People Are Like Bananas Quotes

That ticks me off!” She snapped. “Since when could you bribe me with treats like a fucking child.” I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. “So no smoothie then?” “Mango, banana, orange and extra kiwi,” she replied before hanging up.

I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like traveling.

We ran into lots of old friends. Friends from elementary school, junior high school, high school. Everyone had matured in their own way, and even as we stood face to face with them they seemed like people from dreams, sudden glimpses through the fences of our tangled memories. We smiled and waved, exchanged a few words, and then walked on in our separate directions.

For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they've emerged. You don't even notice that you've been inside until it's too late for you ever to go back-- that's how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.

You dump trash. You dump yard waste and old ripped couches that smell like body odor and forgetfulness. You dump cigarette butts and banana peels and hazardous waste. But people?

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness

In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt? They say that on a visit to an old castle or whatever, the history of the place, the presence of people who walked there many years ago, can be felt in the body. Before, when I heard things like that, I would think, what are they talking about? But i felt I understood it now.

Being called "closed-minded" by religious people is like being called yellow by a bunch of bananas.

I cook better than you," Nick corrected absently. "I think monkeys can probably be taught to cook better than you." "I'd like to have a monkey that cooked for me," said Jamie. " I would pay him in bananas. His name would be Alphonse." "I agree, that would be awesome." Mae said. "People would come for dinner just to see the monkey chef." "You're raving," Nick said, defrosting chicken in the microwave. Mae was a bit impressed with how he seemed to look at the appliance and instantly comprehend its mysteries, when she'd been heating up ready-made meals for years by a method of pressing random buttons and hoping. " I know that's the only way Jamie communicates with people, but I expected better of you, Mavis." "We're cutting out the whole Mavis thing right now, Nick," Mae said warningly. "How many bananas would be good payment for a monkey?" Jamie wanted to know. " I would want to pay Alphonse a fair wage.

It was only after my head started reeling and my body started weaving and I tumbled into bed that I'd hear that soothing voice singing...The reverbations of that voice wandered sweetly, softly, working like a massage on the area of my heart that was the most tightly clenched, helping those knots to loosen. It was like the rush of waves, and like the laughter of people I'd met in all kinds of places, people I'd become friendly with and then separated from, and like the kind words all those people had said to me, and like the mewing of a cat I had lost, and like the mixture of noises that rang in the background in a place that was dear to me, a place far away, a place that no longer existed, and like the rushing of trees that whisked past my ears as I breathed in a scent of fresh greenery on a trip someplace... the voice was like a combination of all this.

Charlotte: Giordano is terribly afraid Gwyneth will get everything wrong tomorrow that she can get wrong. Gideon: Pass the olive oil, please. Charlotte: Politics and history are a closed book to Gwyneth. She can’t even remember names—they go in at one ear and straight out of the other. She can’t help it, her brain doesn’t have the capacity. It’s stuffed with the names of boy bands and long, long cast lists of actors in soppy romantic films. Raphael: Gwyneth is your time-traveling cousin, right? I saw her yesterday in school. Isn’t she the one with long dark hair and blue eyes? Charlotte: Yes, and that birthmark on her temple, the one that looks like a little banana. Gideon: Like a little crescent moon. Raphael: What’s that friend of hers called? The blonde with freckles? Lily? Charlotte: Lesley Hay. Rather brighter than Gwyneth, but she’s a wonderful example of the way people get to look like their dogs. Hers is a shaggy golden retriever crossbreed called Bertie. Raphael: That’s cute! Charlotte: You like dogs? Raphael: Especially golden retriever crossbreeds with freckles. Charlotte: I see. Well, you can try your luck. You won’t find it particularly difficult. Lesley gets through even more boys than Gwyneth. Gideon: Really? How many . . . er, boyfriends has Gwyneth had? Charlotte: Oh, my God! This is kind of embarrassing. I don’t want to speak ill of her, it’s just that she’s not very discriminating. Particularly when she’s had a drink. She’s done the rounds of almost all the boys in our class and the class above us . . . I guess I lost track at some point. I’d rather not repeat what they call her. Raphael: The school mattress? Gideon: Pass the salt, please.

Get rid of the idea that everyone has to like you! Even if you were the most delicious apple on earth, get real, some people prefer bananas!

As people we narrowly get by with our lives each day, energy from our soft, delicate actions appearing like cherry blossoms, only once, and once for a short while. Eventually petals fall to the ground.

The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ He says, ‘To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?

Not being able to see truth and lies is like being on an empty stage in front of millions of people and not being able to discern which prop is the knife, the one that clearly says ‘Prop Knife’ on the handle or a ripe banana. For so long I have wished I never enrolled in such a mind-boggling play in the first place. All I wanted was a little fame, and I got a lot of embarrassment.

It struck me that family, work, friendships, engagements - all of these were like spiderwebs placed to protect people from the more distressing colors that lurked within themselves. The more safety nets you had under you, the less far you had to fall, and if you were lucky you might live your entire life without even noticing what was below.

But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.

Maybe I was afraid of seeing anything as absolute. I wanted to keep moving, like a stream, and I wanted to go on watching everything from a distance. That’s how I was. I felt close to people, but I didn’t have any friends I could really share my life with, our hearts melting together. Something always failed to communicate.

I’d always believed I didn’t take up a lot of space in this world—that it hardly mattered whether I was here or not. When a person left, the people around them got used to their absence. That was true enough. But when I pictured the world without me, and the people I loved living on in it, I couldn’t help but feel like crying.

Many people are convinced the Big Banana was secretly replaced by a smaller version, so much so that journalists have written articles about it, but it’s not true. It just looks smaller when we visit again as grown-ups. Nothing dazzles like the first time.

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have had her arrested for assault.

than where I grew up, so I look different from most of the people I know. People in my own country look at me like I’m a foreigner. Even the people who do look like me call me a banana.” “A banana?” Farrah asked. “Yellow on the outside, white on the inside,

It struck me that family, work, friendships, engagements - all of these were like spiderwebs placed to protect people from the more distressing colors that lurked within themselves. The more safety nets you had under you, the less far you had to fall, and if you were lucky you might live your entire life without even noticing what was below. Didn't every parent want to protect their child from finding out how far down the bottom was? . . .That's why humans developed ways of working together; to survive, to make sure nobody falls between the cracks.

It takes time to get to know people, let alone to tell whether you like each other, so it really makes me wonder, you know, what you’re supposed to do if they just keep coming through like a revolving door, in one day and out another, and you don’t even have time to figure out who they are?

I know just how slimy people can be, and how people like that are during the daytime. They don’t get slimy at night because they’re drunk, they get slimy because they’re already slimy to begin with. I

That's because you think about everything in words ... You can go around and around the same question all you like, and never find an answer. I know that's how you cope, how you get through time, so I've never thought it was immature, or unhelpful. But there's another way of doing it: to sit with an empty space, and just look at it, without thinking anything, just enduring. Some people can do that.

And the money came rolling into the pockets of the two greedy aunts. But while all this excitement was going on outside, poor James was forced to stay locked in his bedroom, peeping through the bars of his window at the crowds below. “The disgusting little brute will only get in everyone’s way if we let him wander about,” Aunt Spiker had said early that morning. “Oh, please!” he had begged. “I haven’t met any other children for years and years and there are going to be lots of them down there for me to play with. And perhaps I could help you with the tickets.” “Cut it out!” Aunt Sponge had snapped. “Your Aunt Spiker and I are about to become millionaires, and the last thing we want is the likes of you messing things up and getting in the way.” Later, when the evening of the first day came and the people had all gone home, the aunts unlocked James’s door and ordered him to go outside and pick up all the banana skins and orange peel and bits of paper that the crowd had left behind. “Could I please have something to eat first?” he asked. “I haven’t had a thing all day.” “No!” they shouted, kicking him out the door. “We’re too busy to make food! We are counting our money!

We will need to stay over two nights in a hotel on our trip home.” Momentarily alarmed, I glanced at Ren. “Okay. Umm, I was thinking that maybe this time if you don’t mind, we could check out one of those bigger hotels. You know, something that has more people around. With elevators and rooms that lock. Or even better, a nice high-rise hotel in a big city. Far, far, far away from the jungle?” Mr. Kadam chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.” I graced Mr. Kadam with a beatific smile. “Good! Could we please go now? I can’t wait to take a shower.” I opened the door to the passenger side then turned and hissed in a whisper aimed at Ren, “In my nice, upper-floor, inaccessible-to-tigers hotel room.” He just looked at me with his innocent, blue-eyed tiger face again. I smiled wickedly at him and hopped in the Jeep, slamming the door behind me. My tiger just calmly trotted over to the back where Mr. Kadam was loading the last of his supplies and leapt up into the back seat. He leaned in the front, and before I could push him away, he gave me a big, wet, slobbery tiger kiss right on my face. I sputtered, “Ren! That is so disgusting!” I used my T-shirt to swipe the tiger saliva from my nose and cheek and turned to yell at him some more. He was already lying down in the back seat with his mouth hanging open, as if he were laughing. Before I could really lay into him, Mr. Kadam, who was the happiest I’d ever seen him, got into the Jeep, and we started the bumpy journey back to a civilized road. Mr. Kadam wanted to ask me questions. I knew he was itching for information, but I was still fuming at Ren, so I lied. I asked him if he could hold off for a while so I could sleep. I yawned big for dramatic effect, and he immediately agreed to let me have some peace, which made me feel guilty. I really liked Mr. Kadam, and I hated lying to people. I excused my actions by mentally blaming Ren for this uncharacteristic behavior. Convincing myself that it was his fault was easy. I turned to the side and closed my eyes. I slept for a while, and when I woke up, Mr. Kadam handed me a soda, a sandwich, and a banana. I raised my eyebrow at the banana and thought of several good monkey jokes I could annoy Ren with, but I kept quiet for Mr. Kadam’s sake.

I suppose that's the reason I believe that as long as there is someone in charge of the household, someone who can maintain order among its members, someone who is clearly mature and established as a person, someone, in other words, like my mother, then eventually all who live under the same roof, despite blood ties or lineage, will at one point become family. Such a simple idea, but one that took a while for me to catch on to. Oh, and another thing. If the same people don't spend enough time in a home, even if they are connected by blood, their bonds will slowly fade away like a familiar landscape.

And it seemed to me that even if you weren’t actively letting your emotions ride its surface, the ocean still went on giving you something, teaching you some sort of lesson. Perhaps that was why I had never actually considered its existence before—never really thought about the thundering of the waves as they sweep in endlessly toward the shore. But since I was thinking about it, what on earth did people in the city turn to when they felt the need to reckon with “balance"? Maybe the moon? That seemed like the obvious choice. But then the moon was so small and far away, and something about it felt sort of lonely, and it didn’t seem like it would really help . . .

His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars. Hamlet died at the end, of course. “The rest is silence,” Hamlet declared,

I like to save things. Not important things like whales or people or the environment. Silly things. Porcelain bells, the kind you get at souvenir shops. Cookie cutters you’ll never use, because who needs a cookie in the shape of a foot? Ribbons for my hair. Love letters. Of all the things I save, I guess you could say my love letters are my most prized possession. I keep my letters in a teal hatbox my mom bought me from a vintage store downtown. They aren’t love letters that someone else wrote for me; I don’t have any of those. These are ones I’ve written. There’s one for every boy I’ve ever loved—five in all. When I write, I hold nothing back. I write like he’ll never read it. Because he never will. Every secret thought, every careful observation, everything I’ve saved up inside me, I put it all in the letter. When I’m done, I seal it, I address it, and then I put it in my teal hatbox. They’re not love letters in the strictest sense of the word. My letters are for when I don’t want to be in love anymore. They’re for good-bye. Because after I write my letter, I’m no longer consumed by my all-consuming love. I can eat my cereal and not wonder if he likes bananas over his Cheerios too; I can sing along to love songs and not be singing them to him. If love is like a possession, maybe my letters are like my exorcisms. My letters set me free. Or at least they’re supposed to.

You see?’ his uncle said. ‘He has nothing against what he calls niggers. If you ask him, he will probably tell you he likes them even better than some white folks he knows and he will believe it. They are probably constantly beating him out of a few cents here and there in his store and probably even picking up things—packages of chewing gum or bluing or a banana or a can of sardines or a pair of shoelaces or a bottle of hair-straightener—under their coats and aprons and he knows it; he probably even gives them things free of charge—the bones and spoiled meat out of his butcher’s icebox and spoiled candy and lard. All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man—which Mr Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do—and now the white people will take him out and burn him, all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as he is convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like white folks; both of them observing implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side (since Mr Lilley is not a Gowrie) once the fury is over; in fact Mr Lilley would probably be one of the first to contribute cash money toward Lucas’ funeral and the support of his widow and children if he had them. Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

Epic. Primordial. Gritty. Incandescent. These are just a few of the adjectives the fat girl feeds you along with her Banana-Rama bread, her peanut butter and raspberry triangles, her rocky road. She says it’s like you have Leonard Cohen’s touch with lyrics coupled with Daniel Johnston’s sincerity coupled with a Rimbaudian aura of tragedy yet with Nick Cave teeth. She doesn’t tell you not to quit your day job, like Some People. Instead, she counsels never to give up, her gaze wet, dark, and adoring as a dog’s.

Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending anytime. You know where you are with an ending." "Now then, you mustn't say things like that. You know you don't mean them. Purl one, plain one, purl two together... Why, that's what I like about making things for people. You can start off in Birmingham and finish in, well Tanganyika or somewhere. That's not messy, my cherub. That's exciting." "Exciting my aunt banana! What's so exciting about it?" "Well, every one we make's unique. Never seen before. Never seen again." "Hmmph. I don't know why that's exciting. It's not like anyone notices what we do. Not like anyone cares. And they're always complaining: they don't like the fit of it; too loose-- too tight-- too different-- too much like everyone else's. It's never what they want, and if we give them what they think they want they like it less than ever. 'I never thought it would be like this.' 'Why can't it be like the one I had before?' I don't know why we bother.

The pirogues came with live turtles, and with fish, with cloudy beer and wine made from bananas, palm nuts, or sorghum, and with the smoked meat of hippopotamus and crocodile. The vendors did a good trade with our crew and the passengers down at the third-class boat; the laughter, the exclamations, and the argument of bargaining were with us all day, heard but not understood, like voices in the next room. At stopping places, the people who were nourished on these ingredients of a witches' brew poured ashore across the single plank flung down for them, very human in contour, the flesh of the children sweet, the men and women strong and sometimes handsome. We, thank God, were fed on veal and ham and Brussels sprouts, brought frozen from Europe.

Pretty soon, however, I noticed something familiar. Most books are also about the exceptional. The biggest history bestsellers are invariably about catastrophes and adversity, tyranny and oppression. About war, war, and, to spice things up a little, war. And if, for once, there is no war, then we’re in what historians call the interbellum: between wars. In science, too, the view that humanity is bad has reigned for decades. Look up books on human nature and you’ll find titles like Demonic Males, The Selfish Gene and The Murderer Next Door. Biologists long assumed the gloomiest theory of evolution, where even if an animal appeared to do something kind, it was framed as selfish. Familial affection? Nepotism! Monkey splits a banana? Exploited by a freeloader!31 As one American biologist mocked, ‘What passes for co-operation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation. […] Scratch an “altruist” and watch a “hypocrite” bleed.’32 And in economics? Much the same. Economists defined our species as the homo economicus: always intent on personal gain, like selfish, calculating robots. Upon this notion of human nature, economists built a cathedral of theories and models that wound up informing reams of legislation. Yet no one had researched whether homo economicus actually existed. That is, not until economist Joseph Henrich and his team took it up in 2000. Visiting fifteen communities in twelve countries on five continents, they tested farmers, nomads, and hunters and gatherers, all in search of this hominid that has guided economic theory for decades. To no avail. Each and every time, the results showed people were simply too decent. Too kind.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

When someone’s been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit. That’s why you can’t save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you’re catching up only on the big things, because it’s too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life. Like a month ago when Daddy slipped on a banana peel, a literal banana peel that Kitty had dropped on the kitchen floor. Kitty and I laughed for ages. I should have e-mailed Margot about it right away; I should have taken a picture of the banana peel. Now everything feels like you had to be there and oh never mind, I guess it’s not that funny. Is this how people lose touch? I didn’t think that could happen with sisters. Maybe with other people, but never us. Before Margot left, I knew what she was thinking without having to ask; I knew everything about her. Not anymore. I don’t know what the view looks like outside her window, or if she still wakes up early every morning to have a real breakfast or if maybe now that she’s at college she likes to go out late and sleep in late. I don’t know if she prefers Scottish boys to American boys now, or if her roommate snores. All I know is she likes her classes and she’s been to visit London once. So basically I know nothing. And so does she. There are big things I haven’t told her—how my letters got sent out. The truth about me and Peter. The truth about me and Josh. I wonder if Margot feels it too. The distance between us. If she even notices. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han

It was October 17th, 2084 and stupid opinions were illegal in the United States of America. Up until 2059 stupid opinions had been very legal, very common, and extremely monetized. You could make lots of money off stupid opinions back before 2059. Some people made zounds of money talking about how stupid the stupid opinions were. Other people made zounds of money defending stupid opinions and building a platform on the idea that—no matter how stupid an opinion was—it was each American’s right to have and promote stupid and dangerous opinions. Few people talked about worthwhile opinions then. Worthwhile opinions were not exciting. They did not get likes or views. If something didn’t get likes or views back then, it didn’t exist. But it was 2084. A stupid opinion had not been shared online for 25 years. The internet had atrophied. It was just a big store now. The big store mostly sold banana-flavored cigarettes. Almost everyone smoked banana-flavored cigarettes.

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name" You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self-analysis. Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium. Names of boys you once knew and their sleds, Skyrockets are good—do they still exist? There are a lot of other things of the same quality As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, Dull-sounding ones. She approached me About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments. Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something Ought to be written about how this affects You when you write poetry: The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate Something between breaths, if only for the sake Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you For other centers of communication, so that understanding May begin, and in doing so be undone.

Next, I drink a few more glasses of water containing liquid chlorophyll to build my blood. If I’m stressed, I’ll have some diluted black currant juice for an antioxidant boost to the adrenals. Once I’m hungry, I sip my way through a big green alkaline smoothie (a combination of spinach, cucumber, coconut, avocado, lime, and stevia is a favorite) or tuck into a fruit salad or parfait. And tomatoes, cucumbers, and avocados are fruits, too; a morning salad is a good breakfast and keeps the sugar down. But, this kind of morning regime isn’t for everyone. You can get really hungry, particularly when you first start eating this way. And some people need to start the day with foods that deliver more heat and sustenance. If that’s how you roll, try having fruit or a green smoothie and then waiting for 30 minutes (if your breakfast includes bananas, pears, or avocados, make it 45) before eating something more. As a general rule, sour or acidic fruits (grapefruits, kiwis, and strawberries) can be combined with “protein fats” such as avocado, coconut, coconut kefir, and sprouted nuts and seeds. Both acid fruits and sub-acid fruits like apples, grapes, and pears can be eaten with cheeses; and vegetable fruits (avocados, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers) can be eaten with fruits, vegetables, starches, and proteins. I’ve also found that apples combine well with raw vegetables. Leafy greens (spinach, kale, collard greens), along with the vegetable fruits noted above, are my go-to staples. They are the magic foods that combine well with every food on the planet. I blend them together in green smoothies, cold soups, and salads.

The broth... it's made with a mix of soy milk and charred miso. But how could you get a flavor this robust with just those?" "I mixed in grated ebi taro root. It's a strongly flavored tuber that mashes easily into a smooth, thick paste. Adding that to the broth gave it a creamy texture and a richer flavor." "Weird. All of a sudden I'm starting to feel warm." "That's the chili oil and grated raw garlic and ginger taking effect. The soy milk took the edge off of the spicy bite... so now it just gently warms the body without burning the tongue." "The rest of the ingredients are also a parade of detailed work. Thin slices of lotus root and burdock deep-fried to a crispy golden brown. Chunky strips of carrot and turnip grilled over an open flame until lightly charred and then seasoned with just a little rock salt to bring out their natural sweetness. Like a French buffet, each side ingredient is cooked in exactly the best way to bring out its full flavor! But the keystone to it all... ... is the TEMPEH!" TEMPEH Originating in Indonesia, tempeh is made of soybeans fermented into a cake form. Soybeans are lightly cooked and then wrapped in either banana or hibiscus leaves. When stored, the naturally occurring bacteria in the leaves causes the soybeans to ferment into tempeh. Traditional food with a history over four hundred years long, tempeh is well-known and often used in Indonesian cuisine. "Mm! Wow! It's really light, yet really filling too! Like fried rice." "It has a texture a lot like that of a burger patty, so vegetarians and people on macrobiotic diets use it a lot as a meat substitute. I broiled these teriyaki style in a mix of soy sauce and sake.

How delicious! Layer upon layer of exquisitely delicate sweetness blooms in the mouth like the unfurling petals of a flower! And it's different from the cake Sarge presented in one very distinct way!" ?! The flavors explode not like a bomb but a firecracker! What a silky-smooth, mild sweetness! "How were you able to create such a uniquely beautiful flavor?" "See, for the cake, I used Colza oil, flour, baking powder... and a secret ingredient... Mashed Japanese mountain yam! That gave the batter some mild sweetness along with a thick creaminess. Simply mashing it instead of pureeing it gave the cake's texture some soft body as well. Then there're the two different frostings I used! The white cream I made by blending into a smooth paste banana, avocado, soy milk, rice syrup and some puffed rice I found at the convenience store. I used this for the filling. *Rice syrup, also called rice malt, is a sweetener made by transforming the starch in rice into sugars. A centuries-old condiment, it's known for being gentle on the stomach. * I made the dark cream I used to frost the cake by adding cocoa powder to the white cream." "I see. How astonishing. This cake uses no dairy or added sugar. Instead, it combines and maximizes the natural sweetness of its ingredients to create a light and wonderfully delicious cake!" "What?!" "He didn't put in any sugar at all?!" "But why go to all that time and effort?!" "For the people patiently waiting to eat it, of course. This cake was made especially for these people and for this season. When it's hot and humid out... even if it's a Christmas Cake, I figured you'd all prefer one that's lighter and softer instead of something rich and heavy. I mean, that's the kind of cake I'd want in this weather.

Eastern Standard Time Poetry speaks to all people, it is said, but here I would like to address only those in my own time zone, this proper slice of longitude that runs from pole to snowy pole down the globe through Montreal to Bogota. Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band, sitting up in your many beds this morning— the sun falling through the windows and casting a shadow on the sundial— consider those in other zones who cannot hear these words. They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are, or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion. Rather, they are at work already, leaning on copy machines, hammering nails into a house-frame. They are not swallowing a vitamin like us; rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half moon, even jumping around on a dance floor, or just now sliding under the covers, pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps. But we are not like these others, for at this very moment on the face of the earth, we are standing under a hot shower, or we are eating our breakfast, considered by people of all zones to be the most important meal of the day. Later, when the time is right, we might sit down with the boss, wash the car, or linger at a candle-lit table, but now is the hour for pouring the juice and flipping the eggs with one eye on the toaster. So let us slice a banana and uncap the jam, lift our brimming spoons of milk, and leave it to the others to lower a flag or spin absurdly in a barber's chair— those antipodal oddballs, always early or late. Let us praise Sir Stanford Fleming the Canadian genius who first scored with these lines the length of the spinning earth. Let us move together through the rest of this day passing in unison from light to shadow, coasting over the crest of noon into the valley of the evening and then, holding hands, slip into the deeper valley of night.

When Florence Allen took a bite of her dessert the expression on her face changed completely. She looked puzzled at first, as if she wasn't at all sure it was cake that she was eating. She cut herself another bite and then held up her fork and looked at it for a minute before slipping it into her mouth. She chewed slowly, as if she were a scientist engaged in an important experiment. She lifted up her plate and held it up to the light, studied it from different angles. Then she dipped down her nose and inhaled the cake. "This is sweet potato." I dabbed at my eyes again and told her that it was. "Sweet potatoes and raisins and... rum? That's a spiked glaze?" I nodded. She took another bite and this time she ate it like a person who knew what she was getting into. She closed her eyes. She savored. "This is," she said. "This is..." "Easy," I said. "I can give you the recipe." She opened up her eyes. She had lovely dark eyes. "This is brilliant. This is a brilliant piece of cake." In my family people tended to work against the cake. They wished it wasn't there even as they were enjoying it. But Florence Allen's reaction was one I rarely saw in an adult: She gave in to the cake. She allowed herself to love the cake. It wasn't that she surrendered her regrets (Oh well, I'll just have to go to the gym tomorrow, or, I won't have any dinner this week). She had no regrets. She lived in the moment. She took complete pleasure in the act of eating cake. "I'm glad you like it," I said, but that didn't come close to what I meant. "Oh, I don't just like it. I think this is-" But she didn't say it. Instead she stopped and had another bite. I could have watched her eat the whole thing, slice by slice, but no one likes to be stared at. Instead I ate my own cake. It was good, really. Every raisin bitten gave a sweet exhalation of rum. It was one of those cakes that most people say should be made for Thanksgiving, that it was by its nature a holiday cake, but why be confined? I was always one to bake whatever struck me on any given day. Florence Allen pressed her fork down several times until she had taken up every last crumb. Her plate was clean enough to be returned to the cupboard directly. "I've made sweet potato pies," she said. "I've baked them and put them in casseroles, but in a cake? That never crossed my mind." "It isn't logical. They're so dense. I think of it as the banana bread principle.

When we arrived at the wedding at Marlboro Man’s grandparents’ house, I gasped. People were absolutely everywhere: scurrying and mingling and sipping champagne and laughing on the lawn. Marlboro Man’s mother was the first person I saw. She was an elegant, statuesque vision in her brown linen dress, and she immediately greeted and welcomed me. “What a pretty suit,” she said as she gave me a warm hug. Score. Success. I felt better about life. After the ceremony, I’d meet Cousin T., Cousin H., Cousin K., Cousin D., and more aunts, uncles, and acquaintances than I ever could have counted. Each family member was more gracious and welcoming than the one before, and it didn’t take long before I felt right at home. This was going well. This was going really, really well. It was hot, though, and humid, and suddenly my lightweight wool suit didn’t feel so lightweight anymore. I was deep in conversation with a group of ladies--smiling and laughing and making small talk--when a trickle of perspiration made its way slowly down my back. I tried to ignore it, tried to will the tiny stream of perspiration away, but one trickle soon turned into two, and two turned into four. Concerned, I casually excused myself from the conversation and disappeared into the air-conditioned house. I needed to cool off. I found an upstairs bathroom away from the party, and under normal circumstances I would have taken time to admire its charming vintage pedestal sinks and pink hexagonal tile. But the sweat profusely dripping from all pores of my body was too distracting. Soon, I feared, my jacket would be drenched. Seeing no other option, I unbuttoned my jacket and removed it, hanging it on the hook on the back of the bathroom door as I frantically looked around the bathroom for an absorbent towel. None existed. I found the air vent on the ceiling, and stood on the toilet to allow the air-conditioning to blast cool air on my face. Come on, Ree, get a grip, I told myself. Something was going on…this was more than simply a reaction to the August humidity. I was having some kind of nervous psycho sweat attack--think Albert Brooks in Broadcast News--and I was being held captive by my perspiration in the upstairs bathroom of Marlboro Man’s grandmother’s house in the middle of his cousin’s wedding reception. I felt the waistband of my skirt stick to my skin. Oh, God…I was in trouble. Desperate, I stripped off my skirt and the stifling control-top panty hose I’d made the mistake of wearing; they peeled off my legs like a soggy banana skin. And there I stood, naked and clammy, my auburn bangs becoming more waterlogged by the minute. So this is it, I thought. This is hell. I was in the throes of a case of diaphoresis the likes of which I’d never known. And it had to be on the night of my grand entrance into Marlboro Man’s family. Of course, it just had to be. I looked in the mirror, shaking my head as anxiety continued to seep from my pores, taking my makeup and perfumed body cream along with it. Suddenly, I heard the knock at the bathroom door. “Yes? Just a minute…yes?” I scrambled and grabbed my wet control tops. “Hey, you…are you all right in there?” God help me. It was Marlboro Man.

But such subtle things that you could basically read it into any normal person’s behaviour – mild depression, anxiety, insomnia, fatigue. All of which I had, by the way.’‘What were the more specific signs?’‘There was one that always stuck in my mind. It was a bit like a Rorschach blot, only with words. The person was asked to name the similarities between an apple and a banana. A healthy person would say they were both fruit, but in people prone to psychosis, they wouldn’t say the obvious . They’d say something like “They both have skin”.

In the 1970s, UCLA psychologist Eric Holman discovered that certain sweetened substances could make rodents prefer certain foods by virtue of their presence. For instance, by adding a saccharin to either a banana- or an almond-flavored solution, he was able to make rats prefer the taste of bananas or almonds, respectively, a process known as “flavor nutrient conditioning.” In recent years that work has been picked up with humans. Maltodextrin, a glucose polymer, is imperceptible to most of us. It doesn’t taste sweet. In fact, it doesn’t taste like anything. For it to activate the sweet receptors in the brain, the body must first break it down into glucose. If we mix it into another food, we don’t realize there’s a sugar present, but we still develop a preference for that flavor. In one study, people who tasted foods with maltodextrin mixed in would reliably choose the flavor that had been associated with the polymer in subsequent tests. They had been trained to prefer one food over another by a sort of sensory trickery. Imagine dusting a child’s broccoli florets with maltodextrin and transforming a disliked vegetable into a favorite.

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I had hear people say that things like this happen between people in love, but I myself didn't know that such emptiness really existed.

I had heard people say that things like this happen between people in love, but I myself didn't know that such emptiness really existed.

Manmohan Singh’s lost opportunity The anti-corruption agitations of 2011 provided a wonderful opportunity for the prime minister and his government to start the process of purging the system of corruption and retrieving black money illegally stashed away in foreign banks. The government had two options to get our money back. The first, to behave like a responsible, honourable and strong nation and demonstrate political will to fight corruption using the ample machinery available through international and bilateral legal instruments, the Tax Information Exchange Treaties (TIEAs), Double Taxation Avoidance Agreements (DTAAs) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) automatic exchange route. The Swiss have volunteered cooperation; and India can follow the example of the US and UK, and get India’s stolen money back to the country. Or, the government can take the other option and behave like a banana republic and a failed state, plunder capital from their own country through a UPA-sponsored version of imperialism, perpetuate poverty and backwardness by denying the people of this country their rightful development dividend while repeatedly rewarding and incentivizing the looters with amnesty schemes. Mr Singh’s government has continuously concealed information on black money by fooling the people of our country, shielding the corrupt and guilty who have illegal bank accounts in foreign banks, and by creating obstacles for any progress in the matter instead of taking proactive measures to obtain the information from the foreign governments concerned. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have chosen the former option and gone down in history as a great patriot and leader of our country, a pioneer against corruption. But sadly, he has lost the opportunity and chosen such, that history will remember him as having presided over the greatest frauds practised on this poor and gullible nation.

People are people. Wherever they come from or whatever they look like, they’re the same. As the philosopher Garnglegoot the Confused once said: “I’ll have a banana and crayon sandwich, please.” (Garnglegoot always did have trouble staying on topic.)

I don't know if it's something you win. I still have negative thoughts a lot of the time, but I know it's not me. I'm fine in here. I'm a whole person - I like olives, I hate bananas. I can't sing, but I'm really good at video games. I love myself, and other people love me too. But sometimes, little gremlins creep in.

Yuichi & I are climbing a narrow ladder in the jet-black gloom. Together we peer into the cauldron of hell. We stare into the bubbling red sea of fire, and the air hitting our faces is so hot it makes us reel. Even though we're standing side by side, even though we're closer to each other than anyone else in the world, even though we're friends forever, we don't join hands. No matter how forlorn we are, we each insist on standing on our own two feet. But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profile blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren't we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don't we think of each other that way? But the place we are in now is just too dreadful. It is not a place where two people can create a life together.

To be sure, other kinds of bad and good things happen to chimps: droughts, banana bonanzas, and so on. But there’s no reason to think chimps are anywhere near consciously puzzling over those things—trying to anticipate droughts the way they try to anticipate the behavior of their neighbors. And there’s no reason to think that our prehuman ancestors were, either. The best guess is that when natural selection built the mental machinery for predictively pondering causality, the causal agents in question were peers—fellow prehumans. (Is he going to punch me? Is she going to betray me?) Moreover, when our ancestors first started talking about causality, they were probably talking about peers. (Why did you punch me? Do you know why she betrayed me?) I’m not just talking about a habit. I’m not saying our ancestors were used to pondering questions of “Why?” by thinking about human beings. I’m suggesting that the human mind is built to do that—was “designed” by natural selection to do it. So it’s no surprise that when people first started expanding their curiosity, started talking about why bad and good things emanate from beyond the social universe, they came up with the kinds of answers that had made sense within their social universe. To answer a “why” question—such as “Why did the thunderstorm come just as that baby was being born?”—with anything other than a human-like creature would have been kind of strange.

I've no idea how many young women like this there are in the world, but I kind of wonder if those oddly vague people you see in department stores during the day, women who don't quite seem to be students or people who work on their own, might not be the same. I know very well that I used to be like that myself, that I used to walk around with the same utterly unfocused look in my eye.

I’d started to think maybe this was the life I’d been looking for all along. The kind of life that needed no justification, where I felt calm and grounded, and which I would have been content to continue with forever. Maybe all those people I’d thought treated love so carelessly never had to cling to things because they’d always lived with this kind of safety. And maybe this meant I could now start to become more and more like them. I’d always felt slightly intimidated by the idea of getting married or having children, but maybe it was nothing to be afraid of. I was starting to feel quite optimistic about things to come.

But when I pictured the world without me, and the people I loved living on in it, I couldn't help but feel like crying. The only thing missing from these tableaux was me, but suddenly they looked much lonelier. And even if the hole I left was only temporary, until the other characters all moved on into the unknown future, the space where I belonged suddenly seemed to harbor a rare glow. It felt as precious as trees, or sunlight, or cats I met on the street. Astonished by this revelation, I looked up at the sky again and again. Here I was, with a body, looking up at the sky. I existed. As beautiful as the sun setting in the distances, life lived inside this, the only body I would ever have.

I like people who are always doing things that would never have occurred to me at that moment.

When people ask me what keeps me looking young and happy daily, in the midst of all the gloomy and doom. I respond by saying. My life is like banana leaves, when rain drops on them, they roll off and they don’t stay and soak me while I keep dry the ones seeking shelter under me. A daily lifestyle to my thought process and applications

...There are so many people out there with lives far less fortunate than ours, and if we got even a taste of what it's like to be them it would crush us, we'd never make it through. Because we're lucky, we've got things pretty easy. But that's not something we need to feel ashamed of.

At least Lars was curious about the appeal of jazz to black folk; for most observers, such ponderation is akin to contemplating why gorillas like bananas. The attractiveness of jazz to the nonblack is well documented in publicly funded documentaries where experts speak of jazz in the past tense. They look authoritatively into the camera and ingratiate themselves with the Man by saying things like, “White people were hearing something in jazz that says something deeply about their experience. I’m not sure that it would have been this way if we were not a country of immigrants . . . so many people felt kind of displaced . . . I think that was part of its amazing appeal, was how it spoke to feeling out of sort and out of joint and maladjusted.” What hogwash. Does my fondness for classical music make me well adjusted? Besides, people who are really fucked up don’t turn to jazz; they turn to heroin, opium, whiskey, and Vonnegut.

The first morning, emerging from your bivouac-thing, there is a great sense of joy and freedom. You feel quite alone in the world and no one knows who you are or why you are there. You could be in a campsite surrounded by happy families or out in the wild woods with silent, dumb creatures that creep and crawl. It makes no difference, the point is that you are alone because you wanted it this way. You don’t talk to a soul the whole time. You just get up, brew a coffee on a camping stove and then zip up the tent and go. If doesn’t really matter where you go either. You know that you have about twelve hours ahead of you just to yourself. So you start walking, along the coast, up a hill, by a river, down a valley, anywhere on and on, stopping every now and then for a banana and a drink (massive water bottle) and a sit. It feels good. You find yourself skipping no, gambolling, like a newborn lamb. In your head, details about daily life swiftly give way to songs, hymns you used to know, praise, yes praise, for God’s mind-blowing creation. Your thoughts then turn to God because there aren’t any people about and you find yourself chatting amicably with Him. Sometimes there are tears, sobbing even, but this comes with emptying. It’s really all about emptying and then, renewal. This is what we miss if we don’t empty stuff. By nightfall, the little tent and sleeping bag beckon; you greet them both joyfully and shut down. Usually it’s freezing and sleep comes in patches, but the night time wakefulness is all part of it. You use it to set things straight, mentally. Another day ahead, more wanderings, then hunger sets in and you head for home, refreshed.

Right,” Isobel said. “Like that experiment that shows the different ways kids and adults think. If you give people a picture of a monkey, an orange, and a banana, the adults always put the orange and the banana together. But kids—” “Kids and some of us creative types,” Elyse said, taking back control of the conversation, “will always sort the monkey with the banana.

This is what travel should be like. Yampara locals heading home from the market dressed in their Sunday best braced against the wooden tie slats or squatted on the truck bed their bundles tucked around them. It was a little microcosm of the market, of real Andean life with laughter, chatter, babies crying, mothers coaxing, people gesturing at passing landmarks in a language we could never understand and us nodding back, gracious locals offering us bit of pastries and other treats and us smiling in recognition of their kindness. A diaspora of Andean life shared under a bracing blue sky and a passing panorama.

Why do things happen the way they do? Is there some kind of order in all this chaos that we just don't see, or is it all, as the mathematically minded people would like us to believe, just random coincidence? If you put one hundred apes in a room, they'll tell you, with one hundred typewriters, and given an infinite amount of time and bananas, one of them would eventually churn out the complete Oxford dictionary. It's all statistical math and probability. The odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of getting struck by lightning, but someone wins, don't they? And people get hit by lightning disturbingly more often that you would think. Their point is, eventually all things happen. No matter how philosophically unprejudiced you are, you can't argue with statistical probabilities. But you can certainly give the mathematicians some substantial cud to chew on, can't you? For instance, sure, everything may be eventual from a statistical point of view, but what happens to the formula if you plug in when a particular thing happens? The fortuitousness of the timing? Or combine a particular coincidence with other seemingly non-related coincidences that might have occurred within the same general time frame? We've all had it happen. It's one of our favorite phrases: "Why me? Why now?" Well, when you take the "when" into account, all kinds of very interesting and un-mathematical things begins to happen. The coincidence becomes too coincidental to be a coincidence.

Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described. They gave the economists a demonstration of the point:

Foreword Reviews Magazine. Foreword Reviews. Summer 2014 issue. "By way of introduction to Vivienne Kruger’s Balinese Food, bear in mind that eight degrees south of the equator, this modest-sized lava rich, emerald green island rests among the 17,508 remote, culturally distinct constellation of Indonesian islands. It is home to three million mortals who believe they are protected by an unfathomable number of Bali-Hindu goddesses and gods that inhabit the island’s sacred mountain peaks. The Balinese are unlike almost any other island people in that they are suspicious, even distrustful of the sea, believing mischievous spirits and negative powers dwell there—the underworld, as it were. Yes, they eat seafood, they just mostly let other Indonesians do the fetching. Fittingly, Kruger’s masterful use of language; dogged, on the ground conversations with thousands of Balinese cooks and farmers; and disarming humanity leads to a culinary-minded compendium unlike almost any other. Bali, you got the scribe you deserved. What made Kruger’s work even more impressive is the fact that almost nothing about Balinese food history has been written down over the years. She writes: “Like so many other traditions in Bali, cooking techniques and eating habits are passed down verbally by elders to their children and grandchildren who help in the kitchen. However, Indonesia has an old orally transmitted food culture because the pleasure of storytelling is entwined with the pleasure and effort of cooking and eating.” Balinese Food is framed around twenty-one chapters, including the all-important Sacred Ceremonial Cuisine, Traditional Village Foods, the Cult of Rice, Balinese Pig, Balinese Duck, and specialized cooking techniques like saté, banana leaf wrappers, and the use of bumbu, a sacred, powerful dry spice paste mixture. In the chapter Seafood in Bali, she lists a popular, fragrant accompaniment called Sambal Matah—chopped shallots, red chilies, coconut oil, and kaffir lime juice—that is always served raw and fresh, in this case, alongside a simple recipe for grilled tuna. An outstanding achievement in the realm of island cooking and Indonesian history, Balinese Food showcases the Balinese people in the most flattering of ways.

Emotions, particularly strong emotions in people we care about, are contagious. But just as so-called negative emotions are contagious, so are calming and compassionate ones. [...] Mirror neurons in the brain are what cause us to feel the experiences and emotions of people around us. In the classic example, if I am watching you eat a banana, the neurons in my brain that are involved in eating bananas begin to fire. Likewise, if I am sitting across from you and feeling sad or angry, you are likely to have those neurons fire in your brain as well; thus you are *feeling* those emotions yourself, not just detecting them.

bananaland, where the jungle had been leveled and replaced by endless acres of banana trees, each displaying bunches of bananas enclosed in bright blue plastic bags. The bags would be filled with insecticide and chemicals deemed essential to marketing bananas where winter was cold and people liked their fruit in uniform: industrial agriculture gone tropical. Later, after the harvest, many of the bags ended up in the Caribbean, where they would be mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by turtles that would then choke to death. Unlike the complex ecosystems of the rainforest and jungle, mono-crop plantings like bananas couldn’t hold the ground; when the hard rains fell—it

There isn't anything bad in eating an white ice cream it really doesn't matter is it in a pail or in a cornet. (You are now thinking... oh, oh, oh an ice cream, I can do one for you. I have loads of just come to "Where I live" and I can fill you with a lot of ice cream. You won't want to go home...). The banana eating, what's bad?? To go in a public and to eat one normal banana,... I'm talking about the fruit called banana which is yellow as an a colour... (O..., o..., (off I hate this moment as far as now when everything in your head is about sex and you just connect it), "I'm sure that you like it", I have one in my home and it's one large you will like it and in the end there is little suprise for the people with patience)... What's bad or awful to eat an a cucumber???? OFFF, OFF, OFF you just again did this you connected it with this... what's bad of choosing sour cream or milk? Off, off, again and again all the time with this pornography it's like it's planted in your mind, like a bomb and in replace of the time you connect everything with pussy and dick. One moment with your dick sperm making it as an a milk, sour cream, ice cream so many faces… Then you connect it and with banana because in reality the banana is kind of fruit which can be sucked so you put replace of banana, your dick... even when you write "woman eating banana" in the google engine it will show some kind a pornography. But why do you connect it?? Even with the pussy which cums, how woman touches it... WOW, WOW!

My way of looking at the world is so nearsighted. If no one said anything, I'd probably just live like I do now year in and year out, and feel complacent about everything around me. Plus, I don't see that many people. Something is definitely missing -- I don't know what, maybe compassion for people who are suffering, a sense of adventure, interest in other people...

I loosen my grip and take a tasteless bite. I don’t like bananas much—they’re so mealy—but they’re a safe fruit to eat, always cleanly wrapped in their own packages. As I chew, I crane my neck to check out the people around us.

As she piped rosettes, docked a sheet of dough, or doused a tart with sanding sugar, another world occurred on the doorstep. Now Avis answers the door herself and leads surprised delivery people into the front entrance, across the living room, and through the heavy swinging door to her kitchen. She almost enjoys the contact with the outside world. On Monday, there is a Colombian man who delivers free-range eggs and unpasteurized milk that glows like satin. Tuesdays, a woman from Lima bring special concoctions of candied lilacs and fruit peels and 'gelees,' and later a young boy comes with a box filled with dried starfruit and bananas and fresh tea, mint and sage from his father's botanical garden in the Redlands. She asks and forgets everyone's names, but next week, she thinks, she'll ask again. Some deliveries- like those from her son's market- come every week, others- like the fig balsamic vinegar- were special-ordered to accompany a single chocolate strawberry ice cream cake.

I love feeling the rhythm of other people’s lives. It’s like traveling.

It takes time to get to know people, let alone to tell whether you like each other, so it really makes me wonder, you know, what you're supposed to do if they just keep coming through like a revolving door, in one day and out another, and you don't even have time to figure out who they are?

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) Home, upon that word drops the sunshine of beauty and the shadow of tender sorrows, the reflection of ten thousand voices and fond memories. This is a mighty fine old world after all if you make yourself think so. Look happy even if things are going against you— that will make others happy. Pretty soon all will be smiling and then there is no telling what can’t be done. Coca-Cola Girl Mother baked a fortune cake pale yellow icing, lemon drops round rim, hidden within treasures, a ring—you’ll be married, a button—stay a bachelor, a thimble—always a spinster, and a penny—you’re rich. Gee, but I am hungry. Wait a second, dear, until I pull my belt up another notch. There that’s better. So, you see, Hon, I am straighter than a string around a bundle. You ought to see my eye, it’s a peach. I am proud of it, looks like I’ve been kicked by a mule. You know, dear, that they can kick hard enough to knock all the soda out of a biscuit without breaking the crust Hogging Catfish This gives you a fighting chance. Noodle your right hand into their gills, hold on tight while you grunt him out of the water. This can be a real dogfight. Old river cat wants to go down deep, make you bottom feed. Like I said, boys, when you tell a whopper, say it like you believe it. Saturday Ritual My Granddad was a cobbler. We each owned two pairs of shoes, Sunday shoes and everyday shoes. When our Sunday shoes got worn they became our everyday shoes. Main Street Saturday Night We each were given a dime on Saturday opening a universe of possibilities. All the stores stayed open and people flocked into town. Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds set up a popcorn stand on Reinheimer’s corner and soon after lighting a little stove, sounding like small firecrackers, popping began. Dad, laughing shooting the breeze with a group of farmers, drinking Coca Cola, finding out if any sheds needed to be built or barns repaired, discussing the price of next year’s seed, finding out who’s really working, who’s just looking busy. There is no object I wouldn’t give to relive my childhood growing up in Delavan— where everyone knew everyone— and joy came with but a dime. Market Day Jim Pittsford’s grocery smelled of bananas ripening and the coffee he ground by hand, wonderful smoked ham and bacon fresh sliced. He’d reward the child who came to pick up the purchase, with a large dill pickle Biking home, skillfully balancing Jim Pittsford’s bacon, J B’s tomatoes and peaches, while sniffing a tantalizing spice rising from fresh warm rolls, I nibbled my pickle reward.

One proof of the decadence of America today is that too many political decisions are made based on people’s feelings. Striving to prevent people from feeling bad is like preventing them from making mistakes. The only thing they will learn from it is that everything is beautiful and that the world owes them. This is hardly an attitude to build resilience and face the vicissitudes of life

His sheer presence made a room feel warmer, made me feel like I'd been blessed. I understood exactly why people wanted to be near him, like he was kind of talisman...I knew firsthand that after talking to him, I didn't feel lonely at all. My body felt more at ease, my thoughts happier. I felt like life might yet have good things in store for me. And it wasn't a heady, unmoored feeling, but a quiet, rolling wave. This feels good, I thought. I'm just happy he's here. I don't need him to be mine. I wanted to appreciate him the way I did giant trees in the park, which gave people shelter and relief but didn't belong to anybody. Since I'd always assumed he was something to be shared, to me he was akin to cake, or a hot spring, or good music, a steady presence I could rely on to be there when I needed to catch my breath.

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go very easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness.

Potato - 1947-1995 In haste one evening while making dinner I threw away a potato that was spoiled on one end. The rest would have been redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail it became the consort of coffee grounds, banana skins, carrot peelings. I pitched it onto the compost where steaming scraps and leaves return, like bodies over time, to earth. When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay fork to air the pile, the potato turned up unfailingly, as if to revile me— looking plumper, firmer, resurrected instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow until I might have made shepherd’s pie for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning hand-me-down clothes on the line.

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

You know that every year in the western part of the United States there are fruits and grains produced that never find a market; bananas and oranges rot on the ground, whole skiffs of fruits are dumped into the ocean. Not because people do not need these foods and couldn't make good use of them in the big cities of the east, but because the employing class prefer to destroy a large percentage of the production in order to keep the price up in cities like New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Boston. If they sent all the bananas that they produce into the eastern part of the United States we would be buying bananas at probably three for a cent.

The train stopped at a station that had no town, and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route that had its name written over the gate: Macondo. This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had made with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant. I had already used it in three books as the name of an imaginary town when I happened to read in an encyclopedia that it is a tropical tree resembling the ceiba, that it produces no flowers or fruit, and that its light, porous wood is used for making canoes and carving cooking implements. Later, I discovered in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in Tanganyika there is a nomadic people called the Makonde, and I thought this might be the origin of the word. But I never confirmed it, and I never saw the tree, for though I often asked about it in the banana region, no one could tell me anything about it. Perhaps it never existed.

He learned how to talk to anyone, how to find common ground. He learned how to be a vessel for people’s worries, their complaints, and he learned that he’d better not have any worries or complaints of his own. He learned how to be friendly to women without crossing a line, he knew how to make them feel beautiful without being a sleaze, and he learned how to walk those same women back when they crossed the line, without insulting them, without embarrassing them. He learned to hide his shock at some of the things they said to him, these perfectly normal-seeming women, these women in their nearly identical faux leather jackets and their wedges, their hair in banana curls like they were all heading to some pageant for middle-aged women, the things that came out of their mouths when they had too much to drink or if they’d been wronged by their boyfriends or husbands.

When someone’s been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit. That’s why you can’t save it all up like that. Because by the time you finally see each other, you’re catching up only on the big things, because it’s too much bother to tell about the little things. But the little things are what make up life. Like a month ago when Daddy slipped on a banana peel, a literal banana peel that Kitty had dropped on the kitchen floor. Kitty and I laughed for ages. I should have e-mailed Margot about it right away; I should have taken a picture of the banana peel. Now everything feels like you had to be there and oh never mind, I guess it’s not that funny. Is this how people lose touch? I didn’t think that could happen with sisters. Maybe with other people, but never us. Before Margot left, I knew what she was thinking without having to ask; I knew everything about her. Not anymore. I don’t know what the view looks like outside her window, or if she still wakes up early every morning to have a real breakfast or if maybe now that she’s at college she likes to go out late and sleep in late. I don’t know if she prefers Scottish boys to American boys now, or if her roommate snores. All I know is she likes her classes and she’s been to visit London once. So basically I know nothing. And so does she.

if you come to know lots of different people's dreams, like you did, maybe you reach a point from which you can't return, and maybe that weighted down on you so heavily that in the end there was nothing you could do but die.

Yo momma’s so ugly, when she and your daddy go for walks they tell your daddy to put a leash on his dog. Yo momma's so ugly, when we went to the zoo, a little boy pointed to her and said, “Daddy, can I feed that monkey a banana?” Yo momma’s so ugly, when she was born the doctor apologized for malpractice and gave her momma a refund. Yo momma's so ugly people give her dog treats at the pet store. Yo momma’s so ugly the last time I saw something that looked like her, I pinned a tail on it.

Acknowledgments You hold this book in your hands ◆ because Bonnie Nadell and Austen Rachlis, no matter how many bananas drafts they read (and boy were they bananas), saw what this book could be, and helped me to see it too. Because Naomi Gibbs saw it and brought it fully into itself, and was a joy to work with, like everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Larry Cooper, Chrissy Kurpeski, Liz Anderson, Michelle Triant, among others, who took my weird visions and made them manifest, and beautiful. And because Andrea Schulz, years ago, when she first heard about my day job, said, Oh, you should definitely write about that. Thank you, Kayla Rae Whitaker and Amber Sparks, for your words and your kindness. You hold this book because I lived in Boston for eleven years and worked in both fundraising and finance, and had a LOT to process. Thank you, MGH and the Prospect Research Team (2010–2014), especially Angie Morey. I loved the work, but I loved working with you all even more. You are an astounding group of human beings. Thank you, Michael and Deanna Sheridan, Wendy Price, Barry Abrams, Heather Heald, and Eddie Miller, for the years before MGH, the days of RFPs and BlackBerrys (those who know, know). I didn’t always love the work itself, but working with you was a gift, and it changed my life. Thank you, Grub Street, which I am thrilled to work for still; thank you to Michelle Hoover, Alison Murphy, and Chris Castellani, and to all the thoughtful, visionary, funny, and immensely talented writers and people in the Grub universe.

Every so often night plays these little tricks. A knot of air pushes quietly through the darkness, and a feeling that has converged in some far-off place tumbles down like a falling star and lands just in front of you, and then you wake up. Two people live the same dream. All this takes place in the space of a single night, and the feeling only lasts until morning. The next morning it gets lost in the light, and you’re no longer even sure it happened. But nights like this are long. They continue forever, glittering like a jewel.

Nicest thing I can say about conspiracy nuts like you is that they have an overly optimistic view of man’s guile and cleverness. Realists like me see people for what they are: clumsy, selfish monkeys who try to grab all the bananas.” “Are

Some people’s routines are so consistent, their shits are the same. Dammit, if you’ve been pooping the same smooth shits for a month, you’re doing it wrong. Try olives. Papaya. Strawberry cheesecake. Truffles. Banana bread. The Chinese takeout you never trusted. Fish tacos downtown. A day-long empty stomach after missing the exit. Grandma’s recipe you flopped in the kitchen with your one-night-stand on a what-day- is-it kind of morning. Falafels. Mangoes from a Mexican. Get out there. Run around! And fall too! Nothing like a good cut on your leg to remind you that you have a leg.

For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiograpihc journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodrama like China Cry and Not Without my Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don't a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn't your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body...Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, "Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life." I thought I'd pass out -- a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hand of Morvarid, my friend nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother's fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm - life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn't do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit. Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The skeptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of Kit Kats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual skeptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant... Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? ...To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

Is organic cotton the future of sustainable development? With the increase in climate change and global warming, each step taken by us matters, be it even by transforming our cotton closet into an organic cotton closet. We are living in a time, where each step will either lead to an immense increase in global warming or will lead to the protection of our Mother Earth. So why not make our actions count and take a step by protecting our nature by switching to organic clothing?! As we know, the fashion industry is one of the largest industry of today, in which the cotton textiles lead the line together with the cotton manufacture setting them as the highest-ranked in the fashion industry. These pieces of regular cotton those are constructed into garments leads to 88% more wastage of water from our resources. Whereas Organic Cotton that has been made from natural seeds and handpicked for maintaining the purity of fibres; uses 1,982 fewer gallons of water compared to regular cotton. Gallons of water used by: Regular cotton: 2168 gallons Organic Cotton: 186 gallons Due to increase in market size of the fashion industry every year along with the cotton industry; regular cotton is handpicked by workers to keep up with the increase in demand for the regular cotton and because these crops are handpicked it leads to various damages and crises such as: Damage of fibres: As regular cotton is grown as mono-crop it destroys the soil quality, that exceeds the damage when handpicked by the farmers, leading to also the destruction of fibres because of the speed and time limit ordered. Damage of crops: Regular cotton leads to damage of crops when it is handpicked, as not much attention is paid while plucking it in bulk, due to which all the effort, time and resources used to cultivate the crops drain-out to zero. Water wastage: The amount of clean water being depleted to produce regular cotton is extreme that might lead to a water crisis. The clean water when used for manufacturing turns into toxic water that is disposed into freshwater bodies, causing a hazardous impact on the people deprived of this natural resource. Wastage of resources: When all the above-mentioned factors are ignored by the manufactures and the farmers, it directly leads to the waste of resources, as the number of resources used to produce the regular cotton is way high in number when compared to the results at the end. Regular cotton along with these damages also demands to use chemical dyes for their further process, that is not only harmful to our body but is also very dangerous to the workers exposed to it, as these chemicals lead to many health problems like earring aids, lunch cancer, skin cancer, eczema and many more, other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long other than that people can also lose their lives when exposed to these chemicals for long Know More about synthetic dyes on ‘Why synthetic dye stands for the immortality done to Nature?’ Organic cotton, when compared to regular cotton, brings a radical positive change to the environment. To manufacture, just one t-shirt, regular cotton uses 16% of the world’s insecticides, 7% pesticides and 2,700 litres of water, when compared to this, organic cotton uses 62% less energy than regular Cotton. Bulk Organic Cotton Fabric Manufacturer: Suvetah is one of the leading bulk organic cotton fabric manufacturer in India. Suvetah is GOTS certified sustainable fabric manufacturer in Organic Cotton Fabric, Linen Fabric and Hemp Fabric. We are also manufacturer of other fabrics like Denim, Kala Cotton Fabric, Ahimsa Silk Fabric, Ethical Recycled Cotton Fabric, Banana Fabric, Orange Fabric, Bamboo Fabric, Rose Fabric, Khadi Fabric etc.

Under the freezing starry sky, I felt an understanding make its way deeper into me: the preciousness of me, as an individual, with my own experience which no one else in the world could know the whole of, but which I shared parts of with so many people everywhere whose experiences touched and overlapped with mine, even if I was young and miserable and looked like I had nothing at all.