Fishing

My fish tank is a disaster. I moved it to the window sill, and then it got decked out in algae. Imagine just sitting around on a couch and then suddenly, without warning, everything is covered in Nickelodeon-quality slime. You can't just scrub it away because it comes back. You have to actively kill it with commercial chemicals. But even this solution poses problems, because now instead of algae clinging to the glass walls and every centimeter of sunlit surface on the aquatic plants, its a series of large clumps of kelly green... stuff... being pushed aside every time a fish swims past it. It looks like snow, even though it actually is more like autumnal leaves, dead and useless and lying around, waiting to decompose. [Fish, I'm enriching your environment by giving you seasons. You are welcome. And I am sorry.] 

The filter is working at max capacity and it's still not clearing away all of the algae. I already changed the water once, and the five gallons I pulled out were straight green. I let the bucket sit over night and all the algae precipitated to the bottom. There was a lot of it. There is still more in the tank. I can't stand that there is still more in the tank. I've spent my entire three day weekend beautifying my apartment and yet my fish tank demands to look like a sewer outside a manure production plant? No. I will not watch my fish dart around in a biological war torn bowl.

So I grabbed my fish net and began scraping algae away from the filter, then decided to swirl the net around to shovel and lift the algae up and out of the glow in the dark gravel on the tank bed. The fish freaked out. 

Over the summer I became so distraught watching the largest of the fish chasing the littler ones whenever I added food to the tank, that for an entire week I captured the big kahuna first, then, keeping the net and the kahuna (her name is Peggy) sequestered in the corner, added food so that the other ones could eat without fear. I did this for a week, and by the end it was actually driving me insane. I don't like terrorizing anything ever. I am that type of person who walks slower when they see a squirrel nearby. I hate frightening squirrels. It makes me sad. Frightening groundhogs makes me want to cry for days. [As a consequence of this, I often get into staring matches with squirrels. And occasionally I talk to them. I swear this does not make me weird, I just operate in a world where everything, no matter how sentient or how alive, has character.] 

I had to eventually stop capturing Kahuna Peggy because the two medium sized fish would also freak out. I had hoped the fish would see a pattern and recognize that they were safe, but Dart and Arrow are kind of idiotic. They are both diamond tetras, and Arrow may or may not have a weird fungal infection that makes it race back and forth in the tank around twilight, bumping into the glass walls and scaring the bejesus out of me. Seriously Arrow, clearly I can't know exactly what you need (you're a fish, apparently I'm a human), but I personally think you need to calm the f*** down. So because I can't inflict confusion or pain on even fish, I stopped the Kahuna Fishing experiment. 

But everyone is still afraid of the net. So by the time I was whirling algae around my net, Peggy, Dart, and Arrow were all in a corner, huddled together underneath aquatic fronds. I added some fish food to appease them, but no one budged. Of course, Fry, the smallest of the fish (he is a fourth the size of Arrow, who is the smaller of the two diamond tetras) was in the clearing, just chilling out. It's easy to lose sight of him, and most of the time I panic when cleaning the tank because he could easily fit into the tube used in such endeavors, but here he was: swimming underneath clumps of algae. I found his behavior peculiar, and even more so when he began eating food. I have maybe seen him eat 6 or 7 times. I've had these fish for almost a year and a half now. I assumed he snuck little crumbs that passed him by while hiding somewhere. But here he was, with the orange dash above his small eyes matching the center of the Tetra Tropical Freshwater Fish Food wafer, openly enjoying a nice dinner. 

Fry is brave--maybe the most fearless fish in the group. I guess when you've spent your entire life being the little guy, a flurry of algae and a giant net don't bother you as much. You are stronger for having suffered and eventually surviving. You now know what you want and you have a pretty good idea of how to get it. There are inherent risks in getting out there, but you've already been through enough hardships to realize that it will probably be worth it. The ends justify the means, even if the means are terrifying, exhausting, and not always meaningful. "Ah yes, why do I have to memorize all this minutiae in school again?" Because one day you will be doing something you love and you will be good at it. Fry knows this. Fry knows that he loves eating and Fry knows that the best way to secure eating is to get out there and nibble. 

Of course, I may be reading entirely way too much into this.