Good bye, Holly

From my Livejournal:

"When I woke up this morning, I knew one of my fish was dead. I don't know how I knew, but I just sat up and thought, "I'm going to go out into the living room and find one of my fish dead. And it'll probably be Hugo."

So I went out and checked, and sure enough, one of them was dead. But it wasn't Hugo. Holly was laying diagonally (tail up) in the corner of her tank, eyes abnormally bright. She's dead.

And I don't know why. I've had her since mid May and she's never been sick, not even once. No symptoms of anything. Her colors were bright, she was swimming around her tank like normal when I went to bed. She'd grown so much since I bought her, but she wasn't swollen or fat. Just proportionately larger because she was young and I was actually feeding her unlike the pet store. No scales were marred, her eyes and gills were fine, and she was happy. But now she's just dead. Like she had a heart attack or something stupid like that.

What's really sad about this is that Cuba will probably die now. Holly was his best friend. When I found her this morning Cuba was at the bottom of his tank, just looking at her. He'd go up for air, and then come back down and look at her again. It seemed like he was trying to say, "Come on, get up! Let's play!" But soon he's going to realize that she's not going to play with him anymore, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he gets depressed and dies.

I asked mom to bring me home one of those very small milk cartons from work. The kind kids have in their elementary school lunch. I want Holly to be buried in water, because she wasn't a dirt dweller in life and she shouldn't have to have dirt on her now. Hopefully a milk carton is biodegradable enough that I won't be polluting by burying her in it. It'll hold just enough water for her. And then I can put some of her gravel on top of her grave."

That's how it happened. My baby girl is dead and I'm pretty upset about it.

Hugo is the purchase mentioned in my last post. He's a tiny (as thin as a pencil) sick betta I discovered at PetCo. They were going to flush him when the new shipment came in, so I bought him. He's in the half gallon hospital tank, no toys yet, being treated with Tetracycline because he has inflamed gills. He's eating very well already, and stretching his fins by flitting around the tank constantly. He even blew a little bubble nest already. I'm glad I rescued him. He's very pretty for a VT. His body is a strange gradient blend of yellow and pink, his face is mostly white with yellow speckles, and his fins are streaks of fuschia and violet. He looks like a ribbon.

I also must reveal now that I've purchased a huge CT male on Aquabid. I didn't really mean to... I bid just a few cents more than the asking price of $15, thinking I'd be outbid because such a fish could easily go for $40+. Apparently no one else noticed him though, because I ended up being the winning bidder with the original $15 price. I'm shocked, but happy. He's amazing, and I'll have him within the next couple of weeks. He's coming from Thailand by air so I have to wait for the rest of the stock coming to America to be packed with him.

So I've lost one betta and gained two more in just three days. I never thought Cuba would outlive Holly. I thought for sure he was going to die when he got sick after the floor incident. Strange how things work out.

Labyrinth dream

This morning I dreamt that I was a boy, and I needed to pee, but the bathroom I found was huge and like a labyrinth and I never found a toilet that was available so I died. o_O In another there was an evil spirit in my closet, and I held a cross while invoking Jesus Christ to remove it, but instead it just turned into a creepy cat with blue eyes. Mom picked it up and wanted to take it in, and refused to believe that it was evil.

We're so awful

So I'm watching Return of the King with mom and Noah. At the point where the moth appears to Gandalf, we began an interesting discussion that ended up being something akin to MST3K:

Noah: "What's up with the moth?"
Mom: "The eagles represent America, and the moth represents you!"
Me: "I thought the moth was Canada!!"
Mom: "No, it might be a bat. Or, what's that thing called... A tidbit?!"
Me: "No, a sugar glider."
Mom: "Yeah, a tidbit bat!"
Noah: "That's what they call moths in the middle ages?"

Me: "Where'd the tidbit go?"
Mom: "Where's a tidbit when you need it?!"

Noah: "How can something that fat run that fast?"
Mom: "Well, it's fleeing wrath."

Me: "And then Sauron was like 'Uh oh! Uh oh!'"
Me: "'I'll just close my eye and it'll all go away!'"

Me: "Lava's not that hot! It's just a little muggy, that's all!"
Mom: "It's not the heat, it's the humidity!"

Mom: "Here comes Marissa's Scooby Doo ending!"
Me: "No, don't you remember? This is the Star Wars ending! The Scooby Doo ending comes later."
Me: "Well, actually, it looks like the thermometer ending from here."

Me: "Now let this be a lesson to all the young men out there: You take a big swig of your drink, go talk to the lady tending the bar, and the next thing you know you're getting married."

Aging

On the local news tonight there was some bit about how high schoolers are graduating over the next few weeks and they're finally adults. I made a comment to my mom that that's bull -- There are all these times that you're supposedly an adult (16, 18, 21, 25), but it's all arbitrary nonsense. It has nothing to do with the digits in your age or whether or not you graduated from high school. (Clearly, there are people who dropped out who are now adults, and people who graduated long ago that have never become adults!) Mom asked what makes a person an adult to me. I didn't really know what to say.

I suppose it comes down to a few key traits: A sense of personal responsibility for one's actions, an understanding of one's mortality and flaws, and the ability to be selfish without shame when necessary but unselfish otherwise. Throw in some life experience for good measure. By my own standards, I don't expect to consider myself an adult until I'm 25+. Thirties, probably. I have little portions of all the required parts, but not complete. And I really don't mind.

We're expected to feel like adults too early. Not necessarily be adults -- there are pads in place by society that allow people to be juvenile for as long as they want -- but to feel it. So we run around at 18, 19, 20, crying, "Look at me, I'm all grown!" and then five years later think, "Shit, I was stupid then." I remember thinking I was grown at 16. I remember thinking it at 18 even more so. And now I look at myself from a year ago and think, "Poor girl, she had no clue." I see this same thing in my peers and kids younger than me.

I find it funny that as I get older, I feel less and less truly adult. Well, I suppose it's just that I'm becoming more and more aware that I'm not the adult I always thought I was.

Buried pig dream

I had an odd dream last night. I dreamt that there was a party in my front yard, late at night, and I was getting very upset because I didn't know any of the people and they were acting very crass (obviously drunk). I was out there trying to get everyone to go home, and then one of the people started digging under the huge tree that stands in my neighbors' yard (but right next to my driveway). I screamed for them to stop, because bad things were under the tree, but they didn't. Suddenly someone screamed, "Why is it moving?!" and I ran over to see. There was a huge, hippo-sized pig buried beneath the tree. It was clearly dead, but it was getting up anyway. It was some sort of zombie pig, I guess. But the people didn't care -- they were trying to tie it down on a fire to eat it, but it just kept screaming. I woke up, but the pig's shrill screams were still sounding in my head for a long time after that.