Just Fishin'

Hi, and welcome to my life! Well, you're not in my life. In fact, you are a complete stranger on cyberspace curious about who I am.

Okay, okay, suits me. No feelings hurt? Good.

My name is Isabelle, and my middle name is after my mom's first name. I was born in the Windy City, home of the Cubs! Not that I'm a huge baseball fan - in fact, I don't get baseball at all. I don't get a whole lot of sports, actually. Well, I get the gist of it, but I think track, swimming and the other simple whoever-gets-to-the-finish-line-first-wins sports are easiest to understand. Except tennis. My dad likes to play tennis, so I kind of know how it works. Kind of.

Why am I writing this? I mean, I have a life outside WDC, and I could be doing something else - like taking my dog out. Well, see, I'm part of the "October NaNoWriMo Prep Challenge"  group, and for a contest entry I have to make the judge basically fall in love with me. NO, not like that. I mean, the protagonist. The problem?

This is nonfiction. Okay, so if this was about my dog, the protagonist would be my dog, Charlie. But I'm writing my NaNo about me, and my fish over the past year. On the bright side - I can share the idea and no one can steal it from me. But, on the darker side, it doesn't have clear elements  that a fiction novel would.

I mean, I suppose I could talk about me - heck, that's what I'm doing. But, it's kind of... my fish and I against death and disease. And I can't write about my fish - that's why I'm going to write the NaNovel!

*insert a long deep breath here*

Okay, okay, background story. Here we go.


~*~*~*~*~

Fishkeeping is crazy. I thought about that as I grasped the fish net and the algae scraper to pull the dead fish body out of the filter part. You think that's gross? I've seen worse. In fact, I lost my school of zebra danios to this disease that made their spines bend; then they dwindled and eventually died.

My life is one huge background story, right?

Well, let's start at the beginning of my lovely fish "career". I always wanted a pet, but I was allergic to dogs, and my family just didn't love animals like I did. When the pleading, begging, groaning, petitions, implorings, and beseeches didn't work for a "real" pet (dog, cat, pony), I decided to pursue fish.

I mean, they're perfect, right?! You can leave them when you go on vacation, they don't shed, and besides, didn't they teach children about caring for living things and responsibility? (By the way, I learned about death, mortality, and the fact that uncanny things like a mother and her daughter dying in the same relative corner of the tank on the same day in separate tanks can happen).

So one day, my parents "owed" me something. I was about six years old. My older sister and I had finished a chore of some sort and we were promised whatever we wanted. Cammy (the aforementioned older sister) bounced along to the mall and got jeans and a matching shirt with sparkly hearts on it. Me? I opted for a goldfish.

Funny, I still remember going to the grocery store and picking out Sunset. We filled a bowl with water from the tap and proudly put the new fish in our family room. Well, unknown to us, fish are killed very quickly by the chlorine in the water from taps. I was fascinated with Sunset and would take the rough tea-strainer net and poke him around the bowl. Later that night, I saw my first death. My goldfish Sunset was dead, his limp body tilted upward, his nose just trying to peek above the surface of the water, from the chlorine that was probably burning his scales and sensitive gills.

I was heartbroken. I saw him dead, but being slightly secretive me, went upstairs and tried to read my picture book. I couldn't. The odd thing is how I remember it all. I remember Cammy was taking a shower, and how I stumbled to my dad's office, blinded by tears, and told him that Sunset wasn't moving.

We offered him nothing better than a flush down into eternal pipes. We tried again - we got goldfish after goldfish, and eventually I got my dad to buy a small ten-gallon tank for me.

Eventually, we gave up on goldfish and moved to tropical fish.

Every single time another fish died, I cried my heart out. Of course, that meant I was sobbing almost every week. I remember coming home from ballet class and nervously asking how our sick tiger barb was. My parents were always careful telling me they had died, but I am glad they didn't make up stupid stories like going to an ocean for the rest of their lives or whatever.

A few years later, our last tropical fish died. Pretty much what we had been doing was having our fish die, sticking more fish in there, until finally the last fish died - and there were no more left in the tank.

I was old enough - and I was determined. I researched all fish before we bought them, and cleaned the tank thoroughly before setting out to buy our first platys.

October 19, 2008 began our Fish Year.