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What A Difference A Fish Makes
Aug. 20th, 2006 12:20 amThey always tell us in vet school that pets help improve people's lives, that having an animal in your house helps decrease stress, lower your blood pressure, improve your activity and your attitude, and generally turn rainy skies into sunny rainbow-laden heavens of happiness. I can understand this. In fact, I'll even admit that when I enter a true deep funk I tend to hide from my cats in order to prevent precisely that phenomenon - it's hard to wallow in misery when a fluffy grey ball is demanding that you pat his tummy.
I never thought it applied to the fish, though.
I was just having a splendid wallow in self-pity, depression, loneliness, and lethargy, and contemplating both the calorie and misery benefits of skipping both lunch and dinner to sit on the sofa and pout, and starting my fourteenth game of Spider Solitaire, when I remembered that I promised my sweetie I'd feed the fish while he was away.
Stupid fish. Stupid silly-looking pink fish, burbling away just feet from the sofa, staring at me with their unblinking, trusting, fishy eyes, making me feel guilty for leaving them hungry.
I could live with not feeding myself. I could live with not washing the dishes, or not making the bed, or not doing a lot of things that involve getting up off my mopey backside. But I couldn't live with not feeding my pets, even if they do seem a lot more like mobile art than non-primate family members.
And of course, once I'm standing up to feed the darn fish, it's a lot easier to put on a pair of shoes. And once I've got my shoes on, it's easier to wander out onto the porch, and from there to the grocery, and even if their spring rolls were truly horrid, they were better than nothing, and having gone out once made it impossible to stay inside alone when friends called.
Now it's late, and I'm going to be tired tomorrow, but at least I'm wallowing in the guilty pleasure of having paid full price to see 'Step Up' (which was better than I thought it would be, in a repetitive, just-like-every-other-dance-movie, vague-remake-of-Romeo-and-Juliet sort of way) instead of wallowing in self-indulgent loneliness.
All because of the fish.
I never thought it applied to the fish, though.
I was just having a splendid wallow in self-pity, depression, loneliness, and lethargy, and contemplating both the calorie and misery benefits of skipping both lunch and dinner to sit on the sofa and pout, and starting my fourteenth game of Spider Solitaire, when I remembered that I promised my sweetie I'd feed the fish while he was away.
Stupid fish. Stupid silly-looking pink fish, burbling away just feet from the sofa, staring at me with their unblinking, trusting, fishy eyes, making me feel guilty for leaving them hungry.
I could live with not feeding myself. I could live with not washing the dishes, or not making the bed, or not doing a lot of things that involve getting up off my mopey backside. But I couldn't live with not feeding my pets, even if they do seem a lot more like mobile art than non-primate family members.
And of course, once I'm standing up to feed the darn fish, it's a lot easier to put on a pair of shoes. And once I've got my shoes on, it's easier to wander out onto the porch, and from there to the grocery, and even if their spring rolls were truly horrid, they were better than nothing, and having gone out once made it impossible to stay inside alone when friends called.
Now it's late, and I'm going to be tired tomorrow, but at least I'm wallowing in the guilty pleasure of having paid full price to see 'Step Up' (which was better than I thought it would be, in a repetitive, just-like-every-other-dance-movie, vague-remake-of-Romeo-and-Juliet sort of way) instead of wallowing in self-indulgent loneliness.
All because of the fish.
