Wednesday, March 14, 2012

My Top Five Reasons to Be Terrified of the Zoo

My senior picture (copies made upon request)
Afternoon Readers,

     It's not often we get out of the house, but, yesterday, the kids and I had the pleasure of visiting the zoo. I could go on and on about every little detail, but, instead, I'll go ahead and share the top five things I find truly terrifying every time I have the pleasure of visiting animals in their carefully-manufactured-almost-the-same-but-not-really-unless-monkeys-are-born-in-spare-tires environment.

Paige's Top 5 Reasons To Be Terrified of the Zoo
(as selected by Paige and a carefully chosen panel of Oreos)

 1.) The death march

Mothers are the veritable donkey of the zoo trip. I should know. Yesterday I walked all the way to Kenya and back.

The next time you're at the zoo, lock eyes with a woman lugging three kids in a rickshaw up a manufactured mountain, and try to tell me she wasn't praying for sweet sweet death to claim her as soon as she hits even ground.

*Fun Fact: Approximately fifty mothers die every year while pushing a stroller through the zoo. One-hundred-percent of the bodies are fed to gazelles with eating disorders.*

2.) They Want To Eat You

A lot of people really enjoy going to the zoo to watch animals point, spit, and pretend they don't want to break out of their plexi-glass and rip our faces off. The sad reality is that Bo Bo wants to maim you dead. He's not farting at you, those are declarations of war.

While trying to muscle my way through the crowd, I noticed parents pushing their young closer and closer to the glass. Great idea. Fill little Roddy with the idea that Polar bear wants to drink a Coke with him and not rip his face off.

He's not smiling at you, Roddy...he wants to rip your face off.

*Fun Fact: All Polar bears will eat you*

3.) Where For Art Thou Bathroom?

     There are no bathrooms in the Arctic, Africa, or the Rainforest. The best luck you can have is to pay a hippo to move over and forget it wants to eat you, while you try to burrow a hole in the mud, before anyone starts shouting, "Ooh, they're mating.. "

*Fun Fact: Those leaves you're cleaning yourself with are Poison Oak*

4.) Oh, you thought...

..that  Emu didn't want to rip your face off. It does. 
..and it picked your pocket when you were licking Dip n' Dots off your elbow.

5.) A Penny Saved

     So you've made it all the way through and back to the beginning of the Zoo. Great. Time for a snack. Wait, no it's not, because you paid that other kid to throw himself into the lemur ranch, so your kid would clearly see what a bad idea it was and forget the idea himself. That, and the bottled water and package of cotton candy shaped like a rhinoceros's horn is going to set you back a mortgage payment.

Time to sell one of the kids.

But which one?

Which would survive easiest in an African wilderness type setting?

You now starve and dehydrate all the way back to the car...but where did you park the car?

...right, it doesn't matter, because you have to go get your keys from the Emu, and you'll never make it back alive.

Until Next Time, Readers!