Porch Monkeys!

The day I went for a hike with some of my dorm mates to NACP, Ryan and I went a bit ahead of our companions while digging up and forming if not recalling stories of any topic under the sun. Finally, our conversation crossed the monkey world but avoided the issues of a monkey as either a man's look alike or what science claims as where man evolved from. (What is the difference of a monkey and an ape?) Instead our stories revolved around a different corner of the monkey world.

This conversation brought me back to the days when I was about 4 or 5 years old when I can remember myself always nagging my mother to repeat a monkey story that I earlier heard from her. It may had always been a boring time for her to tell the whole story over and over while I enjoyed listening to it! It was about a turtle and a monkey who finally decided to divide a banana plant into two so each one can plant and take care of his own. By ruling his power, the monkey chose and grabbed the half of the banana with the leaves intact because he thought that it would grow faster for sure than the other half which was just a stalk without any leaves! It had no leaves but it had roots intact which was left for the turtle to plant.

Ryan and I reached a place further uphill where we spotted a horse and a couple with two kids sitting down for a rest beside the road. He said that we are approaching some "porch monkeys." "What? Porch monkeys?," I repeated quizically. I accept I am so poor in vocabulary and to add to this it was really my first time to hear the phrase. He explained that monkeys are also called as such because it is one of their characteristics to sit down (on their porch) and stare to passers-by. "Why is it that monkeys are accused of this manner? Don't human beings also do it?", I kinda asked him. "What if we also get tired an hour later and take a rest by sitting down beside this road and if someone passes by, will we not also look at him?" (As I was typing this blogstory I just don't know why I immediately used the word look and not stare. I immediately felt indifferent when I was about to type the word stare, of me as one of those being described. This means then that I don't accept that I'm like a monkey and that I didn't come from the monkey because I don't possess the characteristic... lol!) People I know all over the world whatever race they maybe have this typical activity tough. During an idle part of the day it is always refreshing to stay on the porch of the house with any of the family member, visitor or anyone from the neighborhood for a chat. And if the house happens to be beside a road then these people having a chat on the porch cannot avoid to look at those passers-by. This is why the phrase "porch monkey" had to grope its way to Ryan's vocabulary.

Then I recalled my first days at the residence hall where I now stay. Some of the older residents used to gather on the benches in front of it just to let time pass by especially during blackouts. "I may had been one of the topics when I happened to pass by these people before because I was a new face by then! I should have called them porch monkeys have I heard of it and you were one of them," I told Ryan.

Then I remembered my friend who always mused about the word busy, so that I always got careful in using it. He said that there's an opposite meaning of the word. "It is what monkeys do everyday!" he always laughingly told me before. Again the real monkeys are accused without their knowledge of it at all! Monkeys are compared to individuals who say that they are so busy even if they are just sitting down and chatting making noise and even hop from one workplace to another but at the end of the day nothing new is accomplished! If not, a work was done but an an illegal one! It is well known that this was how the famous "monkey business" was coined and had even harbored numerous stories.

Poor monkeys who are always the center of man's foolishness and stupid stories! But are they really the ones stupid? Obviously their "world" is not the human world! Monkeys cannot only think and talk rationally like humans so that they cannot write to tell their stories about their despiser's, cannot post on blogs, cannot send messages in YM's, e-mails and friendsters...! lol!