Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Accidentally in Love

There's this show that my roommates and I (especially Kiera) like to watch called "I Didn't Know I was Pregnant". Every time these women deliver these babies that they had absolutely no idea existed, they are of course completely shocked, but always end up keeping them and love-love-loving them. I always try to put myself in their shoes and socks and wonder what I would do and think and all of that crazy stuff that is sure to follow finding out that you went 9 MONTHS not knowing you had a baby in your stomach. (Which I still can't comprehend at all.) Luckily, since I have certain restrictions on the way I live my life, there's no way (at least while I'm unmarried) that I'll ever think I have to go to the bathroom and end up... pooping... a baby. (I can't believe I just typed that. But that really did happen to some of those women.)

While I've never been pregnant without knowing it, I did accidentally become a mother. Sort of.

You see, it all started one day back in April when Kubo and I
(sometimes referred to as "Brookubo") ditched our friends after eating pupusas.We ditched them because while we were eating said pupusas, I found out that Kubo had a Beta Fish. Why he had never told me this before, I do not know. But, the second I found out that he had a Beta, appropriately named Beta-Spice, I asked if he had ever fed Beta another fish. He said he hadn't. I know. My jaw dropped, too. Since there's a pet shop just a block away from the Pupusaria... we ditched our friends, like I mentioned earlier. Over at Jay's Jungle, we bought the absolute smallest, cheapest fish we could find. It was a little striped one, about 15 cents, as I recall. It was one of these:
As we were driving over to Kubo's, I gave him a couple pointers on feeding a small fish to a big fish (not that I'm an expert on it or anything, in fact this was my first time, but, I've had enough pets to know certain things). My main rule was that we didn't get attached to the sacrificial fish. It's a lot easier to kill something if you refuse to believe it has a soul. That meant NO NAMING THE FOOD.
Once at Kubo's, we both bent down eye level with Beta and his tank. We weren't sure how quickly Beta would eat the little fish, so we tried our very best not to blink. This was going to be good. Kubo dropped the fish into the tank and...

Nothing.

We waited a couple minutes. Still Nothing.

Finally, Beta got close to the little fish. He started following it around like a dog sniffs another dog's crotch when they first meet, except not nearly as awkward. Kubo and I tensed. We waited. Here it was. I rubbed my hands together. "Say goodbye, little fishy!" And then...

More Nothing.

Deflated, Kubo tapped on the glass. "Come on, Beta. Nemo's just waiting for you to eat him."

"Woah, woah, woah! Who's Nemo?"

"I couldn't help it!" He'd broken the rule.

"Kubo!"

Long story short, Beta never ate the Nemo. They actually became BFFs. Which is very lucky since Kubo had to go and get attached to Nemo that way. And even luckier because I accidentally went and got attached to Nemo, too.

Kubo went out of town for a week or so and so we moved the tank over to The Pad (where Cami, Kiera and I live) so that we could fish-sit. And since Kubo spends more time here than he does at his own place, when he got back to Provo we just decided to keep the fish with us. Now that we knew that Beta wouldn't eat other fish, we took another trip to Jay's Jungle and came home with a whole family. Sadly, the shelf-life of pet store fish isn't usually more than a month or so, sometimes it's only a day or so. I have learned to love the fish while we have them, and when they pass on to that big river in the sky, I don't cry nearly as much as I used to. We've gone through lots of fish and some frogs and even a tank upgrade in the last six or seven months. Let's see, there was:
  • Whacko
  • Jacko (NOT to be confused with Yacko)
  • Dot
  • Barack
  • Miranda
  • Spock
  • Freckles
  • Beta-Spice
  • Bird
  • Bumblebee
  • Optimus Prime
  • The Fallen (AKA Sucky)
  • Mak (AKA Mustard and Ketchup)
  • Buzz
  • Goldie Hawn
  • Kurt Russell
  • Ichabod Crane
  • Creamsicle
  • Bones
  • Ruby
As Kubo has said, "Holy Crap! We've killed an entire underground city!" Some of you might feel the same way. I like to look at it this way, "We've given an entire underground city a loving and fulfilling life." Plus, once you catch the Fish Fever (not associated with Swine Flu), it's hard to stop.
Currently, our tank houses:
  • Crystal Meth
  • Jay-Z
  • KieraSGeorge
  • French's
And OF COURSE:
  • Nemo
I'll admit that I've grown closer to some fish than others. Whacko and Jacko were hard ones because they were our first to die. They also died just a day before the real Wacko Jacko died. We were afraid we might have voodoo fish on our hands for a while. I thought I was responsible for the death of an icon. Then I got over it. Sort of. We named one of the fish, Bird, after me. (It's one of my nick-names.) People started hating on her because we suspected that she was biting off the other fish's tails and that's they were dying. I didn't believe them. I came home one day and Nemo's tail was almost all gone. I flipped out and put her in a cup by herself to think what she had done. Later that night we saw that she had jumped out of the incredibly tall and only half-full cup, committing suicide. It was a little traumatizing. My voodoo-fish worries came back, but I haven't had any life-ending thoughts, so I think we're safe. It was also really sad when Beta-Spice finally kicked the bucket. He was the great-grandfather though, it was his time. Miranda was a hard one, too.

But, hardest of all would be to lose Nemo. I've already said that when he goes, I'm done. He was my miracle baby and he's survived all odds being the smallest fish and being attacked by Bird and Barack and other bigger fish. I just hope he never finds out that I only bought him to be fed to Beta. But in my defense, I didn't mean to love him. Though I'm irrevocably attached to the little squirt now. I think I know how those mothers on "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" feel. He's my life now. He's the best mistake I've ever made. Nemo, this one's for you:

1 comment:

wuxiheather said...

So I never read peoples whole blog posts. For some odd reason I got sucked into this post and read the whole thing. Even my husband was into it. It cracked us up!