I'm NOT Piscicidal...Honestly!

Those of you who know me are most likely aware of Spaz, the feeder fish that I adopted from Petsmart last year for 12 cents.  He's no llama, donkey, dog, cat, or bird...but he's a fantastic fish and I'm allowed to have him in my dorm room, which is a plus.  This past year I've been trying to find him a friend, not just for him to have some company, but also to keep his tank a little cleaner.

Plan A was to get a Red Cherry Shrimp and name him Jacques after the French cleaning shrimp in Finding Nemo.  I was rather excited about this prospect but there were two problems with it.

1. Petsmart did not have any of these shrimp.
2. Kyle thought that the name lacked originality and creativity.

From Plan A's failure Plan B was born.

1. Kyle decided that regardless of what kind of cleanly friend I got for Spaz, Kyle would be the one to name it and its name was to be Lee Harvey Oswald.
2. Since the shrimp were not in stock a nice young woman named Audrey, touted as the "fish expert" by her fellow Petsmart worker, told me that an Otocinclus would work quite well in my one gallon tank with Spaz.  She said that it would be good addition to help with tank maintenance and that its contribution to ammonia production would be negligible.  Sounded great to me.
3. And so it was...that on that day, in that Petsmart store, an Otocinclus was bought by myself, and as it was decreed by Brother Kyle, he was called Lee Harvey Oswald.

Plan B worked out pretty well...Spaz and Ozzy got along just fine most of the time.  Once in a while Spaz would have the need to nudge Ozzy around just a little bit, but it was nothing that my fishy little assassin couldn't handle.  Then, months later, Ozzy seemed to be kind of off...my friend Stephanny was over to work on some of the Woyzeck design with me and I informed her that it seemed as if Ozzy's end might be in the near future.  I checked around the tank and saw that some of the gravel pieces on the bottom seemed to have no more color to them, as if Ozzy had gotten a wee bit overzealous with his cleaning duties.  Shortly thereafter, Ozzy was no more.

Rest In Peace

Lee Harvey Oswald (Ozzy)

? - February 12, 2010

So I came up with all of my possible reasons for Ozzy dying.  I didn't know if it was from the gravel...or if he just died...or whatever...or if it was Kyle's fault.  In the long run, I decided to blame it on Kyle, thinking that surely only bad things can come from naming one's pet for an assassin.

Then came Plan C.

1. I got sick and rushed to the emergency room which prompted my mother to come down from home to take care of me.  (Yes...for anyone who was wondering, I definitely just slipped into my default phrasing for writing down the backwards dominos of action for Play Analysis in accordance to David Ball's Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays.)
2. During my mom's stay with me at school, she bought me a new Otocinclus to cheer me up/give Spaz some company.
3. Seeing as Ozzy died because my brother gave him an unfortunate name...I carefully chose the name of my new fish on my own.
4. I chose to call her Antigone, after the title character of Sophocles' tragedy.  For with such an honorable namesake, I reasoned, a fish would never die.
5. She died.

Plan D.

1. My mother decided to take me to Petsmart on Monday because she wanted to try once more, fearing that maybe Antigone was injured during the move from Indianapolis for Spring Break.
2. Learning from my past two problems with fish names/deaths, I decided before even laying eyes on this new fish, that its name would be Lazarus.
3. Then...after picking out the fish that I wanted...the unthinkable happened...when I asked the Petsmart woman to get me the fish that I wanted she started questioning me about what kind of fish I had at home...what kind of tank...yadda yadda yadda...she then told me that it was probably my fault that Ozzy and Antigone died, because my tank was not big enough to support a goldfish and another fish.  I was greatly saddened by this...but then she continued, telling me that my tank isn't even big enough to support Spaz himself!  "Well I have two goldfish and I have them in a 20 GALLON TANK!!!!" She says to me.  Basically she went on to tell me that I was suffocating my beloved fish by denying him the proper housing.
4. You could tell that she was at least making an effort to be nice about it...but her eyes told me that in her mind she could see Spaz's internal organs trapped in vice grips.
5. We left Petsmart...without a new fish...and much to Petsmart Girl's chagrin, without a 10 gallon tank.

In the car on the ride home I really felt bad about how I'd been stifling Spaz's ability to grow...but when I could no longer take the guilt I diagnosed this Petsmart girl that I don't know with a random mental illness and deemed her, therefore, an unreliable source of information.  That made me feel better for a while...and when I sat down to blog about these fish tales, if you will, I found the following article:

Italian Town Bans Goldfish in a Bowl

So the question is now this...is ignorance really bliss?  Because honestly, I don't find dead fish to be all that blissful.