Because It Takes A Village To Raise An Ape...

Last week I attended training for work. As if being trapped in a car with co-workers for hours on end listening to the sob stories on Delilah isn't bad enough, the training also blew chunks. The trainer was a crier. The instance occurred when he was talking about a research study concerning gorillas in a zoo. Apparently researchers swapped babies and mommas to see how temperament affects parenting (my first question is this: how you can you definitively talk about temperament in apes, and my second question is: did they take into account that some apes might be pissed at losing their babies and being given new ones). Apparently, the study found that it took a super-ape-mommy to raise a difficult gorilla-baby. If the difficult ape-baby was raised by an average ape-mommy or even a "bad" ape-mommy, then they became isolated and ostracized in their group. But, if it was raised by a June Cleaver-ape, difficult gorillas grew up to lead the group (cue crying) and save everyone from threats (like zoo keepers trying to take away their babies?).

The trainer then went on to talk about (and cry about) how Winston Churchill saved the Queen and her people in WWII (I think it was because he was raised by a super-gorilla).

The most screwed up part of this story is that I am a social crier, so every time monkey boy fell apart at the thought of super-gorillas, I cried with him. In case you were wondering, my training was on how to run a child group (using puppets no less, so imagine monkey boy crying about super gorillas while holding a giant puppet). Needless to say I feel ill equipped to do anything but cry about baby gorillas and the insurmountable power of the English people. Another successful training by I.Y.

I forgot to also mention that Monkey-boy had the flu during this training. After two days of watching him sweat or holding his hand to his mouth to stop the puke, he wanted to shake hands with everyone who finished the the training. Like I said it blew chunks.