Night

Do I divide and fall apart?

Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark

And the ship went down in sight of land

I went for a long walk last night, across Biola and beyond it. I found myself staying in the shadows avoiding the pooled light from the street lamps. I was feeling down, a diffuse sort of black absence that left a dull ache. It came on suddenly, no clue why, just another compelling proof that I am a stranger even to myself. I went for a long walk to help it pass.

I am just a man who knows how to feel.

One of the more routine things I do at work is algae scrubbing. This job consists of taking a sponge and wiping down all the interior tanks surfaces with it thereby removing algae. The task is simple, easy and almost guaranteed to soak at least part of your torso, particularly if you are trying to clean the jewel tanks. These are a set of four small tanks that are gorgeous but their placement in a surrounding mass of pipes and low walls makes cleaning them a shirt-soaking series of awkward body contortions. The thing that blows my mind about the job is that everybody loves it. No sooner do I put my hand down in the tank with the sponge then the tank begins to flash as people on the other side begin to frantically take pictures….of my hand…holding a sponge. I remove my hand and the flashes taper off. The same effect is scene when I use the gravel vacuum. Sometimes I go out into the aquarium proper to view the tank from the public side to make sure it looks good. Sometimes I get stuff like this:

I walk out and look at a tank to make sure I got all the algae off.
Lady with two small kids: “Was that YOUR hand in that tank?”
Me: “Oh, yeah. I was just getting rid of some algae.”
Lady with a sense of wonder: “Boys come here. That was this guy’s hand. That hand you saw in the tank a second ago was this guy’s hand.”
Ladies son giving me a big eyed stare: “wow”
Me embarrassed: “Yep…that was me…well you folks enjoy the aquarium I am going to go and tend more tanks.”

Yes folk’s aquarists are rock stars…accept not really.

Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away

Now most of you probably have a further question following my description of work. I hope you enjoyed the intermission provided by the 4th of July party picture I posted. The question you most likely have now is this; “But if you only work about 16 hours a week, what the hell do you do with the rest of your time?” The answer ladies and gentleman is simple. Let me give you a bit of background. I am writing this after taking a break from World Of Warcraft which I was playing with Eric. He is now playing Guitar Hero 2 beside me while I type this and Ryan is on his laptop in the dining room. What I have been doing can be best described in terms of accomplishments.

1. Last night I beat Halo 3. Ryan got it two days ago. Eric, myself and him have also played a ton of vs. rounds.
2. I began a new game of Fable.
3. I got Ryan the game Viva Piñata and really enjoy watching him build his garden.
4. Almaarea (which means blessed in elfish) my WOW night elf character is now level 51 and a half.
5. I bought Crimson Sky and I am half way through that game.
6. Eric, Ryan, and myself have play Starcraft at least 3 times a week.
7. I have watched the first two seasons of Venture Brothers.
8. I have failed countless songs on Guitar Hero 2.
9. I am about halfway through season one of Futurama.

Does anyone see a pattern? That’s right I go to work, play videos games, and spend a ton of time just screwing around with Ryan and Eric. It’s fun and relaxing. Stay up late sleep in late etc. I do my job, I do my best there and stay late if they have work for me and when that’s over I indulge in my hobbies. It is a good life. I just wish my wife were here.

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.