Tropicana orange juice -- Florida fresh, 100-percent pure, not from concentrate -- is disconcertingly orange. I'm sure you've all noticed and wondered why this is.
So I conducted an experiment. In one glass I poured some of Florida's finest O.J. (no pulp). Into the other I squeezed two halves of a ripe orange. I didn't need a spectrometer to see something was amiss; the two looked nothing alike. Tropicana may as well be its own fruit, juiced in idyllic Panhandle sunshine by men in overalls with slat-sided pickups. It can't possibly be made from real oranges. What's the deal?
The deal is probably pasteurization or reaction with the container or "mineral fortification" or a flat-out lie on the part of those orange growers down south. Orange juice, though, is not to be confused with the juice of an orange. What an irony. Undoubtedly I have too much time on my hands.
Now, I'm not a fan of Alanis Morissette, but I have been noticing an awful lot of irony these days, on and off the breakfast table. Snow damn near in May is pretty ironic; in the last two weeks we've experienced weather normally associated with either Malaysia or the island of South Georgia. A trip out of my room last week required a dogsled in the morning, sunblock and a sombrero for the afternoon and a life-raft for the return. A cruel joke on the budding trees, burgeoning pink-and-green vegetable genitalia bathed in sunshine and humidity only to be frost-nipped at the twig when the mercury plummeted.
Life sucked for all those worms too, celebrating an end to what can only have been a miserable cryogenic entombment with a mass-exodus worm-spawn free-for-all, only to drown in a biblical monsoon. I've never seen so many of the things. Writhing out of the flooding sod in that rain we had awhile back were nightcrawlers rivaling Canada's finest. They bit it hard though, drowned like cats in the Bermuda Triangle.
It provided pretty good entertainment for awhile -- girls returning from a hard night studying in open-toed sandals trying to pick their way through an ever-shifting annelid minefield. You'd think the girls were the ones about to get stepped on and mutilated, by the stymied expressions of despair and terror locked on their faces. So the worms fled flooding compost tunnels to the world above, only to drown or get crushed by terrified people thousands of times more massive than they. Irony. Irony and a million dead worms.
There's great irony in the gym. Smokers run stairs and pant on treadmills, cranking out the cardiovascular workout while their effective pulmonary capacity erodes like the smoldering butts they suck on, plaque building up in their arteries like a veritable systemic Ice Age. Run faster. Really, I thought one of the few benefits to a thorough nicotine addiction was that exercise no longer mattered. Intravenous Crisco probably couldn't keep up with the load you're already giving yourself. I have a hard time buying that someone really cares about their health if they aren't at least trying to quit, no matter how toned their calves.
More irony -- while it's great that we have compost fairies hovering over refuse bins at the Hop, no one at eco-conscious Dartmouth seems too concerned about the thousands of four-by-five inch information cards (be they from a campus group or the administration) that get pumped into our Hinman Boxes on a weekly basis. The life of those things, from the time one comes out of the mailbox until it's shot down the slit of the recycle bin, lasts about six seconds. I pay more attention to limericks scratched into stall walls in the bathrooms.
We must go through a metric ton of paper per year, in colors not normally associated with anything between infrared and ultraviolet, decorated with stars and fonts that no one is actually supposed to use. I would think saving that paper would be more ecologically important than saving banana peels from landfills. To those who engage in this practice: blitz the message (we'll all get it), post a poster, take out an ad in the paper. But don't mail me impersonal fluorescent propaganda. It wastes my time and (ironically) nearly guarantees I'm not coming.
The icing on the proverbial cake of my recent interest in irony emerged three nights ago. I made it through a dead New England winter illness-free and survived a noteworthy conjunctivitis epidemic with both eyes blinking in the morning. But I awoke at 4 a.m. with a sore throat high in my pharynx, just at the level where swallowing saliva does nothing and a cough drop just numbs the healthy tissue below the inflammation. I've spent the last three nights sniffling in the pre-dawn gloom, hacking mucus out of my otherwise healthy lungs and experimenting with swallowing techniques to throw at least a little menthol over my lysing tonsils. I really don't get it.
You'd think I drink enough orange juice.
