Lesson #5 Animals are weird....but so are we

One of my earliest childhood memories is a trip I must have taken to a zoo. I remember riding on some sort of double-decker tour bus and I distinctly remember feeling the wind in my hair. The bus stopped in front of the gorilla exhibit and the tour guide started to tell us about the gorillas. One gorilla, who was clearly the head honcho, had mostly gray hair. He was running back and forth in his cage. He wanted us to know he was pretty awesome. I think gorilla for awesome is running back in forth in your cage. Either way he was definitely strutting his stuff. Suddenly he stopped running and he cocked his head to the side as if he was listening to the tour guide. He then put his hand to his butt and proceeded to defecate in his hand. Its what memories are made of people. Gorillas, feces, you know, the good stuff. So Gramps the gorilla then takes said handful and starts to smell it, and then, wait for it......wait for it........takes a bite. I remember feeling so confused and baffled. What in the sam hell was this dude doing? Gramps's grand finale was to hurl said handful at the tour bus. Pretty sure that wasn't in the brochure but maybe I didn't read the back. I learned pretty clearly that day that animals can be really weird. I mean really weird. Over the years I have learned that people can be weirder. The thing is we are all weird. I am not saying we are all secretly shit slingers, pardon my French, but that really no one is immune from being human. We are all weird. It's true, some weirder than others, but weird none the less. I spent a lot of my teen and adults years thinking that I was the only one who was weird and that most people were normal. I thought for a very long time that people were effortlessly put together and as nice as pie first thing in the morning. For a time I struggled with feeling like a failure because I wasn't like everyone else. I didn't have shiny hair, I didn't look cute first thing in the morning, I would forget to floss, I looked retarded in skinny jeans, I didn't get jazz, and the list could just go on and on. Accepting that we all are human and therefore imperfect was a hard lesson for me to learn and one I am still learning. So every time you start to beat yourself up about being weird just remind yourself that as long as your not hurling human waste there are other beings in this world weirder than you, in fact being weird is probably more normal than you think!