Complaint: Zoo Cynicism*

*Wouldn't that be a great name for a band?

Now that we live in a new part of the country, the inevitable has occurred: I tried to put it off for as long as possible, but it finally happened. We went to the zoo.

Not a big fan of zoos. Watching sad, overcrowded polar bears soaking in bathtubs is just, well, it's a downer, frankly.

Having recently converted to actually enjoying museums, I was hoping for a similar transformation at this new zoo in a new town.

Alas, it was not to be.

Why would you pay almost fifty bucks for your family to walk around looking for live animals, only to be constantly assaulted visually with hordes of plush ones in the souvenir stores that pop up every two hundred feet?

Is this why we go to the zoo? To buy a fake animal? I saw a few animals, yes, but that probably took up 10% of our time there. The rest of the time was spent walking around looking for animals and ending up dangerously near gift shops over and over and over.

Is this what it’s come to?

Oh, we did spend at least 35% of the time listening to my daughter say, “I wanna see the shark!” three thousand times. Since there is a small aquarium attached to the zoo, this wasn’t as outlandish a request as it might seem at first.

But what did we do when we saw the shark? We took pictures. Every single grown up I saw was taking a picture of the shark, or their kid looking at the shark, or their kid ignoring the shark. I’m guilty of it, too.

Are we living our lives or are we just gathering data for later? And what’s later? Are we going to look at all the videos and photos we took of the top of our kids’ heads and the butt of a bored shark and think about the fact that we were just at the zoo? WHILE we were at the zoo, we weren’t thinking about the zoo. "Hey, remember an hour ago, when we were at the zoo> Let's watch."

Talk about mindless. There is nothing mindful about videotaping a shark while your kid whines for juice and you wish you were somewhere else. And anyway, how many YouTube videos of shark parts does the world need? How much of life is now recorded and posted online?

Which brings to mind a Simpsons quote (doesn’t everything?). Homer is bored and wants to travel. He says something to Marge along the lines of, “I want to explore the world and try new food. I want to have hoagies, subs, heroes. I want to live Marge, why won’t you let me live?”

Homer's got a point. Maybe we shouldn’t take so many pictures of our life and actually try living it instead.