You know what I hate? That I can't eat a banana in peace anymore. It's my favorite fruit -- always has been, but for the past couple of years, I've had to eat it while breathing heavily through my nose so I don't gag. Chalk it up to my overactive imagination. Any and all foods can start to remind my tongue of gag-able elements such as slime, rot, putridness and salmonella if I let my imagination run free. Tofu is the worst -- they say that this malleable cube-paste can take on the flavor of just about anything you add it to. What they don't say is that can also lodge itself midway in your esophagus and take two days to get slowly coughed back up one booger-sized chunk at a time.
Yes, my imagination makes it very difficult to eat in peace. Eggplant becomes whale tongue, eggs become loose gray matter and jello cubes slide down the throat like slippery bird livers. It's not easy being a spaz. But, it isn't my imagination that ruined my love for bananas. It was actually a girl I worked with a couple of years ago. She saw me take the first bite out of the banana I was eating at my desk and just about crapped herself.
"You EAT the top of the banana?" she asked, as if I had just shoved a shoehorn down my throat.
"Yeah, so?" I said, giving her the credence that I always give people who still wear two-story bangs. You heard me right -- two story bangs. I had me a pair circa 1984. You part your bangs horizontally into two equal sections. The basement bangs receive one rotation of the curling iron. The top story bangs receive two rotations. Voila! Instant lift!
"Eeew. Well, I won't tell you what's in the top, then," she said while shaking her hands free of the cooties that my apparent nana-eating self was atomizing around the building. I wanted to tell her that she was ugly, but instead I swallowed 15 times and finally got the banana bite down.
I tried not to let her advice bother me, for the last thing I needed was another fantasy food mutation. But, it was something about her complete hysteria over my eating the top of that banana that really started to get my mind in motion. I began thinking about the possibilities of what could be in the top of the banana. Here are some of the ideas I came up with:
-- Monkey love serum. This is the most logical in my mind, and, consequently, what I think of every time I eat a banana. I can only imagine that monkeys, with their love of perverse sex acts (oh, come on -- you know you've seen the little perves "doing stuff" at the zoo), perform some type of hybrid pollenation/mating ritual act that results in my banana becoming polluted with, what else, but ape jizz.
-- Fingernail dirt from the dirty jungle dwellers who are paid 3 cents a day to pick bananas. I'm sure that it's not all that uncommon for a disease-infested fingernail to "accidentally" slice the top of the entire bunch. I mean, come on, how else with the dirty jungle dwellers stick it to the man? It's not like they have jungle dwellers unions or anything.
-- Poop. I don't know how it would get there, but poop is the most disgusting thing a person could accidentally ingest, so it had to make the list.
-- Banana worms. Have you ever noticed that when you peel a banana, there are little mealy banana "shreds" all over the sides? Are you sure that they're banana shreds and not long worms smothered and mummified by the banana peel? Are you sure you're sure???
So, what have YOU all heard about the tops of bananas? Maybe you can enlighten me. Please comment if you have a hypothesis of your own. And, I'm sorry that I've probably ruined the act of eating bananas for you. Someone had to tell you though.
Yes, my imagination makes it very difficult to eat in peace. Eggplant becomes whale tongue, eggs become loose gray matter and jello cubes slide down the throat like slippery bird livers. It's not easy being a spaz. But, it isn't my imagination that ruined my love for bananas. It was actually a girl I worked with a couple of years ago. She saw me take the first bite out of the banana I was eating at my desk and just about crapped herself.
"You EAT the top of the banana?" she asked, as if I had just shoved a shoehorn down my throat.
"Yeah, so?" I said, giving her the credence that I always give people who still wear two-story bangs. You heard me right -- two story bangs. I had me a pair circa 1984. You part your bangs horizontally into two equal sections. The basement bangs receive one rotation of the curling iron. The top story bangs receive two rotations. Voila! Instant lift!
"Eeew. Well, I won't tell you what's in the top, then," she said while shaking her hands free of the cooties that my apparent nana-eating self was atomizing around the building. I wanted to tell her that she was ugly, but instead I swallowed 15 times and finally got the banana bite down.
I tried not to let her advice bother me, for the last thing I needed was another fantasy food mutation. But, it was something about her complete hysteria over my eating the top of that banana that really started to get my mind in motion. I began thinking about the possibilities of what could be in the top of the banana. Here are some of the ideas I came up with:
-- Monkey love serum. This is the most logical in my mind, and, consequently, what I think of every time I eat a banana. I can only imagine that monkeys, with their love of perverse sex acts (oh, come on -- you know you've seen the little perves "doing stuff" at the zoo), perform some type of hybrid pollenation/mating ritual act that results in my banana becoming polluted with, what else, but ape jizz.
-- Fingernail dirt from the dirty jungle dwellers who are paid 3 cents a day to pick bananas. I'm sure that it's not all that uncommon for a disease-infested fingernail to "accidentally" slice the top of the entire bunch. I mean, come on, how else with the dirty jungle dwellers stick it to the man? It's not like they have jungle dwellers unions or anything.
-- Poop. I don't know how it would get there, but poop is the most disgusting thing a person could accidentally ingest, so it had to make the list.
-- Banana worms. Have you ever noticed that when you peel a banana, there are little mealy banana "shreds" all over the sides? Are you sure that they're banana shreds and not long worms smothered and mummified by the banana peel? Are you sure you're sure???
So, what have YOU all heard about the tops of bananas? Maybe you can enlighten me. Please comment if you have a hypothesis of your own. And, I'm sorry that I've probably ruined the act of eating bananas for you. Someone had to tell you though.
How you (used to) see a banana.
How I see a banana.
3 comments:
I am thinking that two-story bangs got one of those e-mails from Chiquita Banana stating if she didn't forward that e-mail within five minutes of reading, all of her banana tops would be infested with a monkey's love juice. Obviously, she didn't send the e-mails on because she is now cursed with these infested banana tops.
Vicki - Keep eating your bananas. According to a recent survey undertaken by MIND amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. This is because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin known to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel happier.
By the time you eat one or two you won't care what the girl with the bangs said. It may help you with your immunity to Zoloft too.
By the way, I never heard anything about why you shouldn't eat the tops of bananas.
OK Vicki, I feel differently about bananas, but they are still my favorite. And, I like what anonymous said so I may try a little overdose with them to get in that monkey mood. Maybe those monkeys know something we don't. M
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