Her Majesty

I wonder if anyone other than me ever feels a little bit like they're living in a zoo. Specifically with the chimps and orangutans. Where there is poo flinging and banana eating. Sometimes I feel like I am Queen of the Monkeys, the alpha female that keeps the monkey business wrangled in to a certain level of acceptability.

That's how it feels today – like I'm holding it all together by a very thin thread. And it's not a tough kind of string. Not at all like that wire used for deep sea fishing. No, my thread is the cheap stuff from the sale bin at Wal-Mart that you don't realize is dry rotted until after you get home. But you don't return sale-thread because it only cost 25 cents. My god, Gas is $3.50 a gallon! It wouldn't make fiscal sense. So you cut your losses and forget about it. You shove it in a drawer or toss it into a basket or something and let it go. I don't know why you don't just throw it away. Maybe because it feels wrong to put something you just purchased into the garbage can. But – of course! – you don't do the LOGICAL thing and toss it.

You keep it in a junk drawer for months. Until one day you think: I'll sew the button back on your favorite black pants. You never remember that day you brought the thread home, tried to use it and discovered its weakness. No, you smile and sew the button on and go on with your day just fine. Until after lunch at the point of the day that your belly is expanding to it's maximum capacity and then as you sit down to your first meeting of the afternoon IT HAPPENS. The rotted thread gives way to the pressure and the button shoots across the conference table like a rocket and hits your boss right between the eyes.

And your pants? Are attempting to fall to your ankles. So you beg a safety pin off a coworker and walk to the bathroom holding the zipper closed so the entire office doesn't see your junk. And then? Then you are sitting in the bathroom, fixing your pants, in near tears over your own fatness. That's when you remember: It’s the Wal-Mart thread that was on sale! It is at this point you are so mad you curse the grave of Sam Walton himself and vow to never purchase another item from Satan's chain store.

But do you go home and throw that thread away? No. No, you don't. You thank god for safety pin and the crisis that has been averted. You go back to your meetings and back to the work until you're too tired to hold your head up. Thread is the last thing you're worrying about at 5 o'clock when you get in the car and head home. So it completely slips your mind. The next thing you know six months or so have passed and you have decided you need to fix a tear in a skirt. And you even think about the trauma that thread has already caused… Until you are surrounded by coworkers and squatting to get into a low-riding car. That's when you hear the sound: Riiiiiip! And then you remember the entire sage. After it's too late.

You know what's trouble with being Queen of the Monkeys? You might be wearing a crown, but in the end, you're still a primate.