My favorite quote from sideshow's blog:
From now on I will remind myself in many other areas of life that it gets boring to keep feeding the sea monkeys but you have to hang in there.
Bitter true story in regard to Sea Monkeys, other aquatic life, vomit, and the horrors of moving and leasing:
My SO and I were desperate to get out of the lease on our first apartment a month early, mainly because we'd found a new place and would have a month of overlap before our one lease expired, meaning double rent if we didn't sublet. We tried really hard to sublet it and started showing the old place a couple months before we were going to move. At the same time, my SO had gotten me Sea Monkey's for X-mas and it was now Spring and I was getting a little bored of feeding these stupid brine shrimp, but couldn't bring myself to actually let them die. Then the SO brought home a couple tadpoles he'd found in someone's pool while working as a lawn fertilizing guy, so I was stuck in the tedious care of two aquatic life forms (I'd never raised tadpoles before, and had no idea it would get as interesting as it did). At one point he suggested I feed the Sea Monkey's to the tadpoles, but I was horrified by that, and outright refused. The SO was working at a job where he did huge amounts of overtime so I was on my own a lot. So I was packing, showing the apartment to look-y loos and tending Sea Monkey's and the tadpoles, when I got the most horrible case of food poisoning. I mean unimaginably ill. So much vomit. More that ever, ever before in my life. Horribly, horribly ill. For over a week straight I was unable to leave the Bermuda triangle of the couch, toilet and bed, and so sick and weak that I could just barely stagger from one to the other. The SO desperately wanted me to get to a doctor, but the window of time between vomiting and not vomiting was less than 15 minutes, and I some how argued that I had too much dignity to wretch in public. I vaguely remember people being shown the apartment as I lay on the couch moaning. After seven days had passed, it came to a point where I could not hold down water for more than 3 minutes and was mildly delerious. For some reason, this is when it suddenly occurred to me that I had forgotten all about the tadpole and the Sea Monkeys. I staggered over to the little tadpole tank, and there floating was a dead frog - he had become a frog, and died within the period of my illness. I was so sad for our little frog. Then I checked out the Sea Monkey's and most of them were dead, but a few pitiful ones swam around. For some reason seeing the dead froggie and pile of dead Sea Monkeys at the bottom of the tank is what convinced me that I needed to get to a hospital.
I have no memories of how I got to the hospital. I know I drove there alone, along with a bucket in the seat next to me. I remember being sick in the hospital bathroom at least three times while waiting to be seen. I did not remember being hooked up to the IV or that the nurse had made some sort of mistake with the IV that left my hospital gown, bed and blankets covered in blood. I didn't even know I had blood all over me, or why the same nurse kept apologizing to me over and over. I vaguely remember my Dad and SO's faces floating over the bed. After about 12 hours I got discharged and sent home.
I was incredibly weak after that, and barely able to eat for weeks after. Somehow managed to continue packing, and the time came for the month of lease overlap with no offers to sublet, so we started moving fairly slowly into our new place, but started sleeping there within the first week. To our horror, 10 days into our final month in the old place, someone gave the new tenant our home phone number, and while we were away, the landlord's roommate let the new guy move a fairly large load of his stuff in. This was not the plan, since we had paid for an entire month, and since I had been so sick (and also injured my knee when moving our dishwasher) the time was now definitely needed. Yet somehow suddenly, we came to our old place to find that someone else had half moved in (and even put up some posters of Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr....?), while most of our stuff was still there, including the half alive Sea Monkey's and lots of our higher value stuff. Turns out the new tenant was friends with the landlord. The new tenant called me, and asked if he could move in early, even though he had already started to, and I said I was quite upset that he had somehow illegally entered our apartment and that we had made a clear offer through the leasing agency to sublet the apartment to anyone who wanted to, and that if he did indeed wish to pay to sublet our apartment that he could talk to the leasing office and we would find away to move out sooner, although we really didn't want to because of all the shit that had gone down. This lead to the guy who had started moving in getting very crazy that we would not let him move in even though he was unwilling to actually pay to sublet our place. He began calling me and screaming and swearing at me on the phone, and making threats that he was going to "hurt me" several times. Needless to say, we were very tempted to dump all his furniture (now clogging our hallway and making it hard to load things out) into a dumpster. We did not do that. My SO spoke to the new tenant, and made clear that he was to call and apologize to me for calling me a bitch and threatening me. The psycho did call to apologize, but then called back later that day again making threats and freaking out about his stuff being in our apartment. Since he continued to insist on moving in earlier without actually paying to sublet, we simply continued to slowly move out at our own pace.
The week before our lease was to actually expire, my SO barricaded the front door (the only door our landlord had a key for) with the new tenants own chair, and to his amusement, when he went back for another load of our stuff the next day,
someone had actually broken the chair to get in through the front door. I was terrified of the new tenant after all his calls and threats, so I didn't go with him on that trip, but since he had clearly gotten in to our place again, I insisted to my SO that we just get the rest of our stuff out of there. My SO then packed up most of what was left, but I insisted on going back for the final trip, and when we pulled up to the door of our old place, my SO had left the Sea Monkeys out on the front step in the direct hot sun light. I just left it there. It really didn't matter since they were mostly dead anyway. We went into our place one last time, carried out a few last things, and walked out. I was in tears, because it had all been just way too much stress. As we pulled way, I just stared at the Sea Monkey tank sitting on the stoop, and I felt so sad and defeated that it had to go down like it did. That image is just burned in my mind. I got really emotional over the whole thing, especially since we had paid double the rent to have a sane, easy move, after having been so sick and weak, but in the end still being stressed and worried and $650 poorer for nothing That night I remember being really depressed and irrationally wanting to go back for the Sea Monkeys, knowing full well that they were long dead. My SO was really sweet and willing to go back if I really wanted to, but I talked myself out of it.
We went back the next week, on the actual date of our lease's expiration. We did the walk through, and were handed our damage deposit check, and handed over our key. Both us and the landlord ignoring the piles of the new tenants boxes already in the apartment. We through the long process of fighting the leasing company, and eventually three months after the fact got refunded half a months rent, and I learned from someone who still lived in the building that the landlord also got fired - it was all moot after the horrible shit that went down. Long after, I realized that a couple of our boxes were missing, including my record player, which I'd payed a pretty penny to maintain, and most of my records. Somewhere out there in the world is a bastard who has my original LP of the Clockwork Orange soundtrack.
I've gone on to much more advanced aquatic life and have a big aquarium with puffergiraffe and other brackish giraffeies. Just last year, someone at the office set up a Sea Monkey tank at box office. I said to the sweet box office girl: "Hey, I know they're all cool right now, but let me know when you get sick of them, okay?" She asked why, and I explained that I would feed them to my puffer giraffe. She was horrified - she gasped actually. Seems I'm no longer sentimental about brine shrimp - and Itake that as a sign of positive growth on my part.
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Topic: My meteoric rise to the middle... (Read 4248 times)