The Sunstroke Journey for the Black and White Cards
It ended with a great nap
Hello friends,
I did it. I gave in to to hype and there was a casualty. I had gotten the whole family on board with waving the zebra leggings in the baby’s face. The baby was appreciating and tracking the zebra pants. Also my black and white plaid hat. Also the black and white fish.
Grandma had the inspiration to park the rolling bed next to the shelf of ten fish tanks. It was mostly for the white-noise effect of the filters. It’s as soothing as a cat fountain.
A tangent about Dune
It just so happened that the fish equivalent of the Bene Gesserit had arranged for the current crop of fish to all be black and white or very close to it. Sea monkeys(brine shrimp) are the Shai Halud of guppies in a world where fish tank Dune is not an outright contradiction of premise. The frefish can’t resist eating the shrimp long enough to be able to ride them, but we can’t judge fish like humans. How and why would a fish need to ride anything? Oh, right. To look cool. I do need an image of a frefish riding a giant shrimp.
Back to the cards
All that to say, the baby can look up at the black and white fish and get all the en-smartening that looking at zebra pants can offer.
Let me just go for a walk and think of some Fish Dune puns. Kwisatz Haddockerach? Shamuad Dib would be the messianic figure of orcas. Ok I’m done
In memoriam
I thought I was done for on the walk to the pick-up-your-delivery store.
“Did you choose the closest one?” Asked my husband, enablingly, once I confessed that I had caved and spent money online.
“I chose this one,” I showed him my phone map.
But it wasn’t the closest. It was a 16 minute walk and I didn’t want to take the kangaroo sling on a bike. I’m too prone to falling and crashing on bikes.
The newer, closer shop wasn’t showing up in the app preferences, so I didn’t really fail, not without technical assistance.
So I made a less-than-an-hour quest feel like an endless journey. It’s spring in the lands of my extended family, and a walk to the store and back might range from cold to crispyfresh. Here, it’s both hot and humid. I got the baby cards home and washed the child for fear of deadly outdoor toxins or disease. Only because parenthood is the obsession that drive one to thoroughly rinse and sanitize everything when one hasn’t the energy to properly zip one’s own pants. Once the child was clean and safely tucked in, I slept until End of Day.
I opened my eyes at least twice during the massive nap and had just enough brainpower to think both, “I should plug in the phone,” and “maybe I was sunlight poisoned. Perhaps this is how I go.” I could not even turn my head to see that the phone was not within reach before being pulled back into sleep. I wanted to shower and put on clean clothes, or at least dump out and hang up the little baby tub.
I woke up in my filthy adventure clothes and ate the kindly provided dinner before I showered.
Gary the fish wasn’t eating his fish pellets. He normally ate everything, including other, smaller fish. He was a majestic angelfish, dramatically sweeping all around the tank, dipping down to nip at the pleco, only half joking about his intentions to eat them.
This morning I was feeling well-rested and scrambling to accomplish three or four important things at once without ever being able to decide an order of operations. I wanted to weigh in, weigh the baby, drink water, get dressed and clean the house.
I walked by the large fish-tank.
“Gary?!” It appeared empty.
He’s jumped out of the tank??!? Angel fish can jump!?!? This tank is supposed to be jump proof?!?!
On closer inspection, Gary O’Brien the angelfish was somehow shoved up between the filter and its little pipe, near the top of the tank.
He looked emo and thoughtful
I worried the fish might be stuck, so I pushed him back into the main tank where he died quickly and dramatically.
Rest in peace
Gary “Triangle” Big Ugly Bug Face Baby-Eating O’Brien the Angelfish,
The last of the original cohort of fish.
We unceremoniously went to the big park that has the best fish vendors and bought plecos for our filthy fish tanks. The tiny yellow sucker fish were shockingly elusive. My husband, a seasoned fish wrangler, can normally grab any fish with his bare hand in once try without harming the fish. He say on the itsy bitsy plastic stool beside the big flat Tupperware in the outdoor fish tent, trying and trying to get the little yellow plecos. He got four of those speed demons before turning to the tub full of another variety of tank cleaners he called “mice” or sometimes “pandas.”
“How about these neon-colored little fish?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. The Power Rangers of neon mini-tuna moved into Gary’s tank. It will be a few months before the child can sense colors enough to appreciate whichever fish survive that long. Perhaps by then I will have finished the embroidered silhouette of Gary that I started before buying the cards.
So now we’re another family succumbing to the please-be-a-genius bandwagon as the only viable path to providing a decent shot at life for the child. I don’t want the baby to be an elite. I hate the elite people I have to endure every day.
It’s bad enough to suffer through a culture of shouting and memorizing times tables in the least enjoyable learning style possible. It’s worse that everyone who went through this rote maths and testing goodly on tests version of the factory pedagogy has to spend the rest of their lives telling me how good they test and how hard the memorized all the math.
Every conversation with a citizen of a host nation is a round of Russian roulette where the gun has at least two bullets. Maybe I’ll make a new friend, but probably this stranger will dump on me with the all-important fact that they score gooder on the smartness tests, that they’re gooder at the schools — both naturally more smarter and also more naturally harder workinger, AND more strong work ethic…because culture — and gooder at saving money, and gooder at health and culture. It doesn’t even feel good to tell me this stale, overplayed , useless repetition of racist, over generalized statements.
I don’t want my child to have to repeat this to any other person, or to buy into the eugenics-adjacent ethnocentrism that places such importance on these mantras of in-group goodness.
I want more for the child to be a decent person with empathy that can have self esteem without needing to make an immigrant or any other person feel bad.
