I’ve lately been the recipient of the most disappointing visitors: fruit flies. They are a huge fan of my kitchen, and lately they have the audacity to venture even into the back rooms where I hide away frantically attempting to type blogs with one hand while swatting fruitlessly at the flies with my other hand. I thought that perhaps once they saw I was fruitless, they’d journey elsewhere, hopefully to my loud and obnoxious upstairs neighbor, but alas even fruit flies find her unpleasant to be around.
Over the last few weeks I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to capture these troublesome tyrants, attempting to smash them between my palms while jumping, springing, bouncing, and pouncing, and never doing a damn thing but entertaining the neighbors, who probably think I’m doing some sort of Native American rain dance. And I swear I hear the fruit flies chortle every time they evade my increasingly bruised hands. A few nights ago I actually succeeded in catching one, and I was so startled by the unexpected victory that I stared at my victim for nearly a full minute, wondering what people typically do once they’ve smashed a fly on their hands. Bury it? Hold a fruit fly funeral?
It really became quite a mystery to me how my flying foes came to inhabit my place of residence. After all, fruit flies are labeled as such because of their affinity for fruit, and being a person of total fruitlessness, I couldn’t fathom how they came to have such an affinity for me. Not only is my house devoid of all fresh fruit, but also such toxins as fresh vegetables literally flee in panic from the highly preserved contents of my refrigerator. They know they don’t stand a chance next to my BFF, processed cheese.
So what exactly are these flies wanting from me? A stable home life? Money? Fame? I pondered this question as I opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink to toss some trash into the garbage can and as my fan club of fruit flies swarmed out from beneath the cupboard to greet me, I saw the culprit glaring out at me from the array of discarded items: a banana peel.
How could I have forgotten that I consume 5/6 of a banana every day in my protein shake?? I plop nearly everything into that thing when I make it; rice milk, peanut butter, bee pollen, protein powder, yesterday’s leftovers, last week’s leftovers, a shot of whiskey, and the contents of my recycling bin; my protein shake is so dense it could feed a family of four for a week. And when I get home from work to make the shake I’m so hungry I could eat a family of four. For a week.
And it is precisely these banana peels that are luring these flying fiends into my abode. I could find a better way to dispose of the peel, but I figure the easier solution is to throw the whole peel into my protein shake along with the rest of my belongings.
Now that I have eliminated the source of my fruit flies (if only all problems were eliminated so easily—-but men are too big to smash between your fingers ;-)), and I can type with both hands again, you can expect an increase in the number of blogs I’m able to post. Sorry about that. 🙂
–Troi out