fruity is the new crazy

If you've never let yourself become addicted to any kind of calorie-counting website, you're - well, you're probably healthier in some ways than I am, for one thing. You also probably don't measure your milk. Or realize quite how much milk you actually drink on a daily basis.

This calorie-counting is fun for me. I think it's my father's mathemathically-based, computerey-oriented, engineering-type genes poking their heads out to see if it's safe.

You see any raging hormones or sobbing or other sorts of emotional activities being engaged in out there?

No - you?

I do not. See any decisions being based solely on pheremones or intuition?

Nope.

So for the first time in thirty-three years we're in the clear?

That's affirmative.

Hot dog! Let's count stuff!

I've actually doubled my fruit intake because of this website I'm hooked on. Doubled it. Although, eating even a single piece of fruit would be better than quadrupling my previous fruit intake, if I'm going to be all math-ey about it. It would also be better than multiplying it by three-hundred-and-seventy-two. Or adding a whole bunch of zeros to it, as up until a week ago my daily fruit intake was essentially in the negative numbers (mathematically real things that people like my father believe in). If someone gave me fruit, I'd fling it back at them, plus that other fruit that I found shriveled up on the floor of my truck.

Please don't misinterpret me. I like fruit. I have extremely good intentions concerning fruit. I carry it around with me at all times, practically. I currently have an orange and an apple sitting on my desk at work. And I'm saving another orange for later. In my trash can. I also have an apple core in the cupholder of my truck. But it's not me who left it there.

If I could eat only fruit that I find on plants - the wild strawberries that grew beside the house when I was a kid, the blueberries we used to pick from the bushes around my grandparents' house in New Hampshire, the blackberries we found weighing down the bushes of every campsite along the Oregon coast one summer, the sweet-as-candy oranges that grew right off the porch of Raphael's old bachelor pad - then I would be the worst kind of fruit person. I'd be like an ex-smoker, only with nicer lungs.

Until that day, I will continue to regard tasteless Safeway fruit as medicinal at best and eat it primarily to satisfy the needs of my beloved calorie-counting website. Except for the pineapple, which I will grill and eat with a quarter-serving of poundcake and a tangy lemon-lime sauce. As we all know, it's not really fruit if you stick it into the flames and smother it with sugar. I think my website would agree.