My Terrific and Terrible Day.

After five hours of sleep, I woke to the sound of my fish tank filter running too loudly and it set off an alarm in my head. After five and a half years of raising my cichlids, I knew what every sound meant. This one meant the water was much lower than when I went to sleep. 

I shot up out of bed and grabbed for the draping below the stand, immediately feeling the wetness, hearing the drip in the buckets below.

The tank was leaking.

After hitting my light switch, I searched the sides and top to see they were dry,  placing buckets under the drips. Because I'm not a total dipshit, I didn't look under the tank. If there was a crack, the glass could burst into my head. Instead, I switched the overhead light of the tank on and pushed aside the gravel to look for cracks. None. So the problem was the middle seal.

I tried to keep the fish in the tank for as long as I could, taking out the rocks and decorations. Around 8 AM, I had to remove the fish into the biggest bucket I had and monitor the temperature. The fish store didn't open until noon and I would be at work, covering for my sister who is recovering from one of many surgeries that saved her finger after a cottonmouth bite. She agreed to check on them and call the fish store.

They were dead before it even opened.

Cichlids, as I've learned over the years, can easily die from shock and stress. Even for a few short hours, they couldn't handle the departure of their tank. I was able to save the algae eater and I gave him to Aquatics and Exotics. He'll have a great life with them or wherever home he goes to.

I'm upset, of course, but after six hours of bailing 55 gallons of water down a flight of stairs one two-gallon bucket at a time, I had to go to work.

It was busy and nonstop but I was more confident. One man stopped me to show me a picture of his adorable grandson and tell me the story of how he was able to get a signed basketball for the boy, who loves basketball. I wasn't aware of how an apron makes some people open up to you like an old friend, but I better understand why they say it's a job that feeds writers. People sometimes see you running ragged and use their grace as a customer to give you an excuse to take a break. Now, the shitheads also use this to hold you hostage but I haven't dealt with anyone that bad yet.

After work put me to the grindstone, I stepped outside to a beautiful sunny day. I laughed and talked with my cousin and aunt, knowing I had music to face at home. I took the bucket of dead fish and emptied them behind the shed, gave them back to the earth. It seemed a more glorious end than a garbage bag in the trash or a trip down the toilet. I cleaned out the filter and scooped the gravel into buckets. A friend of my sister is taking the tank and stand. The rest of it I'm giving to friends. Selling off that which remains seemed too cheap so I only asked them to pay what they would or could. 

I also received about $65 in gift cards doing surveys over the past few months. I met my goal for getting that digital display drawing tablet. So among hard work, heartache and the people who bring joy into my life, what could have been a terrible day was still a victory.

I've loved and lost and still received. I've given of myself and it wasn't one-sided. 

I'll miss my fish. That will hit harder when I'm not so numbingly tired. Pinkie was my six year old fatty and I know I did all I could for them. I knew the hobby was getting too expensive for me and I would have liked to re-home them. Life has other ideas. Death has a few more.

I'm glad I work tomorrow because I truly need to keep moving through the sadness. Those fish got me through tough times. I didn't know I was ready to say goodbye to them until I had no choice. They gave me so much as a writer and an artist.

My fish mama days are over. I won't be getting fish again unless I have more room, more equipment, more preparation. It's a lot of work, a lot of stress when they're unwell, a lot of money. I adored them but I won't take on that kind of responsibility without being prepared for everything. 

It's why I never wanted children. I love them and they love me, but my body, mind and resources mean that I would not subject a life to being an accident. I stepped up for my nephews and became a parent and it only made me more sure that you can't love or reproduce or step up to be a parent half-heartedly. Life deserves better. 

I won't beat myself up about my fish. I know I did all I could with what I had in that moment. I don't play woulda coulda shoulda. I was great at caring for them. It wasn't enough. It's time to move on without them.

Fish Shtick

At one time, I might have said that I'm just talking out loud. Now, I can say for certain that I actually talk to my pets. Not in the way you would with someone who might converse WITH you in return, but I raised human children. Boys especially have the tendency to delay speech even when you suspect they understand damn well what you're saying. In the same way, I believe creatures that spend enough time around you start to learn what you're communicating in some degree just as you are.

Don't eat each other? I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that.

I'm sure there are arguments for their level of intelligence or retention or position on the food chain, but there are some parts of interactions with sentient creatures that doesn't fall under mere coincidence. It's not the same as fanaticism or fervor-- I've said before that while there are distinctions between being a critter mom and mother to your own spawn, there are certain convictions where it's not important if they are real or imagined as long as they are beneficial and the connection is genuine enough to have a real impact.

Many times, I've been told my fish would make a great subject for my comics. It would be hard to express the level of passion I get into when I'm lovingly talking about my 'jerks', but whatever it is, it's clear that the way I observe their behaviors does ignite my imagination. It's a mini soap opera in there sometimes. The big pink jerk and dominant male, PinkiePie, tends to be everyone's favorite (and I can't say I don't share that sentiment). He patrols around with the fish version of a strut or he blubs around, sort of lazy in his insistence on claiming two of the rocks (yet benevolent enough to let another fish occupy the one he isn't claiming). He watches me more than the others and likely wonders if I'm a threat to his dominance. He's also vain and insatiably curious. If I'm taking pictures or videos, he follows the camera almost ruthlessly. He hates how I arrange the tank, but his own ideas seem more borne of spite than actually improving things. He's smart though, so if I want him to stop trenching under big rocks, I have to block his efforts with smaller rocks. He's gotten stuck in rocks that I've warned him he's too big for. I can almost see the defiant glint in his eye when he looks at me and does it anyway.

I don't have a feeding schedule for them, but they seem to know why I'm coming near their tank based on their behavior. If I'm coming over to look closer, they wiggle around mid-level and gravitate towards my face or hands. If I'm feeding them flakes, they start to agitate the water before I even lift the lid. If I'm about to feed them pellets, they know they sink so they wiggle near the surface (sometimes splashing because who has time to wait?). Whatever you want to call it, they observe and learn. Even if I throw in an exception, they are pretty quick to solving the new problem. When I started feeding the brine shrimp in freeze dried cubes, one of them learned that sticking it under the water coming out of the filter broke it up. He was like a dolphin pushing a ball around, immediately repeating the behavior that led to the reward.

And yes, they do ridiculously stupid things, but that has little to do with brain capacity. They tend to do stupid things for the same reasons humans do: Attitude, lack of forethought, forgetfulness, ignorance. We're all creatures limited by our circumstances. One of my earliest posts has a concept I've always loved in terms of measuring intelligence (and it doesn't matter who said it because chances are, it's been said many ways by many people)-- if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it's stupid.

If he can do it, why can't you?

In a literal sense, it's laughable. Fish don't suffer from crises of conscience, at least not in any observable sense. I've seen what might be regret (getting stuck in a rock) or even mourning (when my big pink jerk lost his breeding mate-- he's never bonded to a female fish again and looked for her for days, but didn't eat). Inferiority is non-existent in cichlids, even to the point of blatant stupidity. They're proud to the point of causing stress to themselves for not backing down or not hiding from an aggressor. 

"I'm gonna kick your butt."

I know, I know-- not the point of the quote, clearly, but as much as I love the quote for simplistically relating that intelligence has layers, it doesn't do the nature of fish any favors. Not all fish are created equal after all. Most species of fish although ranging from dull to beautiful are also somewhat boring in nature, so my own experience with fish is still limited to cichlids, but I can vouch for them. If I put a tree in their tank, they'd uproot it. In fact, I suspect their nature is to get rid of anything that isn't weighed down. They dig up and push around the fake plants and rocks and gravel and one time they even figured out they can scare the crap out of me by pushing the airstone into a rock or log and float it (I make sure the tube can't stretch that far anymore). You could make the argument that it wasn't deliberate, but I pretend like I'm not watching and see that they wait until they think I'm not looking to do something they know I don't like them doing.

You could be delicious, so keep it up and I'll find out.

Haaaaa, as much as I observe, it really sounds like I do nothing but study fish all day, but women-- we are the ultimate multi-taskers and this is an activity that actually aligns with writing, designing, computer work. In fact, you can say my productivity even increased despite their 'distraction'.

Affinity isn't an easy thing to explain. I love the little bastards. I talk to the little bastards because there's some gratification in the response to the stimuli. Sometimes they seem to understand and obey, other times they seem to deliberately disobey. It doesn't really matter which it is. Like faith and fantasy, not every aspect of it needs logic. They do like when I talk to them. They do get extremely interested when I dance around or exercise. They even seem to enjoy mimicking me when they can. It's symbiotic and beneficial and a sounding board that works. 

Often, writers don't always need input. Sometimes it's just nice to have a sentient being to throw things at. It's kind of nice when that being doesn't actually have the capacity to give advice even. Sometimes we just need unblinking encouragement. Or judgement.

Probably judgement.

Needs more work.

Fish Parenting: Why People Say Pets are Like Children

Aside from notions of species superiority, there are undeniably parallels in being parent to a human being and parent to some creature that depends on you in some way. I can say this because I've been both. I've raised my nephews through most of their lives, from infant to middle schoolers. I've changed diapers, dried tears, taught life lessons, loved to the point it aches.

Before working at Petco, I didn't think much of fish. I had fallen in love with a betta fish when I was a child, crimson bodied, prismatic fins, completely non-aggressive. Be careful-- he'll fight other fish. Except he didn't. Claude made friends with all the fish we put him with. When he met his end because my brother decided to add craw-dads (crawfish to everyone else), it broke my heart, but I never thought much of them after. 

I cleaned fish tanks at work; mostly because everyone else hated doing it, but I found it incredibly calming. We'd get new fish all the time, but it was the cichlids that intrigued me. All the other fish-- tropical flakes. For cichlids, I was told they liked the pellets. While caring for them, I noticed we had one little yellow guy in the bunch (an electric yellow labido) and he wasn't getting sold. He grew bigger little by little and often was the one starting a 'dance' with the other cichlids, a ridiculous up and down flitter along the edge. It made me laugh.

When I went home, I looked things up. Starting a tank, what to get, what they ate. Wasn't planning on getting any fish, but I did want to know more about them. Maybe subconsciously I was preparing to be a fish parent. And then I decided it would happen.

It wasn't the goldfish you get at a fair. I started nesting, so to speak. I shopped for a stand, a filter, a heater, decorations, gravel, a gravel vacuum, food. I set each thing up as I got it, but I was waiting for the large tank sale. However, I couldn't wait because I grew attached to the yellow one and I didn't want him sold. So I bought a little ten gallon set and took it home to set up. I'll admit, I didn't do it 'right'. I conditioned the water but didn't stumble on the nitrogen cycle information. Luckily, cichlids are hardy enough that they survived my beginner's duh. I didn't just get the yellow one, but a lively blue mbuna too.

I set up the large tank properly-- seeding the tank with bacteria to start the cycle off of rocks in their current tank, testing the water until the levels were perfect. Holy crap, the little guys were terrified by the transfer. Perhaps instinctively, they must've thought bigger tank meant they were primed to be food for a predator. They swam cautiously until they began to revel in a world 5.5x what they were used to.

Every little problem was a panic. I would cruise over the equivalent of FishMD pages for every little thing out of the ordinary-- tumors? Bloat? Parasites? Aggression? What the hell did I get myself into? And then they started breeding! It was one of those moments were I actually relaxed-- cichlids don't breed unless you're taking great care of them. But holy hell, how do I take care of the babies? Luckily, nature builds that duty into them the way they were meant to. They worried, they grew, they learned on the fly just like we do. Okay, they also eat the ones they can catch, but fish do cull the population to keep their species healthy. (Oddly enough, they were almost 'reserved' about that part-- I never once saw them eat their young, but you'd notice when the numbers dropped.)

Flashing-- that was another wild card in fish behavior. Most pages worry you with concerns of parasites or aggression or an illness. It's where they quiver or rub along things like a cat. Crap, mine do it all the time! It took a while to observe that this was also a cichlid thing. My dominant especially likes to flash when he's annoyed, angry, even happy and, like any parent, it was an emotional cue and I could tell the difference between them in the subtleties. It's those things you start to fall in love with. You start to know their faces, the way that only they use them, the things they try to tell you when they can't speak. They're sweet and mean and wise and reckless. They watch me too. I'll never figure out what could possibly interest them about me most of the time, but they do little dances when I talk to them, get jealous of whichever ones I'm speaking to and try to cut in front to absorb my affection.

Okay, maybe their deaths aren't as devastating or long lasting in our grieving. Then again, maybe they are. I'm not saying it's a matter of ranking, but with fish, I accept their short-lived nature. It hurts when I do form an attachment. When my dog and cat died, I mourned for months, just like I've done with people I loved, but fish are very different. How, it's harder to say. I worry about them but there's a sort of knowledge about their unpredictable health I've come to prepare for. With our own kind, we tend to develop longer lasting attachments or instant dislikes. 

Love and hate don't feel quite the same, although the intensity can. There are so many different kinds of love that a 'different' love often doesn't have a vocabulary we can make another understand. I always laugh when I hear parents of human children protest with unshakeable arrogance that you don't know 'love' until you've had a human child. They are willing to forget that there are parents who never connect to their children so strongly if at all. There are parents who adopt with not a speck of blood shared between them and love that child as their own. Not all of us need to have people that share our face to feel a real and meaningful connection. Many people even connect more strongly to other species than their own, either through trauma or experience. I could say that you don't know love until it is a choice and you make the choice again and again. It's not about being unconditional or expected or accepted. Love, even short-lived, leaves its mark on how we grow and learn to receive and give it. People will even try to attach conditions on what someone else considers unconditional love, but in truth, we just don't get to define it for anyone but ourselves. My mom and dad, the most incompatible people to outsiders and even people close to them. They fought like children but came together like soulmates even after divorce and drama. It wasn't storybook romance and it wasn't constantly evident, but it existed-- without simplification or reason.

Now my nephews. I knew I was bound to them from the time they were born and it was the stupidest thing I could do to myself. I knew they would be used against me and that I would never have the legal right to decide for them as a legal parent or guardian does. I knew it would be turmoil, sometimes absolute hell, that as much as I loved them, there would be days I didn't like them at all. I knew I had no business being a parent, that I didn't want to risk either passing on my demons nor bringing kids into a world I couldn't vouch for. I didn't choose to love my nephews either, but it happened. Against all reason, against all intentions, I had already felt they were mine. Feelings don't equal the absolute reality, so for years, I couldn't trust like that a regular parent does. 

I have my father to thank for giving both me and them the security to give them that chance. He told me under no uncertain conditions that he would not let them get taken from our secure situation on the whim of their parents. It was hard to get them to trust that I wouldn't leave them or let them get taken away, hard to even step aside so they could bond to their grandpa as they had come to rely on me. I had to build a bridge and help them meet in the middle. My nephews were socially haunted and it took a lot of nurturing to help them build confidence in the validity of their emotions. They want for nothing, but they aren't spoiled either. They understand responsibility and trust. These aren't things that came overnight. It was a battle for all of us, not a fairy tale of starting a family.

Of course, people asked me when I would have 'kids of my own'. A socially acceptable question that really shouldn't be. Another thing I had to laugh about. They ARE my kids. I have no desire to start from square one with 'my own'. They're not 'practice kids' or any less than ones that I might pop out of my own body. Aw, it's such a shame; why is it always the people that would make great parents are never the ones that want them? My situation was something, not exactly tailored to me, but one I tailored into my existence. I can't say I sacrificed anything other than drug addiction or useless wandering. These kids were a wake-up call that made me into the person I am proud of now. I've had to adjust. I don't believe I would have handled 'my own' as well because I think sometimes the supposed guarantees give us room to take things for granted.

Parental affection isn't something universal. It's built on many, many blocks. Things like death or disappointment or consequences of life are not things we can gauge nor can we bear all the blame or understand all its intricacies. When a pet parent says they love their pet as much as you love your child, they do. We all know what our hearts filled to bursting feels like and it's not lesser based on your opinions of it. When people say it's just as hard, it is, because people lose sleep over it just the same as you. Or, as Bill Burr said, the stakes are higher with pets. Your kid bites me and they get time out; my dog bites you and it gets put down. Now, you could put everything on scales and play the 'my misery is worse than your misery' game, but why not just trust that people know what they're feeling. Hell, maybe they will have kids one day and join the 'you don't know love until you've had a child' group, but don't diminish a present claim like you're some fucking clairvoyant of their self-expression.

That being said, I'll break into another short topic: memoirs. I could easily fill a fat book with my stories now. In fact, my life might be incredibly dull in the next thirty years and have nothing more to contribute to it. However, I'm willing to bet that some things age better with time. No, my past won't change, but my impressions and understanding of it may. I often gather pieces of my journey along the way, look at how life made my view of things change. It's not that we can't write them when we're still young. It's just that the most captivating parts are how we come to grips with our hardships and triumphs, how they mapped out our lives. The longer you can wait, the more opportunity for depth and epiphanies you get. Also, sometimes you just want to see if you can outlive anyone who might take issue with it. I know that's morbid and we don't like to think about it, but a memoir is never just our story. There are sometimes casualties we never meant to drag through our truths.

Whatever you take away from this, sometimes you just have to trust your intuition and be okay with people not understanding the depth of your emotion. There will be people who only see the shiny bits you put on social media (or the gritty ones) and judge without really knowing where you're coming from. And that's okay. Sometimes we mean to say something simply and get interrogated when, no, we don't quite understand what we feel. Sometimes you just have to walk away, contemplate, try to develop the vocabulary and try again. Words will just never be able to convey it all. Try anyway.

Beyoncé Lives: The Fish Name Game is Strong

In case you haven't been following my ramblings, I found a single baby cichlid while cleaning one day and preemptively named them Beyoncé. As fish give zero shits about gendered names or my bullshit, I thought I may have jumped the gun with the 'survivor' joke since shortly after, said fish seemed to be gobbled up.

Wrong. So wrong. Little bastard popped up again after a couple of weeks MIA, a little bigger but a shy guy or I'd snap a picture for blog purposes.  So not at all like Beyoncé on the social aspect. Any time I try to take a picture, there are at least six curious fish that insist their anus makes the shot. Which makes the rest of them like Beyoncé because that booty sells. I could easily publish a fish butt book.

Today, Bowser, my biggest OB Peacock fish, has been spitting rocks at the glass. Been a while since I've had a builder but apparently him and one of my big blue mbunas has decided to start carving out terrority. Then don't actually fight, they just passive aggressively build gravel castles. Oh, you have one too? Yeah, mine has two entrances and a fake plastic plant that I use like a beaded curtain. Check and mate, bitch.

Fish are fun. I don't know why they warm my heart so much but their drama tickles me. Every living creature seems to take their little worlds so seriously. Cats are like that too. Cats mean business. It doesn't matter if they're flipping head first around the corner of a favorite rug or dutifully killing all your rogue plastic grocery bags. It's serious work. You should thank them, ungrateful human.

So I'll continue to track Beyoncé, maybe even give her/him a makeover worthy of Snapchat because I'm a weird mom. It's what I do and I mean business.

Seriously.

Finding Beyoncé: The Aquatic Inspiration

That heading sounds like a weird inside joke, but I'll let you in on it. I may have mentioned before but I raise African cichlids. My current tank has one electric yellow, 5 pink zebras, 6 blue zebras, 5 orange-black peacocks, and a plecostomus (not a cichlid-- the algae eater that cleans up after them, but he's twice the size of the biggest cichlid and not at all shy). Well, that was the count anyway. I saw one little fry (baby) cichlid while cleaning this morning. Just one. Cichlids do eat the young and it keeps my tank from becoming overcrowded, so it may be the only one. If it survives, I'm naming it Beyoncé. Most of my fish have no names. The algae eater is Hoover, the yellow one is Sparky (Buttercorn Zapdos-- but I made the mistake of letting the boys name it), the big pink male PinkiePie, Naranja (he's a pink, but he's more orange than pinkie), and the newest to be named is Bowser, one of the OB peacocks and only because he attacks my gravel vacuum every time I clean. They get names when I recognize them all up in my face.

Names... I've probably said this before but they are not my friend. Not because I don't think of good ones-- that part isn't hard. I am just not someone who either remembers them easily or even uses them unless I can't get your attention. Even though I like my name, I hate introducing myself because I almost always have to repeat it twice when people ask 'Kristen/Crystal/Kristy/Christine?'. Most of my stories never use a second/surname let alone more. UnNamed was actually written to make fun of myself for the nicknames I give people and characters if I can't remember their names. I don't ever give someone the same first name or even another similar to it, so there's no issue with distinctions. Most books make a big deal of the full name, only to rarely use it again. I think GRRM gave Daenerys so many titles just to make fun of that tendency in fantasy. There's no way he did that without laughing.

There's a point somewhere. Oh yeah, inspiration. My named fish often get the privilege of a name because of a distinct personality. I've had plenty of people tell me I should do short comics about them just based on the way I describe their antics. They have already inspired character arcs in more than one story so I guess you can say they're even helpful against writer's block to some extent. I definitely consider short comics, but I really ought to focus on the webcomic too, not just find a way to avoid that.

Ideas can be fleeting like that-- another reason not to put so much importance on just having ideas. Plenty of people have them. Where you utilize them is the trickiest part. Most writers keep notebooks or emails or digital notes or post-it's-- any number of the bits of noise that may culminate into a full project someday. I have a lot of maybe projects, but I usually resist telling anyone about them because I put undue pressure on myself when it gets brought up again and it was never even started. I stick to anything I'm actually working on and don't throw in the maybes as much as possible. Ha, even though I do like to blog some maybes here and there... Have you ever made lists just to try to warm up to the idea of something on it? Yeah, that happens too...

Anyways, fishspiration... When I'm making up my own words, it's probably best I leave it at that. Writers often have pets, desk clutter-- many things that they use to combat writer's block, entertain the muse and inspire them. What are yours?