monkey love

It has been a monkey kind of week. First, last weekend my family and I went to see the latest Leaky Heaven production, which was Bonobo and was about Bonobo apes. It was rather a departure for LH, with only a fraction of the usual irreverent maniacal hilarity, but it was still entertaining and rather moving. Which is not a quality I usually look for in a circus performance, so it caught me off-guard, but it was quite lovely as all their productions are.

anyway. The other thing was J and I went to stay with my man in Seattle for a couple days, the first time in the 2 years he and I have been together that I've taken her there to hang out with us. Which is silly and complicated but there you are. We went to the zoo yesterday and the thing that really caught me the most was when we were looking at the Orangutans.

We got to the Orangutan enclosure and they weren't around in the first window we looked in. At the next window there was a whole crowd of people, and there was a woman drawing an Orangutan who was sitting on the other side of the glass, his chin balanced on his hand which was resting on a rock ledge. He was sitting very still, letting the woman sketch him. I asked her if he always did that and she said he did. She said she sketched him often, and every time she came he would come up and sit down and pose for her, sometimes sitting for hours. He knew who she was and what she was doing. I forgot to ask whether she showed him her drawings, but the whole thing struck me as quite magical. I nearly took her picture, but by the time I thought of doing it we were already walking away.

I forget if it was before that or after, but we saw these other monkeys, maybe they are chimps, and the window to the enclosure came right down to the floor and one of the chimps was sitting right by the glass. And I took a picture of J and the chimp, and you can't really tell there's glass there so it looks like they're sitting together, having an animated exchange or conversation of some sort, which would totally be in character for J, who undoubtedly would have a wonderful and interesting conversation with a chimpanzee. And so I have a new appreciation for our primate brethren.

BLOG SPAM!!

dammit, I got some spam comments on my blog! I deleted them so you, gentle reader, would not be sorely offended as I was.

I have now added word authentication to my comments area, so spammers cannot pollute my pristine blog environment. Sorry to those of you who comment, for any inconvenience.

zoiks.

i just had an 80s flashback moment. A guy walked into the library wearing a pink polo shirt with the collar flipped up and I had the urge to laugh out loud. Good thing i'm feeling really tired and dragged out right now, crawling toward the end of my work day, or I might have.

chocolate malted

last night I met my alter ego. or my mirror image. I don't know, it's kind of weird and hard to explain. let's see if I can do it.

i have this friend named bella and she has a friend named D. She and D have been friends since they were teens, and bella and I have been friends since we were pre-tweens (actually we were "frenemies" way back when, i learned last night), and yet, somehow, D and I had never really met. Maybe we had, at some teenage horrorshow birthday party back in the mid-80s or something, but we blocked out those memories or otherwise failed to retain them.

the thing is, D and I actually have a fair bit in common. Both Jewish girls who married Italian men and procreated, producing overly articulate, gorgeous brainiac daughters, whose radiance and brilliance is rarely more than a fun afterthought to us. Observing her interacting with her daughter last night, i imagined how people look at me when I interact with mine. or did, when she was 2 1/2 years old. Oh hell, I probably do interact with her the same way now that she's 8 1/2.

however, the main thing we have in common is bella. The reason bella invited us both to dinner last night was because she had something of great import to tell us, and she needed us both to know, and it was a long story (so long that while D and I polished off our dinners, listening intently and slurping mojito, interjecting at intervals, she barely ate half of hers, and finally let the server take her plate away after a few halfhearted attempts to finish...though she did manage to drink her martini), so it made sense to tell both of us together. The very fact that she did this represents the most important aspect of the story she had to tell us, which was something that both D and I understood and acknowledged.

and here's the mirror part. Because D and I had almost the exact same reactions to what bella was telling us, almost at the same moments, during the entire story. and bella kept looking from me to D and back again, and said over and over, "this is exactly why I needed you both here!" and it was funny and strange and perfectly natural. later, when we had walked off the pitcher of mojitos and were winding things up, chatting on D's front steps, bella commented one more time how D and I had such similar insights into her mind and actions, and said we must be so much alike, and I said no, what we have in common is you. it's like we each have part of your brain embedded in ours. it's like you're a chocolate malted, and we each have a straw.