On the Origin of Monkey Fever

I realize that there has been a real dearth of Book Monkey related material here at CoIM, for which I apologize. Part of this is probably just because the Book Monkeys have been the least diligent checkers of the blog (Fellow Book Monkey and Blogger Bubblegum Tate notwithstanding), and so I don't feel as compelled to write about them; without their constant feedback, their stories aren't popping into my head as easily as those of the frequently commentating Parkerites and Singles are. Which is to bad, since in some waysthey're the ones most responsible for CoIM.


A few weeks ago after the All-Singles Christmas party, a few of us went to Starbucks to hang out. Cap'ns Cluck and Disaster were trying to convince The Nickless One that she should try out CoIM. While attempting to explain the Cast List, one of them made a comment that they still weren't sure where the name "Book Monkeys" came from. This made me realize that I probably didn't give a clear enough explanation of where exactly the whole monkey thing started in the first place; it all rests squarely on the shoulders of Rebel Monkey and Bunny.

Now, between the two, Rebel Monkey is the major monkey maniac. However, I most closely associate the group name with Bunny; I can remember her going off on a tangent one day, saying that we staff members treated the students like they were trained monkeys, sending them out to fetch books from the shelves. "Go, book monkeys, scale the shelves!" Pretty entertaining little speech, and it stuck with me. But this was not the only monkeyshines going on in ILS. The walls of the office were decorated with all sorts of random things that the students had created; one that couldn't help but catch the eye was a copy of a magazine cover featuring the Spice Girls, whose heads had all been replaced by pictures of monkeys, with the words "Spice Monkeys" spelled out above them.

Over the years, the monkey has remained a large part of Rebel Monkey's life; when she set up a message board for some of us, she went through several names for it, one of which was "Island of the Book Monkeys." It was while we were frequenting this board that Rebel Monkey gave me fiction writing challenge to me, wherein I would have to turn a series of random words into a comic book. I decided I would do the challenge in the form of a comic book solicitation, and created a comic book company name which I thought would fit well with the whole Book Monkeys idea: Infinite Monkeys Press. I even created a logo and posted it.

When it came time for me to create a web page for my Website Development class, I decided to have fun with it and devote it to IMP; after sending the finished project out to many people, I started getting all sorts of monkey stuff (for my 30th b-day my co-workers decorated my cubicle with 30 monkey cut-outs, bananas, and various monkey-related quotes). When I decided to start a blog, it only seemed fitting to continue the monkey theme, which insured that I would get even more monkeys given to me over the following months; I've gotten at least 5 for graduation gifts alone (more if you want to count each monkey in my Barrel of Monkeys individually).

So, now, here I am, endlessly inundated with monkeys, when it's really Rebel Monkey with the monkey fixation. Which is fine; there are worse things I could be receiving, I suppose.