Spain Photos!

Here’s a photo of the sunrise in Barcelona after an overnight bus there from Madrid.  It was really beautiful.  I wish you were there to see that painting in the sky for the fleeting moments that it hung itself there.

 

Monkey Problems

This week I’ve been feeling sorry for myself.  Finding reasons to feel bad is not something I have to really go fishing for.  Lately, I’ve just been feeling out of tune.  I’d like to blame it on the weather.  I’d like to blame it on my night job or the way the light came in this morning.  Just to act like an old snapping turtle making faces and walking too slowly biting when there’s nothing to stick my neck out about.  Getting upset about small things, missing an important package that’s supposed to show up at the end of the month and wondering if I ever take my life in my hands to forget myself in someone elses arms.  Trying to resign to the fact that I’m human and I need other people and my friends want to be there for me….and I should just let them.

And as I was silently judging myself and being an Oscar the grouch prodigy before giving my dad a ride to work he told me something that made me chuckle and tuck my problems in a filing cabinet somewhere away.

Dad: Do you know how here we have gangs?

(Then I thought oh lord here comes some more depressing talk)

Me: uh, yeah?

Dad: Well in India now there are Monkey gangs. And right now they’re been terrorizing people.  It’s very bad.  They go into your homes and steal your things.  They open your fridge and take your food.  People are starting to leave poisonous bananas.  But Monkeys have a great sense of smell and they tell all their little gang friends not to eat the bananas. And you know how your grandma has a black faced lemur? (my grandmother actually has a pet lemur named ‘Rani’ or Princess that wards off monkeys at her house).  Well, everyone is getting lemurs now because they slap monkeys with their hands and their teeth are longer and they slap them with their long tails.

What you have to understand, reader, is that this conversation is actually pretty serious.  I remember going to India as a kid and having to be weary of monkeys biting you or chasing you.  They’ve become rather fearless since the 60s when my dad explains a lemur would stand on the street and stick his palm out at you for one rupee.  You’d give him a rupee and he’d go to a peanut stand and give it to the owner who would feed him peanuts.  “Those days are gone”, says dad.

While we feel sorry for ourselves about gang violence virally spreading through our children’s veins in America just think there’s a whole monkey epidemic in another country.  There’s an army rising, there’s a crew coming to eat your fridge out literally.

Can you imagine I felt bad for myself?

(By the way please not hints of sarcasm in this post.  Also the Monkey issues of India I was not making up super real tho!)