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The long, lonely time my Twitter has spent huddled, sobbing alone in a dark corner is over, thanks to my dubious girlfriend, who sent me the link to Stephen Fry’s Twitter.

SPOILER ALERT: No. No it isn’t.

I headed down to main campus today, following lunch. The purpose? To get a little prick. Well, another little prick, since God already saw fit to give me one. Extremely labored joke aside, today marked the opening of our free flu shot clinic for this year, so I hustled down to get one.

The challenge? I am reasonably terrified of needles. Yes, I’m being serious. I like to blame it on the multiple “incidents” over the years, where my veins, covered as they are in a rubbery sheathing that seems to deflect needles with a somewhat gauche nonchalance, have refused to cooperate with nurses, ER doctors, and phlebotomists. Even a stalwart heart begins to blanch when every injection is preceded by at least three unsuccessful attempts. Still, flu shots are intramuscular, so I suppose it wasn’t so bad.

What I DON’T get — and the subject of the titular question — is why so many people seem to find it the height of irony that a man with two large tattoos on his forearms can be so put off by needles. How ridiculous!, they say. With those tattoos, can you really hate them that much?

Let me tell you why I can: THEY ARE NOT THE SAME SORT OF NEEDLES. Shots are pokey. Tattoos are scratchy. Also, I’ve yet to have an artist that needed to try three times before he managed to actually tattoo me.

Jeeeeeeeeeez.

Holy hell. Has it really been over four months since my last blog post? While it is tempting to give a personal State of the Union, cataloguing in exhaustive — and exhausting — detail the minutiae of my last third of a year, I’m instead going to talk to you about bananas.

The setting: a crisp Seattle morning, not long ago. The scene: a small bus stop at Denny & Fairview. As I dragged myself to the bus stop, sleep-weary and half-dreading the day, I pondered my recent string of uneventful, mundane days. Things were going well, sure, but the ineffable “spark” seemed to be fading. Then I saw them.

Two bananas, just sitting on the bench. Apparently clean and unmolested.

So when I stood there, looking at the otherwise abnormally clean — and hobo-free — bus shelter, and hearkened back to my previous incident with Metro Transit and bananas, it almost seemed as though the universe were sending me a message. The capacity for finding joy in life (particularly the “small things”), the ability to appreciate and embrace a simple species of joie de vivre, and to see magic in the mundane … well, these are concepts that are deceptively central to my life. And that’s all it takes, sometime: a banana where a banana has no business being.

Who left these?, I wondered, as my mind immediately began cycling through a vast panoply of potential explanations. Had a hobo left them, in a fit of produce-despising rare? Had a young coder, perhaps not so different from myself, forgotten them in an iPhone-inspired moment of mental abstraction? Had some kindly person left them there for me to see and be mystified by? These and other questions of no moment occupied me until the bus finally arrived, but my day gained a luster none of its siblings had recently had. Stupid, silly, and random, those bananas perked me up, reminded me how totally in love with life I am.

Life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for me since the last time I blogged. I’ve lost three dear friends; two to tragic and untimely deaths, and one to … well … attrition? I’ve met and fell in love with lovely, clever, funny, patient woman, with whom I’ve already shared a great deal of passion and forged an incomprehensibly massive collection of wonderful memories. I’ve made great strides in relearning French, and am again looking into a possible move to that distant land of smelly cheeses and smellier people. I’ve discovered that I don’t mind sleeping without earplugs, that Spanakopita is pretty much the most delicious thing on Earth, and that I will always be happier when I make time to read.

Oh, and that there is magic and whimsy in the world. I need only look to bananas to see it.