how ya like me now?

Leigh, you are the inspiration for this with a facebook status that proclaimed you found the Kia lifesize sock monkey "kinda hot."

(shuddering)

Really?

This thing creeps the bejeebers out of me.

There are just some things that need to stay miniature and sock monkeys are one of those things.

I had a sock monkey like every other little girl in the 70s when they were mass produced and love it until the poor thing's seams were popping all over the place.

I have sock monkey slippers I was wearing just this morning.


I have a sock monkey ornament for my Christmas tree that I couldn't bear to pack away and hung him up at my cubicle at the office.

I am not sock monkey averse, clearly.

I even have, albeit a bit reluctantly, sock monkey footie pajamas, thanks to Bob taking me seriously when I pointed them out before Christmas.


Now it will become a tradition that I wear these things every Christmas morning.(Side note: you know why footie pajamas are most popular with the under 2 crowd? Because they don't have to worry about going to the bathroom. When you're wearing fleece pjs, odds are, it's cold. You really do not want to have to completely strip just to pee. Just sayin'.)

I digress.


There are even a lot of kinda cute/kinda bizarre sock monkey merchandise that I can smile at.


And some I will just admit are slightly weird, but still fun.


Ok, just weird...


But Kia has taken this thing too far. A sock monkey the size of a man out partying and getting tattooed after a night on the town = creep factor of 20.


I've tried to figure out why this thing is so nightmarish, compared to life-size mice we regularly visit at Disney World and I think it's a combination of that giant blood red smile and those button eyes. Small little button eyes still remind of me Coraline, but I can deal. Buttons the size of my head are a different matter.

And structurally, the miniature lends itself to the static, like dollhouses and stuffed animals, things we can rearrange and enjoy imagining coming to life because, even if they did, they are small enough to control. Plenty of folks have played with against idea, from Jonathon Swift on forward, but it was an idea to play with because the norm was to think this way. You dress up little things and carry them around and love on them because their smallness lets you. Making this sock monkey man-size crosses that barrier.

. . .the world of childhood, limited in physical scope yet fantastic in its content, presents in some ways a miniature and fictive chapter in each life history. . . We imagine childhood as if it were at the other end of a tunnel -- distance, diminutive, and clearly framed. (44) The toy opens an interior world, lending itself to fantasy and privacy in a way that the abstract space, the playground, of social play does not. (56) (from Susan Stewart's On Longing)

Maybe this is why the giant sock monkey on the loose creeps me out so badly. Why I don't feel the same way about any of the other toys in the Kia ad must have a lot to do with not having held them or loved them as a child.

The next step with to have him Godzilla sized.

At that point, just commit me.