I know. I know. I haven’t been myself lately. My latest columns have been laced with political controversy and social pretension. It’s been a busy past few weeks in the news realm, what can I say?

But every once in a while, some simple newsroom antic provokes me to write a serious, in-depth column about something far beyond my control.

What was it this time?

A banana. Or all bananas really.

Don’t stop reading. The implications and overtones are obviously there, but stick with me.

I was walking around the newsroom as I so often do, and I came upon our photo editor at the photo desk. Next to her sat a sort of bane to my existence.

This may come as a shock to most of you, but I can’t eat bananas. It’s not as if I don’t enjoy their taste, shape or anything about the experience of consuming the fruit. I literally cannot comfortably digest them. I eat a banana just fine. But about 15 or 20 minutes later, I don’t know what it is. My chest begins to tighten. Breathing becomes difficult. All in all, it’s about a good half hour of agony. And this just doesn’t happen if I eat a whole banana. I can have one bite, and sure enough, this reaction ensues.

I’ve never thought to bring this up to a medical professional. Granted, the best explanation is that I have a banana allergy. I do fine with banana-flavored food because there’s typically nothing real about the flavor. Often, though, I have some mental connections between real bananas and banana flavoring – a weird sort of post-traumatic syndrome.

Oh, but the irony. I’m not going to spell it out, but it’s nothing less than totally amusing that someone who is so, for lack of a more subtle way of putting it, gay, would have such an aversion to the most phallic fruit. This is exactly the discussion that ensued when I revealed my allergy to the newsroom this week.

I’m not trying to gain regional media attention for my strange relationship with bananas. (For those of you who weren’t around, former Stater employee Ben Breier reached national notoriety a year and a half ago for his admitted fear of bananas.) I’m just pontificating of such an obviously hysterical problem that is dear, and seemingly dangerous, to my heart.

Karma is a bitch, after all. I don’t exactly know what I ever did to not be able to enjoy bananas, but with my history, you never really second-guess things like this. So every time I see one laying around just like I did this week in the newsroom, or I’m passing through the produce section of the grocery store, I can’t help but consider the irony that such an explicit fruit is so far beyond my grasp or, well, palette.

Adam Griffiths is a sophomore information design major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].