Blessed Brown Bananas

I have two extremely ripe bananas on my desk. I’m considering eating one. Mostly because with each second that passes, the yellow fades to brown. They look diseased and I’d say that if I don’t eat both of them pronto, my entire cubicle (a.k.a. cage) will begin to smell like a banana boat stuck in the doldrums.

Once, I actually found a bunch of black, shriveled bananas behind my computer monitor. Someone from my department had hidden them. I accused just about everybody and no one would admit to the crime. So now I look upon everyone with suspicion. And instead of getting a fresh bunch to put behind someone else’s computer monitor, I took the shriveled ones and hid them in my neighbor’s cubicle. Apparently I work with a bunch of jokers here and I’m just not joker material (if I was, I would have realized a shriveled bunch of bananas wouldn’t achieve the proper sense of hilarity. Then I would have stolen a fresh bunch from the break room on Monday morning to hide in a coworker’s cubicle). If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll remember that no one gets my sense of humor, anyway.

So. The bananas. I don’t even really like them. But they were going bad in my mother’s pantry and I felt like it would be criminal to just to let them waste away like that in defeat of the banana’s higher calling, which is to feed me and provide me with sustenance. Blessed sustenance. So I brought two of them to work.

There’s also an apple on my desk. It’s been there since last week. I like bananas more than apples. But as you can see, I prefer pineapple. And I mean that. As far as I’m concerned, cottage cheese (of the low-fat variety) and pineapple is the breakfast of the gods. When I say gods, I mean Zeus and that lot of Greek gods who reside on gorgeous Mount Olympus, which I happen to have a great view of right outside my office window. I’m not kidding, either. Currently Olympus has a few feathery clouds crowding around it and has received a light dusting of snow. It’s been raining down here in the valley of the mortals and so I guess right now, we’ve got it better than the gods because at least it’s not snowing.

I keep eyeing the bananas. Like they’re my enemy. Like the smell is bothering me. Like I wish I hadn’t brought them to work because if I don’t eat them, I’ll feel enormously guilty. If you know me at all, you’ll know I have a deeply ingrained sense of guilt. I feel guilt for everything. For feeling annoyed at traffic. For not eating all my food at restaurants. For not recycling. For driving a car instead of riding my bike to work. For not wanting to eat the bananas. If only this guilt were balanced by an equally congratulatory feeling when I do something great, like eating a healthy dinner instead of a cheeseburger at the Dairy Queen, like when I refrain from flipping another driver off, or for recycling the rejected papers from the office printer instead of lazily throwing them in my own personal trash can. If only.

So. I’ll let you know how the bananas go down. And in case you’re wondering, the pineapple and cottage cheese this morning was divine, as was the sun momentarily shining through the clouds as it rose over blessed Mount Olympus.


p.s. My sister just came into my cubicle and asked me, as she pointed in disgust at the bananas, “You’re not going to eat those, are you?”