and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

If I believed everything people said all of the time I think that would be about as useful as believing that bananas are directly related to apples - in a brother/sister sorta way - which is to say: not at all useful in any sense of the word. Not that I can think of at this moment anyway.

So I started to give this serious thought; the idea of belief. Belief in other people. Belief in what we see every day. Belief in the sibling rivalry between Baninis and Opples. What struck me was how very unimportant it all is, or rather, how arbitrary. I stopped what I was doing and closed my eyes. I believed for two seconds that fruit had family and that there was a close relation between the tropical plantain and the temperate apple. I tried for three seconds.

Nope, couldn't do it. Two seconds was all the mindshare I could give to such a ludicrus idea but in that two seconds I wandered the streets of my town, drove down the east coast, visited Washington D.C. and then hopped a plane for London. Everything looked mostly the same. No one minded that these two species of fruit were now very much brother and sister.

I'll admit they served apple slices on the plane, but I'm not sure that really means anything. Does it?

So after those two seconds I started to look at people, straight in the eye, and consider a world in which everything they said was the plain truth. I considered their words as if they were written in stone on the wall of time, chiseled by a bipartisan bystander, an innocent and impartial alien unaccustomed to the very idea of lying.

But people will say the oddest things.

In the end I don't think I was any worse off but the world I lived in for those moments was blissfully sweet, like an apple married to a banana, a banappple; Juicy and delicious but somehow unbelievable. It was a fantasy, no doubt, but wonderful and oh so badly did I want to feel the truth of it. I wanted not to convince myself but truly believe, down to my very bone, the honesty of everyone.

Like a child.

If you've bought green bananas and want to accelerate the ripening, place them into a paper or plastic bag. Adding an apple to the bag will encourage faster ripening.