Shimmering like a penny out of reach in the subway grate

"A camera, pool and a trampoline equals fun." - Jared

The first degree was a riot

What I do in California...the work segment

"another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults"

So you might be wondering “What has Jeff been up to? How is his job? What does he do all night? Does he sleep anymore?” I’ll attempt to answer those questions now.

I am an intern at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. I work four shifts during the week. My shifts are 8 am to noon on Tuesday and Wednesday and 1 pm to 5 pm on Thursday and Friday. The aquarium consists of three main wings (Southern California and Baja, the Northern Pacific, and the Tropical Pacific.) and an outdoor portion consisting of Shark Lagoon and the Lorikeet Forest aviary. For this internship there is an intern assigned to each of the wings as well as an intern for shark lagoon. I have been tasked to the tropical Pacific portion.

Each day of the week I work I serve under one of the four different main aquarists who manage different sets of tanks that are all contained within the tropical wing. I spend my entire time back behind the scenes doing routine tank maintenance and animal care. Things like cleaning protein skimmers, changing filter bags, performing water changes, cleaning the insides of tanks and scraping algae, preparing food and feeding the animals, hydro-vacuuming tanks, and checking temperature gauges and observing animals to ensure health. I am still learning the more complicated portions of the job but everyone I work with has been really encouraging and helpful. They have even given me the opportunity to do a little bit of work in shark lagoon and suggested that I might be able to go with them the next time they go to the wholesaler to buy more fish for the aquarium. (The wholesale store is a vast warehouse filled with tanks of saltwater fish. It’s an aquarists toy store….I am so excited.) The job was stressful at first but as I have worked more into the habit of my activities I am feeling more comfortable. I like my job a lot. It’s great. The water quality testing and large scale maintenance (for the huge sand filters etc.) are farmed out to specialty portions of the aquarium staff. After I have learned more of the aquarist end of it I hope to be able to learn a little about their jobs. In my job I thankfully don’t have to deal with the public. Last week I ended up having to go into the public areas for a short time to observe a Bonnethead Shark to see if it was feeding. It went like this.

Visibly upset lady: “Are you a volunteer?”
Me: “Well, I’m an intern so not exactly...”
Lady interrupting: “Well you work here. Fine. I come here a lot and one of your seahorses over there is lying on its side. I think it’s sick.”
Me trying to talk to her and keep an eye on the shark: “Oh well thank you for telling me I’ll head over there in just one minute to check it out.”
Lady snorts in irritation and storms off.

That’s just one more reason why I am glad that I don’t work with the public on a regular basis. The sea horse was of course fine, when I got over there it was holding onto sea grass laying on the bottom looking around to see if there was anything interesting to eat.

On any given day it works like this:
1. Arrive and find the aquarist I am working with.
2. Change filter bags, clean protein skimmers
3. Prepare food and feed
4. Clean up after food prep
5. Hydro clean tanks, maybe algae scrub
Etc. etc.

Interesting things I have done at work:
1. Hand feeding Burrfish (a type of small puffer fish)
2. Standing in waders inside the Stinging Catfish tank to scrub algae
3. Feeding Stonefish
4. Helping move a sea turtle out of a tank so the vet could treat it.
5. Feeding Black Tip Reef Sharks and Zebra Sharks.

I'm tired, and that's never conducive to lucid writing

I for a handful of weeks I will show up to work and stare across a wide bay, knowing that I have come closer to my dreams than anyone in high school would have ever given me credit for. I realized today that my life has been fairly unpredictable. So many people have predictable lives, ones that you can lay out in a long sequence of expected events long before the events actually come to pass. Many people seem to flow like water down the path of least resistance, making all their decisions by never actually making their own. It’s like that line from High Fidelity. “I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.” Making those decisions that aren’t really decisions as much as they are intellectual delaying actions. Caving to someone else’s idea of what you should want to do or think, simply because it is easier to adopt someone else’s view than to parse one out for yourself. Taking a job or staying in a career just because it’s stable rather than because it’s anything you care about. Putting off those tough decisions only to wake up one day and realize it’s already been decided by inaction and now it’s too damn late to do a thing about it. Not that I can claim any real ambition. I have to set a course or drift. This is my course; this internship, this degree, these jobs in field biology or aquatic husbandry. But I still coast more than I would care to admit. I don’t know where I am going with this so, to spare you any more of my rambling...

Go see High Fidelity, read the book or better yet do both.

Then fail to represent your life as you know it.

"Is it the dream that one day you might be something you're not? Is it the dreams that make us real?"

"Even needs have needs, tiny giants made of tinier giants..."


I have an update. It’s long overdue.
I quit my job. I gave them three weeks notice so they could have an easier transition and my last working day was last Saturday. Letting them know of my impending exit went about as well as it could have. They offered me more money, part time work, and every other inducement they could think of to keep me on but I refused. And really, I think it would be dishonorable to fake quitting in an attempt to get a raise. If I felt that a raise was required I would have talked to them about it, not tried to manipulate circumstances. So needless to say, the Petco chapter is over. I liked the people I worked with. My complaints rested entirely with corporate and those customers who made life difficult. I quit my job with no sure next step. I am going to work on a Masters in Fishery Science out of OSU but hadn’t decided exactly which term I would start work on that.
This brings me to my next portion of the update. Just about the time I was nearing my last day I found out that I had been accepted for an internship at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. It’s a 15 week program that allows me to train directly under one of the head aquarists, and teaches me how to be an aquarist myself. According to them, it will set me up so that once it's done I will be prepared to be hired as an entry level aquarist at a major aquarium. It’s a good deal and I am excited about the program. So as I pen this bit of info I am sitting on a couch in LA where I will be for the next 15 weeks. I will be living with my old college roommate which is another bonus for me. Elaine and I were coming into LA on vacation anyway and so for the first two weeks of the internship I’ll have her around. After that I will regrettably be deprived of her company for some time. But what can I do? This truly is a rare opportunity and I would be a fool to pass it up.

All you folks in Oregon wondering if I have fallen off the map or something, in my defense…..I sort of have.

I'm not bad, the sorting hat just cast me that way

They had a fake sorting hat at the place we got our new Harry Potter book. Guess which house I was? Fits don’t it? One Guess what Elaine’s was.

I am backlogged again on my blog. I have nearly 10 events, developed thoughts and general ideas that I had aimed to land on this page. But I didn’t take the time and now I am tired. So I’ll do it one sad little nugget at a time.
Action point 1. (This one has been sitting for about two weeks) Petco corporate has filed a grievance with my store. It seems, by their standards, too many people are coming into our store and buying singular items. This condemnable purpose in shopping has lead to the reinstatement of the dreaded “One More Item” policy. What everyone at the store is content to view as people just knowing what they want to buy before they arrive at the store, has a much more sinister appearance to the desk jockeys at corporate (What would a real desk jockey actually look like I wonder?). Because you know, we can’t have people just buying one item, its just unpatriotic!

Clerk: “Anything else for you today sir?”
Guy: “No just the soda.”
Clerk: “Well you know what goes good with a soda…….brine shrimp!”
Guy: “Uhhh…yeah, don’t have any pets, I just got thirsty.”
Clerk: “No pets?!! Well I’ve got just the thing!”
*A few minutes latter the clerk is trying his heart out to make the hamster he’s holding stop trying to bite him and look cute for the customer*
Guy: “Did that hamster just pee on you?”
Clerk: “ummmm…no….not at all…..he just...ummm yeah he did. Normally they don’t do this...”
Guy: “Sure look, I’ve got some friends coming over later so I gotta skate.”

So on top of pressuring us to try to sell people more stuff, they have required each employee to have an item they personally recommend. You will all be pleased to know I tackled this new challenge with the “oh I’ll give a hand... course the only part I’m offering is my middle finger” attitude you can expect from me.
So then my personal product recommendation is……drum roll please… Otocinclus sp.!!

There are two main reasons:
1. It benefits the customer.
It is a peaceful freshwater community fish that stays around 2 inches full grown and eats brown and green algae very effectively. The small size, voracious appetite, and peaceful temperament make them a good addition to any size freshwater community tank. Most of our customers have tanks 20 gallons or smaller and need something to eat algae but really do not have tanks big enough for most species of Plecostomus they are likely to find. Also this fish is inexpensive, which is always a plus.

2. It gives corporate the finger.
The company is trying to push the sale of the plecostomus, so my personal recommendation directly contradicts the company recommendation. The fish I recommend is the least expensive algae eater we carry. And finally we don’t even have it in the store half the time, so I end up sending people to one of the local tropical fish specialty stores. Now this isn’t me just being vindictive against a soulless corporation, though that’s part of it. The customer who has a small tank usually has community fish, which rules out Chinese Algae Eaters and Plecos, leaving the only obvious solution... the Ottocinclus. I simply refuse to sell the Pleco just to make the company an extra buck but leaving the customer with a fish that won’t even be able to move around in their tank in a year’s time.

The other criminally stupid stipulation corporate gave was that our item had to be recommended to each customer we served. Muse on that for a minute, ponder what that would require, and shake your head in disdain. Most people have a dog or a fish; few have one of every animal we carry in the store. Almost everybody else chose dog items. How are you going to sell that to the guy with the reef tank? “Pardon me sir, but could I interest your sea anemone with a marrow bone?” In closing I will share one of my coworkers reactions to the whole bit.

Clerk: “What’s this thing?”
*gesturing towards the signup sheet*
Manager: “Personal product recommendation, corporate wants each employee to have one.”
Clerk: “You’re kidding. No wait…you’re serious?”
Manager: “Yeah you have to pick something.”
Clerk: “Oh oh can I pick anything!! I want to pick the most random item I can.”
Manager: “Well it has to be something you recommend to every customer.”
*looking tired, because after all it’s not something he wants to do either*
Clerk: “To everybody!? But that’s impossible….oh wait….ok I know what I want to recommend. It’s perfect. I recommend a diet Coke; it’s refreshing and has less sugar than regular coke.”
*manger just gives her a helpless and completely pained look*
Clerk: “Oh alright I’ll think of something good. Don’t worry don’t worry.”


As my last act of consciousness in this post before I release it to sleep in the folder with its brothers I make this request - Watch the music video for the Modest Mouse song "Dashboard", it’s about fishes and technology and old men in bars….I was amused.

You know I could still try to answer it for you.

A girl I know and deeply respect captioned a picture of hers “I should know who I am by now.” It got me thinking.
Really who the hell are any of us? I don’t think it’s a question we will ever be able to answer satisfactorily. I don’t know myself and I think most people haven’t even taken the time to be introspective to pose the question much less seek an answer for it. I don’t know who I am, I have general ideas of my characteristics and I find them disappointing but I don’t know who I am. I imagine she was saying something similar. That feeling you get some days as you stare out the window and try to figure out what the hell your doing with your life, are you living it well, what does it mean to live your life well. The questions of who am I and what am I doing have always been tied for me.

This girl posted the caption and people responded, I mean droves of people; she’s that type of girl. We pass through this life leaving a trail like a ships wake, some are larger than others. The replies all attempted to assure her that they knew who she was. I don’t think it’s accurate, even the people we know the best are on some levels strangers. My wife who often feels like an extension of myself is still to some degree unknown by me. If I were to answer this girl it would only be me showing her the version of herself that I perceive. We all have versions of those we know, they are not the same versions that others who know them have and may not even be accurate. We can’t answer these questions for ourselves and its no surprise we can’t answer them for anyone else.

My typical morning

I wake up, it’s around 8. I used to sleep in, but with my work schedule I have become more jealous of my time. I have begun to view everything in terms of time. Sitting here staring into the mirror thinking that each dollar I spend represents a portion of my life bartered. If I had more money I think it wouldn’t be so clearly defined as such. But in a handful of hours I will trade a small but significant portion of my life for a few bucks. Each soda I buy for a dollar fifty represents twenty minutes of my life given away, makes that slurpee all the more precious doesn’t it. But even as I am stumbling into the bathroom I know my wife would decry such a suggestion as the worst kind of melodrama. It’s a vice. Melancholy, melodrama, and apathy are the vices that characterize my life. Turn on the shower and step in, steam rising across the window pane, today will be a scorcher. I wonder why Oregon is associated with rain. It’s as if all the travel reporters came out for the winter under some delusion that they’d get a white Christmas. They came out and Christmas morning came grey and wet with a metrological depressiveness on usually associates with Britain and then they went home to condemn the state as a land of rain. I don’t think they ever saw the summer here. The summer was when I always felt the most alive; windows down, music loud. I just try to let me mind go blank as the water washes over my shoulders. The water is unreasonably hot; I turn the temperature up to the point just before it would start to hurt. For some reason I am thinking about travel reporters and Christmas again. I understand why it can be a let down. Let’s face it our perceptions of Christmas are shaped by TV and movies and Dickens novels. But here we are in a fragmented society celebrating our holidays alone or with people we don’t even know. Even our family members orbit around each other without even really touching. When we were kids we made lists and expected less. But now we are adults and the only things left to care about are people. We placed all our faith in the commercialism and glitz and we grew up without ever giving the underlying religious significance of the holiday its due and now we can’t feel a thing. I am out of the shower and toweling off and I can’t help but think of my dad. Talk about orbiting bodies with no overlap. Neither of us was ever much for self-expression. I learned from his stoicism and now we both can’t speak. When I have a child I want him to be the first to hold my child outside of myself and my wife, I was never good with words but symbolism…now that’s easy. I put on my crappy khakis that go back to freshman year of high school, vintage 1996. Getting dressed in as much of a rush as I can, work is coming on fast. I still need to make a lunch and get over to the library to look for jobs and blog. In the kitchen and there is nothing easy to make. I am such a bachelor when it comes to making myself food; what’s here, what’s easy, what can I make with the least amount of effort. Awhile back we had the Baileys staying with us Jared and I were at my place alone responsible for our own lunch. It went like this.

Bryon walks in the front door and sniffs the air.
Bryon: “hmm…burnt grilled cheese right?”
Me and Jared look at each other in surprise
Bryon: “Batching it today eh?”
Jeff: “Yeah, how did you know what we made?”
Bryon: “I lived alone for awhile. I recognize the smell.”

I am out the door and as I walk down to my car I already feel whatever blogs I have composed evaporating. It like the counting crows said:

“She said "everybody loves you,"
She says, "everybody cares"
But all the things I keep inside myself
They vanish in the air”

Why did I make this blog anyway?