You Can't Redeem Yourself by Eating a Diseased Oompa Loompa
Or One Way to Not to Build Self-Confidence While Living in the Tropics
Hi poets, writers and friends,
This month (May) I invite you to our free reading and open-mic with Sarah Browning, author of Killing Summer (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), and Alixen Pham on 5/19/24 .
If you are a paid subscriber, you will also get access to Sarah Browning’s workshop “The Republic of Motherhood” on 5/26/24. Get details and register at the end of this post.
One Way to Build Self-Confidence
I’ve heard people say that if you want confidence in yourself to do big things, start by doing little things first.
After returning from the Nicaraguan border, my husband and I realized (again) that we needed to make some big changes (again). This year we would make more money, save more money, and live a Pura Vida lifestyle so that our trip down to the tropics would not be in vain. I wanted to tackle these big goals by building some confidence in myself to tackle a smaller goal.
A goal so small it would fit in the palm of my hand. A goal so easy, I could accomplish it in a single morning at breakfast.
I wanted to finally eat a noni fruit.
What is a Noni Fruit?
The Weird Fruit Explorer lists the noni fruit as the worst fruit in the world. It’s variously called “cheese fruit,” “famine fruit,” and I think most accurately, “vomit fruit.”
When we first arrived in Costa Rica a local guide told us that noni fruit are plentiful in tropical places like Hawaii, Malaysia, and our new home country. They are high in vitamin C. Locals use them to ward off mosquitos. Put them in smoothies, or take them medicinally to cure everything from the common cold to cancer.
The downside of this miracle fruit is that they smell like tropical vomit. The kind of smell you get after barfing up too many frilly boat drinks and half-digested fruit salad. Nobody I know of sells them. Nobody serves them. Nobody allows them entrance into their restaurants or houses. But also, nobody cuts them down either.
We have two noni fruit trees in front of the house next to us and a dozen grow along the road I pass when biking through town.
The fruit itself is neither pretty nor ugly. It’s bulbous and light green with little nubs of brown all around its body, like a large, misshapen green strawberry. Sometimes I pick them off the ground and carry them in my bike basket, thinking, “I am going to eat this tonight.”
Eating One is Like Accepting a Dare from the Devil
But the longer I ride my bike in the sun, with the heat baking the skin of the fruit, releasing the smell into the air, the more awful it is. By the time I get home, I cannot bring myself to eat it. I put it on the table. I let the air-conditioned room cool it to a reasonable temperature so that it doesn’t smell like hot vomit. But now it doesn’t matter what it smells like because it looks terrible. It has turned from bright green to a sickly yellow-white, almost translucent.
It looks like a bloated corpse of an Albino Oompa Loompa*
And I let it sit there, getting softer and softer, less appetizing with every passing hour, until finally, I give up and throw it out the window so it will scare away the ants.
But after our trip to the border I was determined to do at least one small thing right. In the never-ending attempt to get healthier, I rode my bike into town to get some exercise and to get a noni fruit. I didn’t have to go far before I saw one hanging from a branch only a few blocks from our place. It was hanging on a low branch, just at eye level. I reached out, plucked it from the tree, and brought it home. I let it sit on the table overnight, and in the morning I woke up and found it still there, staring at me with its many puckered eyes.
Okay. I said to myself. Here it is, time to start again.
This time, I continued my internal monologue, I’ll do it right. I’ll turn off the news, I’ll sit in the garden and meditate for long hours, listen to the silence, and watch the dove in the queen palm dry her wings. I’ll get so still I’ll hear the wasps building their nests of mud, and the lizards crawling up the walls. I’ll finally understand what the parrots are saying when they chortle at me in that screech that sounds eerily human. I’ll slow my heartbeat to the speed of Pura Vida and feel my oneness with the ocean. I’ll surrender myself fully to the Spanish language and learn to speak it like a native. Finally, I’ll slip off my mortal skin and feel the way that everything outside is the same temperature as the flirtation of butterflies I feel within me, and I will become a forest sage, untouched by the changing landscape. I will breathe in clean air and breathe out toxic thinking. I will breathe in Mother Earth and breathe out over-reliance on technology. I will become an emblem of Pura Vida, poetic, Spanish-speaking, abundant, financially secure, well-published, healthy, fit, muscle-toned, vitamine-C-soaked tropical perfection.
I thought this while I stared at the noni fruit. All I needed to do was pick it up and slice some of that dead, drowned-animal-looking skin from its body, and I could have it all. Experience. Enlightenment. The happiness of a happy nation.
I picked it up. I brought it closer to my mouth, which meant closer to my nose. I smelled it again and suddenly realized something.
Maybe I’ve been setting my goals too high.
Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being a failure, recognizing a little hubris, and admitting that you just can’t do it all.
Somehow, staring at that noni fruit, smelling its vomitous scent, it was easier to admit defeat than it was to face the idea of putting its bloated-corpse-flavored truth into my mouth.
So I picked up the body of that Cancer-Curing fruit and walked over to the railing, where concrete condo complex met unregulated canopy. In one bold gesture, I threw the noni fruit as hard as I could away from me, letting it hit the top of a tropical almond tree and fall backwards into the green sky.
*Aprapos of nothing related to Costa Rica, writing or poetry, I googled “diseased Oompa Loompa” to get what I hoped would be a funny photo. I wound up diving into a rabbit hole’s worth of articles about the dark side of the industrious green-orange critters. Everything from Reddit threads about how Ooompa Loompa’s suck the energy out of children, to this Vulture article about the Glasgow chocolate factory fiasco. I know it’s unrelated to this post, but isn’t everything related to the subject of writing? If you’re looking to get inspiration for more surreal writing (I wrote about this somewhat in this post a while back) here’s some extra fodder for you.)
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