Apparently, I Was Destined to Be A Scientist

I ran into a friend from high school today. He was one of those people with whom you had mutual friends and who took a girl you'd known for a couple of years to prom for the first time but then he graduated and that was the end of it. The point is, I don't know him that well but he's a pretty cool guy. The one thing I really know about him is that he wears glasses but prefers not to.

Once, No Glasses started talking to me on Gchat, which was strange because he'd never done it before or since. He was very stressed by a secret he couldn't tell any of his friends. As I insinuated earlier, NG and I don't know each other very well, so I made him an offer: he could tell me and I would promise not to listen. Strangely enough, he told me something that must have been a big problem in his life since he was a boy.

Anyway, we went out for pizza. NG was paying, and I wasn't that hungry, so I told him to pick the type. He chose one that was veggie-topped, and I began to pull the olives off of my slice, as I customarily do.

"NG, have I ever told you why I hate olives?"

Ever polite,he did not attempt to speak with his mouth full and just shook his head.

"Now, when I was little, I loved grapes. In addition, my parents weren't the type to leave me at home with a babysitter while they did adult things. So once I was taken to some sort of adult party and my parents set me down to amuse myself. (I was a very easily amused child.) They came back a couple of minutes later and found me by a bowl of olives, carefully putting them one by one in my mouth: nope, this one's not a grape; hmm, nor this one; not this one either. By then, I'd gotten through about half the bowl."

"That sounds extraordinarily traumatizing."

"It was! It's interesting that I didn't stop after one, or a handful, or when I realized olives were disgusting."

"Well, there was no way to make sure that none were grapes until you had tried them all. You were just looking for the outliers."