The Wrath of the Indian Monkeys

Tonight (since my insomnia has taken over yet again) I would like to talk about something that threatens, well, none of us... unless you are reading this blog in Delhi.

Apparently, there is a massive monkey menace in Delhi, India, where they are being overrun with evil monkeys. Sure, you might read that and think, “What, are they throwing crap and doing things that crazy little monkeys do?”

Nope. They threw the deputy mayor of Delhi from his terrace, giving him a serious head injury that led to his death. I shit you not, this is totally real. In India it is forbidden to kill monkeys for religious purposes. This. coupled with the fact that people have been feeding monkeys in order to obtain divine rewards, has led to a rise of unruly monkeys. How out of control have these monkeys been?

"Monkeys have invaded government ministries in New Delhi, ridden elevators andclimbed along windowsills. Monkeys slapped students inside a girls school in asouth Bengal suburb. A gang of monkeys in the city of Chandigarh ripped uplawns, broke flowerpots and yanked sheets off beds. Some monkeys, mostly loners, have bitten people, injuring and even killing small children."

Wait. Read that over - they went into a school and slapped the students around? Is that not the funniest thing you've ever read??

Teacher: Jane, why were you late for class?
Jane: A monkey just kicked the shit out of me.
Teacher: Sure Jane, sure...

So what do you do with unruly monkeys that you can't kill? Send them to monkey jail, of course! But none of this has really worked and Delhi is losing its battle against the rouge monkeys. You know what, I don't even have a solution to offer up. I was going to say that I could create a band of freedom fighters that would come and take care of the monkey problem. Maybe I could even wear a cool eye patch and have the latest in military technology to fight the monkeys. But, after thinking about it, why the hell would I want to do that? I am waiting for the inevitable monkey car theft or perhaps even plane theft. Or the story about how someone went to buy an ice cream and the only people working were monkeys, which of course would only dish out banana ice cream.

So India, I beg you: continue your no killing of monkey policies. You can learn to co-exist with them, and and they can continue to be productive members of society. Woo-hoo.

Procrastination & Satisfaction

I catch myself frequently assigning a date other than the present for whenever I’ll feel satisfied with my daily life. Some of it’s procrastination; I tend to put off today what (I convince myself) can be done tomorrow. I dread the hours a 20-page research paper will require so I put it off hoping that in another day I actually want to sit at my computer for hours on end. My quality of life, I tell myself, will improve exponentially when it’s done. I’ll be able to get up in the early morning and sip coffee by the window while reading the news, workout and run before noon, taking the rest of the day to do any number of unproductive tasks I see fit… whenever the paper’s done.

I can’t mentally dismiss assigned academic work, as some apparently can, and blissfully watch movies or hang out. Whether it’s a lengthy paper or impending exam, it sticks in the back of my mind and follows me around constantly announcing its presence like the kid-sister that insisted upon torturing you throughout your childhood. Required work and tasks that must be done occupy my mind, at least on some subterranean level, and lead me to assume that I would be much happier if those things weren’t there.

Life generally strikes me in a similar way. I barely make enough to sustain my frugal lifestyle and wish that I had more leisure time to pursue my interests independent of work and school. I’ve been pegging October as the period when these dreams would be actualized but now with the unrelenting business of my schedule it may not be until December. There’s so much which has to be done which gets in the way of the friends with whom I’d like to hang out, the books I’d like to read, and the time when I’d like to relax, etc., that I long for the day when those obligations and necessities aren’t there. I’m beginning to suspect that this will be how life always falls, unless I turn to monasticism, which would probably eliminate a lot of those extracurricular activities I miss.

Hopefully the future involves financial stability without requiring all of those painstaking hours of weekly slave labor as a teenage maid. However, I wonder if I'm naively concluding that satisfaction is contingent upon situational factors rather than a personal choice to make the most of what one has. What if there are always things which we wish weren't part of our lives... does this necessitate discontentment? I'm leaning towards no.

Self-Improvement

"I think, therefore I am," Descartes claimed, summarizing in one simple, five-word sentence the very essence of Rationalism. But Descartes didn't realize how close he was to penning an equally insightful quip, one that is the beginning point of all self-improvement programs: "I am, therefore I stink." The wise Proverbs claim that fear is the beginning of wisdom, but I say that it is rather a well-working nose that is not afraid to report the truth that its owner is foul.

It isn't as if I am on to something new. Indeed, Freud likened psychoanalysis to catharsis. Have you ever looked up the word catharsis? It means to have a bowel movement. In that case, we might modify our self-improvement quip to be "I am in therapy; therefore I stink," in which case "stink" changes from being an adjective (a quality that is descriptive of our being) to a verb (an action that we impel upon others). To clarify this ambiguity, I propose adding "up," so that our proverb reads "I am; therefore I stink up."

So, we agree then that the process of self-improvement not only begins with our stinking, but in our producing stench. This is a good starting point because a person who believes him or herself to be of good essence must also believe he or she has a good essence, when in reality any "good" essence is only a veneer, a bait and switch as it were. And there is nothing worse than being one of those people who stinks though everyone around that person is afraid to say something because, as if the person is freely whiffing the "essence" of self, he or she has the nose stuck straight up in the air. I believe this is why the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous came up with the Twelve Steps and agreed to get together in meetings where members state, "I am Frank and I'm an Alcoholic." When we begin the process of admitting our lack of control over our addiction, affliction, or stench, it isn't far down the road that we recognize our need for a higher power. Indeed, "I am Frank, and I stink. God help me."

When the ancients equated the soul of man to his breath, they were close to finding the truths we are discovering ourselves. A woman who has eaten garlic takes aims to cover her sin with a mint before talking with others, because one's breath is in one's soul, and if your breath stinks, you stink. It is curious to me that the ancients dismissed the relevance of flatulence, another wind (pneuma) that proceeds from within. But flatulence always stinks and there is nothing you can do to cover it. Unlike breath, which can be freshened, flatulence is suppressed until you are in private, thus continuing the facade that you do not stink, when in fact you do - profusely. In that sense, we ought to equate the soul with flatulence because, like flatulence, everybody has a soul that stinks and we try to hide its reality from others. I am, I have a soul, and therefore I stink. "Can you smell that?" A certain infamous family member from my childhood would ask after emitting flatulance. He, I declare, was an honest man. He was not afraid to bear his soul, and he lived a long and happy life, never married, knew his limitations, and left a legacy of health and joy.

I am, therefore I stink. Stench is the beginning of wisdom. Remember this acumen and you are on the path to health, of knowing that it all begins with an honest appraisal and a bold step forward to confidently go where most humans will not admit they have been.

The Attack on Classic Literature

As someone who aspires to become an English teacher, I sometimes find myself debating inwardly on what exactly I would have my students read. Scores of educational theorists and our good friend common sense tell us that the best way to get kids to learn is to present them with something interesting, something relevant to their daily lives.

Unfortunately, many students are turned off by the classic examples of Western Literature. They deride Dickens, hate Homer, and shun Shakespeare. And honestly, I can't blame them. Even though I devour that sort of thing, I freely admit that I am obviously in the minority; I know of no other classmate who toted an unabridged version of The Iliad to middle school.

The problem is actually a relatively easy one to diagnose. A lot of it, not surprisingly, stems from the language used in such titles. Although everything on an American high school reading list is in English (either originally or via translation), not all of it is what students today recognize as modern English. That seemingly small barrier quickly leads to disapproval, as many students, even those in honors and AP classes, find it difficult to identify with the characters and care about the story. Reading literature, after all, should never be work!

I've found that this is the idea behind the current trend in secondary education, the movement to find and employ literature that meets students halfway - well-written prose that still manages to be relevant to the average teenager's life and culture. Many of these works are written in the past few decades, and most deal with some easily-recognizable issue with which students can identify.

Does this mean that we should ignore the classics? Hardly! For one, those stories are called "classic" for a reason; that means they've withstood the scrutiny of countless generations. They also give us a window to the past, a chance to see what life was like in older societies.

The trick, then, is to find the link. There are certain universal issues and concerns that pervade every society, and it is the teacher's job to help students establish those themes. Hamlet, for instance, deals greatly with the themes of betrayal and depression, motifs that are certainly relevant to the average high-school student. I would know - I am one!

To me, teaching is an art. It may not always be easy, but it has certainly got to be rewarding, particularly when you accomplish something with your students that they never realized was possible. So don't shy away from those classics simply because the connections aren't always immediately obvious. After all, everyone benefits more when the teacher puts more effort into the lesson.

Ninja Strategery

I just had a stunning revelation. At first I thought myself stupid for not thinking of this earlier. But then I realized that I must be the first person to have thought of this, because obviously if someone else had it would already have happened.

The thought I had was this: Why isn't the Army using more ninjas? Just think about it: the Army is presently involved in a war that was scheduled to end several years ago, one that wasn't even originally billed as a war. They are apparently struggling with an insurgency and a nation in danger of destabilization. You see, Iraqis have a different definition of "greeting as liberators" than Americans do. In their culture this term means fire-bombing, flag burning, and rocket launching. This is merely a cultural difference, and one that our traditional Army may not be trained or equipped to handle.

But the problem does not lie with the U.S. soldiers in Iraq; in fact, they are very talented men and women who perform their jobs very well. I have watched quite a few documentaries on the Marines and the Navy SEALS (The Rock, The Marine, G.I. Jane) and they share many similar traits with ninjas. The one quality that our Marines and SEALS possess that a ninja does not, however, is sympathy. As the Iraqi insurgents place bombs under our soldiers' trucks, our men are taken aback by their sweet gestures. They think "Oh look, how thoughtful. He is greeting me as a liberator by killing my friends." And then instead of stopping the bomber by putting one swift bullet into his head, he merely takes him captive and tortures him. If ninjas were in Iraq, that son of bitch would have been dead before he woke up that morning.

Which then brings up another issue that would be cleared up if the Army relied soley on ninjas: torture. Ninjas don't torture. Perhaps they might if they had time, but unfortunately their victim was dead after the very first blow. In fact, by ninja standards, "torture" is when it takes two shots to kill a man instead of one.


Another benefit to adding ninjas to the U.S. Army is that the Draft would no longer be necessary. For a war like the one we are having in Iraq, you'd need like 5, maybe 6 ninjas at most. This would allow Cindy Sheehan to cool her jets and enjoy some much needed family time (at home).


Having ninjas as our only soldiers would also make the President's job significantly easier and less stressful. If the American people demanded to know what the troops were doing, the President could hold a press conference and the only reply he'd have to offer would be, "I don't have a clue as to what they're doing. They're ninjas, you know? They're very secretive. Hard to keep track of. They're strategery is beyond me!" And everyone would be like, "Oh, yeah... that's a good point."


In addition, ninjas are extremely effective nation builders. One night the people of Iraq would go to sleep, and the next morning they'd wake up, look out their windows (or bomb holes) and... DEMOCRACY!


Admittedly, I'm not exactly sure what it's going to take to round up the ninjas we are looking for. Maybe Chuck Norris has some sort of special Ninja whistle that only ninjas can hear. I don't know. All I'm saying is let's stop wasting our time looking for alternative fuels, and see if we can't find an alternative soldier.