Small furry things

I am, as many of us are, a girl. Therefore, I am not immune to the tuggings of baby animals at my heartstrings. (This may be faulty gender profiling. Guilty as charged.) You have to check out at least slides 5-7 of this slideshow of the langur. Yes, that’s right, I said LANGUR. It’s an animal, I swear.

I want one. Having read the accompanying article, I know this is exactly the opposite of what I am supposed to think, but here’s my defense. When I say, “I want one,” I mean it in the same way as I mean it when I say that I hate Gwyneth Paltrow. I don’t really mean that I’ve met Gwyneth and have found her to be personally repellant and morally objectionable. I mean I don’t want to meet her because I don’t like her category (privileged, over-rewarded for middling work) and it would be confusing for me to like someone personally whose work I don’t respect and whose personal life I resent for no good reason besides that I am not yet sufficiently evolved to enjoy other people’s unearned success just because it means nice things for them. (I’m working on this. I really am.) So when I say, “I want one,” I don’t mean I would actually like to have a monkey and its tail and droppings in my apartment, I mean, “Oh my God, that’s adorable, I’m glad it exists and I’ve seen it and how excited must its mom be that it’s that cute?”