The Fruit Post

I found a draft of a post from the other day that I'd forgotten about. It was only one sentence and it was this:

Someone tell me why I keep eating grapefruits.

If it helps take the pressure off, I can answer my own question. My eating habits have been deplorable lately and I'm trying to make myself eat fruit for a snack instead of Nutella. Nutella is great and everything, but the fact that it's great is the problem. Following my family's creed of, "If a little is good then more must be better," I could eat (and have eaten) a bowl of Nutella. Have you ever read the fat and calorie count for just a tablespoon of that stuff? It is exactly 1 billion calories and 5 football fields of fat. Football fields might not be a food measurement on the side of the jar, but is it once it's in the bowl.

So grapefruit. Why, you ask, not something sweet like grapes? Or a tangelo? For two reasons. One, because grapefruit is the only fruit that fills me up like a meal, and two, I once read a short story where a tattoo-artist-in-training practiced inking grapefruits before she tattooed people because the skin of the grapefruit is similar to human skin. This fact somehow gives me more incentive to eat it, not because I'm a cannibal, but because grapefruits can get tattoos and so they'd probably be cool to hang out with.

Notice that neither of those reasons had to with essential vitamins or cancer-preventatives. My diet reasoning is strictly tattoo-based.

Anyway, the feeling-full reason for my grapefruit consumption is just as important as the tattoo short story. Generally fruit as a snack makes me hungrier, so if I eat a handful of grapes at 2:00 then I will need to eat a whole chicken by 2:30. But after I eat a grapefruit? I don't have to eat dinner until 8:00. Which is so very hip and European of me.

So why question the consumption of such a miraculous hipster fruit? Because it's a mess. The actual peeling part is fine but once you get to the juicy part it's like trying to eat a tsunami. I simply can NOT eat this thing at my desk. I need a bib, a fork, a knife, and a roll of paper towels. I've even tried cutting it up in the morning and packing it in chucks to eat later in the day and I still end up with juice running out the corner of my mouth.

"Maybe you're just really sloppy," you're probably saying.

"Maybe you should read blogs by cleaner people," I suggest.

"Ok, I will."

"Wait, wait! I spoke out of turn. You're right, I am very, very sloppy. I'm sorry, I cranky from Nutella withdrawal."

"Oh, it's ok. I could never stop reading your blog."

"Still buds?"

"The bestest."

I love our talks. Anyway, I wonder if there's more tattooable fruits that I should be eating. Like tomatoes. (NOTE: I know what you're thinking and I don't know if they really are or not either. No one does. That's why tomatoes are allusive bitches and we should eat them for spite.)

Eating fruit for spite and tattoos is my new diet. That's why I'll eat a lot of cantaloupe because its relation to pumpkins frustrates me. I like cantaloupe and I like pumpkins, but I'm pissed off that they're cousins because it doesn't make sense to me. And so I shall eat them. The overall benefits to my body and extended lifespan is just a side-effect of my deranged small-mindedness.

It's 3:00 and I haven't had any grapefruit yet. This could explain my crankiness. I had a banana with lunch. Eating a banana means that an hour later I will eat three whole chickens and a can of potato soup. Bananas are infinitely worse than grapes in that way, and I'm pretty sure you can't practice tattooing on their skin without completely mashing what's inside.

I am now going to test this theory by pulling the banana peel out of the trash and drawing a heart on it with a ballpoint pen....

Ok, that was a bad idea.

But I think I proved my point. I eat grapefruit for good reasons. Whacked out as those reasons may be, they are still beneficial, and also I may now consider a career as a tattoo artist. It doesn't matter that I can't draw, what matters is that I will only tattoo fruit. Because if they complain about the work I have done, I can eat them. If I have not already eaten a football field of Nutella.