Ode to Bananas

Bananas and I have an interesting relationship. I don't really like them. It might be more accurate to say that I really don't like them. But I eat them a LOT. Especially when I worked for COPE. It was so easy to grab a banana, hop in a car, and sit in meetings for hours and hours. That banana packed a lot of punch and gave me enough energy to last almost the entire day. The perfect snack food until you put it in your bag and put a very heavy book on top of it.

The combination of eating bananas in a car led to some very interesting, albeit somewhat disgusting, experiments. For instance, if you take a banana fiber and leave it on your dashboard for, oh, a few weeks, its appearance doesn't change much, but it becomes as crispy as really thin bacon left too long in a skillet.

And, if you leave a banana peel in your car (on the dash - that's where I usually kept my bananas), well, after a day, it turns black. Completely black. And you get a little high off the fumes as you drive back home in the hot hot southern California sun. They weren't kidding about smoking banana peels...

Bananas are great though. They're full of potassium and other wonderful vitamins that're supposed to do a body good. Like milk. My mom likes to make banana milkshakes too. That should be a secret ingredient for strong, healthy bodies. Anyway. I wonder if you can overdose on too much banana goodness. Cris and I were on our way to Idaho a couple years back, and my mom, being the banana enthusiast she is, packed 4 bananas for me. 4 really big bananas. And Dana and Kim were on the plane with us! But alas, no one would take these 4 bananas off my hands, and I certainly wasn't about to let food go to waste! Especially when it represented my mommy's love for me...and my friends (who refused to take them). So I ate all four of them in about an hour. I swore I wouldn't ever eat bananas again.

But I still eat them from time to time. Even though I don't like them.