Going Bananas

Bananas cheese me off.

Like that little snark of a girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, when bananas are good they are very, very good but when they are bad they are either green or they're black, hard as a rock or mushy enough to gag a maggot. Every once in a while, though, every once in a lonnnnnnnnnng while, I wind up with a perfect banana and It. Is. So. Choice.

So I keep buying the darn things, just in case the new banana is the Choice Banana but invariably I am disappointed. (This sounds like a metaphor for men and/or life, does it not?)

I bought the last bunch when they were green, because I had no choice. They were all green. Blargh. I sat them in the banana bowl and watched them like a hawk. Every day they were a slightly paler shade of green. Like fading phlegm. Then one day they were pale yellow with green edges. Then, like five seconds later, they were pale yellow with green edges and BROWN SPOTS. I grabbed one while the grabbing was good and peeled it before it could turn black. It looked fine but it was so firm that it wouldn't bend and my teeth wouldn't go through it. Seriously. It was like biting into a banana-flavoured brick.

This happened at work. I held up the offending banana with the bite marks for my colleagues to see and they were suitably appalled. For some reason the guys I work with shuddered ...

This story reminds me of a photo that was in one of our newspapers the other day. The picture featured a protester holding a cat. The cat, apparently, was named Meat Popsicle.

"What a weird name," I said to my co-workers. "Somebody named their cat Meat Popsicle."

They started laughing and saying how rude that name was. I was like, wha? What's so rude about that? I mean, it's stupid, right? But rude?

Then it hit me.