Monkeys Everywhere

     This past Saturday I met up with my aunt and uncle and cousins, who have agreed to let me stay at their house every weekend for my necessary dose of real food and casual human interaction. Don't get me wrong, I'm the world's biggest freeze-dried dinner fan, but it's sometimes nice to eat something that isn't 95% preservatives, if only to make sure I don't come back as a zombie. My stays at their house also provide me with actual exercise out in the fresh, mostly unpolluted air. Sometimes we ride bikes. Sometimes we go for walks. One time my cousins and I spent half an hour engaging in full-on wrestling matches in their backyard (of which I was, of course, the undisputed champion). And this Saturday they took me to the Central Park Zoo.
      Considering the trajectory of my life, I feel like this shouldn't have been my first visit to the Central Park Zoo, but I think it actually was. In fact, this might have been my first visit to Central Park entirely. I found it to be a fairly standard city park, with some nice trees and green spaces, lots of people on benches, and scenic roadways lined with horse poo. The zoo itself is small but mighty, and since I am actually related to the guy most responsible for its mightiness, I got to walk around the place with a feeling of proprietary smugness, which is always fun.
      The weather was warm and sunny, but not too humid, and the place was crowded, but not to the point of discomfort. I was enjoying myself, and having my typical zoo experience, in which I stare at the animals and try to block out all of the people around me assigning male pronouns to everything in sight. "Oooh, look at him! Do you see him? Isn't he cute?" I am always tempted to turn to these people and say "Oh, is that a male [insert animal here]? I'm never sure. How can you tell?" My favorite comment, however, was made by a man who we encountered upon entering the penguin area. He waved a hand at the penguins and turned to the kid next to him. "Look at these monkeys," he said. "It's all just a bunch of monkeys. Monkeys everywhere."
      We watched the feeding and subsequent shouting match of the sea lions (all of which were, I wanted to yell to the zoo at large, FEMALE), and I took the opportunity to spew forth everything I had learned about sea lions in my marine biology class in Denmark. My aunt and uncle and cousins are nice people, and so they humored me. We watched one sea lion bodily shove another off a rock, and then, confident that we had seen all we could possibly see, we left the Central Park Zoo.