Two Things Happened This Week

One was that Russ and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. I think that means we're officially at the point where things get celebrated on fivesies instead of onesies. Playing jacks, marriage -- it's all part of the same circle. And I'm referencing my friend Chad and metafictional circles, not Simba and the circle of life circles.

We went to the Aquarium of the Pacific and took a behind-the-scenes tour. This means we saw all the secret labs where horseshoe crabs are (as we speak) being bred with humans to produce new superhumans with amazing pinching capabilities. We got to feed sharks nori and explore the world of aquarium-style water filtration. I realized the novel I'm writing, which includes a character who works in an aqurium, needs to be totally rewritten and imagined. I'm talking Eternal Sunshine revision, which includes memory erasure and lots of deletion. But far from being an anguishing thought, it's completely exciting. I like learning enough about a subject to get more ideas about how to tie characters to events and places; for instance, I learned yesterday that although the A.P. has about 1,000 employees, only about 200 of them are full-time and paid. So now I have to figure out how to translate my newly acquired smarts about this into the novel and account for how, if my character is one of 200 paid employees, she managed to finagle such a cushy gig. She must be a cut-throat and probably, a bit devious. Dark.

The other thing that happened this week is that we had an infestation of ants. Ants covered our kitchen walls, marching around like the Israelites around the walls of Jericho. Before everything fell to the ground, we crushed so many of them that our house still hasn't gotten rid of the stink of ant death. We had to vaccuum ant carcuses off our walls and floors and doorjambs, mop them up, sweep them up, pinch them off the utensils and pots and pans.

As I was driving to Vons for the third time in one night -- once to find a DVD-R for Russ, once to get ant spray, and then, to get Russ butterfly bandages after he split his head open on the corner of a cabinet while killing ants -- I thought about why we haven't domesticated anteaters yet.