Bad Bananas - Redux

Original Post 8/12/11




The bananas are bad; brown and mushy.  

And Z only brought them home from the banana store a day or so ago.

Luckily I don't eat as many bananas this time of year as I normally do.  This time of year I eat a lot of watermelon, peaches and plums.

I even had apple pie for breakfast today; just because I can....

This time of year can be brutal on fruit. The Peaches look like my grandmother’s elbows.

That’s really not fair to my grandmother since she’s been dead for more than a dozen years.  I guess one of these days we’ll have to move her out of the garage.

The storms seem to have moved along and the heat and humidity’s been broken by a nice breeze zipping down from the north. 

A female cardinal, the bird, not the priest, which goes without saying since…well, I’m not going to get into that whole archaic catholic view of women and their “rightful” place thing. 

Anyway, a female cardinal just alighted on the bush near where I’m pontificating (sorry).

You can tell it’s the female since it’s not as brightly colored as the male…or as opinionated.

Nature has a way of sprucing down its females.  In fact, knowing almost nothing about nature, I’m not afraid to say, it’s like that with most species, except our own.  

But can you imagine what it would be like if men routinely walked around in pantyhose and lipstick and the women wore boring charcoal grey suits with closely cropped hair.

I personally wouldn’t leave the house as often, as infrequently as that is, in the first place.

But WHY DO women put up with these societal norms?  I mean it must be nice to walk around bare legged and shouldered all summer, but is this desirable when it’s 20 degrees?

Do they really enjoy highlighting their lips and eyebrows every morning, let alone the multitude of other mysterious torturous things they put themselves through?   

For what…for men to appreciate, which we undoubtedly do?

But what are men doing for the women?

Men basically jump out of bed, beat back their nose hair, ignore their ear hair, run a comb through whatever head hair they have left, possibly change their underwear, depending on the day of the week, throw on a suit and tie and off they go; dried piece of shredded wheat on their lower lip be dammed.

Quite the eye candy for the lucky ladies on the train.

To be honest, none of us even consider this as odd. 

Just the opposite.

I’ve sat in numerous corporate meetings with top level, big shot execs, both men and women, and the men are all suited up, sporting either some sort of nasal chafing cologne or last night’s Chimichanga.  The women, all lip stick’d, mascara’d and eye liner’d up, topped off with some sort of nicely scented powder, are all bare arms, legs and feet.  From a comfort factor, all this is great for the women and not so great for the men; I mean except for the subliminal primordial pleasure we derive from these norms. 

I wonder who normed them in the first place?

Three guesses…and the first two don’t count.

Of course corporate casual, which has now become more the norm than not, has put a crimp in the whole scenario. 

For men, corporate casual means basically putting on a pair of Khaki pants and some form of Polo shirt, depending on the season. 

But where does this leave the women?

They can’t go the Khaki and Polo shirt route unless they work at Best Buy or some other sort of Buy.

For women, going corporate casual is really going corporate uncomfortable.  Because no matter how many norm acceptable skirts or dresses, of whatever length or shape, women wear to work, if they show up in shorts…it’s going to be frowned upon. 

Because guess who made up those rules too?

But, like I said, I guess that’s the norm. Except for the birds and everything else on this earth, that doesn’t try to over think everything.  

Anyway, we started with bananas and my dead grandma’s elbows and ended up here.

Go figure.

My neighbor’s 2 year old has been standing on the adjacent deck for the last 20 minutes saying hello to me so I better go say hello back. Mostly so she doesn’t end up, years from now, on some therapist’s couch recalling how the mean man next door ignored her.

But first, I have to get the hose ….



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