watermelon science

when the summertime comes, i pretty much want to eat fruit all the time, and only fruit. this is not drastically different from the rest of the year, but it gets worse and worse as i am more able to get brighter, more colorful, more unmarred, jucier, and more delicious fruits at even lower prices than usual in the summertime.

you probably don’t know this, but i am a watermelon fiend. you don’t know this because watermelon isn’t available most of the year, and because i try to keep my watermelon-addiction on the DL to avoid people realizing that i’m an enormous pig.

saturday, i’d finally had enough. the prices had been dropping for weeks, nearly every produce section had watermelons for 3.99, and they were large and made satisfying thuds when you thumped them. i arose bright and early, exclaimed to my roommate, “i’ve had it! i hope you like watermelon, because i’m going to get one this morning!” thankfully, she does like watermelon. so does her fiance. in fact, i am awaiting their return right now so that i don’t have to find air-tight containers for all of this beautiful pinkred fruit.

to make a long story short, i bought myself the biggest, baddest, 3.99 watermelon i could find. and i just cut it open tonight. it was too big for the cutting board, too big for our biggest knife, and its contents are too big for our biggest tupperware! oh, what a lovely thing.

so i’m sitting here, working on a quarter of the melon. yes, you heard me right. a quarter of the melon. i’m about halfway there, and watermelon juice is spraying in my eyes, on my new shirt, on my two-thousand dollar powerbook, i have a towel and a spoon and the more it sprays on my face, the wider i smile and the faster i shovel. it makes me feel like a kid again.

it’s a science, and i’m in the middle of it. the beginning of the experience involves biting off as much as you can without getting your hair in the watermelon. then, you take the spoon to it. this will do away with most of the melon, but then you have all of the bright, perfectly useful and tasty fruit close to the rind. not the greenish whiteish melon with a sort of pink hue, but the real genuine fruit. so you start scraping with your teeth, around and around, until your nose is full of watermelon and your face is sticky with its juice and yes, there is watermelon in your hair. you come up for air, then resume until you are getting more of the aforementioned pseudofruitrind and less of the actual fruit, and with your final breath, you let the rind visit the garbage disposal/compost heap.

watermelons are almost like people. with life cycles. and watermelon certainly holds more firey-vivid memories of childhood than most people do, for me.

i’m off. i’ve still got an eighth of a watermelon to conquer.