The monkeys, oy, the monkeys…
Let’s talk Monkey Parliament.
Monkey Parliament, you say? Yep. You heard me.
You may know the tiny little trigger that prevents all the rude thoughts in your head as “tact” or some other sensible word, but at my house, it’s known as the Monkey Parliament. My husband’s Monkey Parliament is under especially good rule as of late. If I ask him to determine something inane, like whether I should wear the black slingbacks or the black Mary Janes, I’m sure his initial impulse is to say something along the lines of “What in the SAM HILL are slingbacks and I why should I give a rat’s hairy ass what shoes you wear as long as you didn’t spend enough on them to empty our checking account,” but he manages kindness in the face of inanity instead. I can almost see the wheels turning (the monkeys are powdering their wigs and filing into their seats, each holding a sheaf of crumpled papers…the monkeys each get an opportunity to speak and debate the answer to the all-important silly wife question and eventually, the Parliament puts the issue at hand to a vote).
Sometimes the Monkey Parliament is perfectly calibrated, with either good coffee or good whiskey, or now that we have a wily, chatty toddler, a good nap, and comes up with diverse and hilarious topics of conversation all on its own. My husband refuses to take credit for these topics himself and bows in deference to the screaming monkeys (swiped, I suspect, from an episode of The Simpsons where viewers see that Homer’s thought process frequently consists of monkeys grooming each other by picking bugs off their friends and eating said bugs). The monkeys are always in rare form on family roadtrips, but that could be a combination of sheer boredom and the captive audience.
By the way, the slingbacks win every time. The shoe topic is much safer than the “does this make me look fat” topic.