adventures in parenting - or - abandonment sans guilt
When I was in college, me and my roommate Tanya decided we wanted pets, even though we weren’t supposed to have pets. We thought we were above the law, man! So here’s what we did. We took our shiny new Capital One Student Visa cards (three hundred dollar limit, thank you very much) to the pet store and did us some shopping!
I bought an aquarium, and a butt-load of fish. Mike, Carol, Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby, Cindy, Alice, Sam, Oliver and Tiger were their names. I’m not kidding either. The only one I could tell apart from the others was Oliver. He was a gold fish, like all the rest, but he was kinda bumpy and had these weird not-quite-freckle marks all over him and I felt sorry for him, so he just had to be Oliver.
Well, they all died in like a week, and that was probably for the best, cause I sure wasn’t going to fit cleaning the tank in with all of the not going to class and not studying I had to cram in to my schedule.
We also bought two rats. They were the coolest. We named them Justin and Fivel. I have no idea if that’s how you spell Fivel, but he was the rat or mouse or whatever from An American Tale, and Justin was the best rat ever from The Secret of Nimh. We bought them all the stuff they needed to be happy. We played with them an awful lot. We hid them away nicely, just in time for room check. We were great rat moms.
But, when Fivel turned out to be a pregnant chick? We were not as happy. Tanya took her home over winter break, and when the babies were born, they became snake food (don’t make me sing you “circle of life”), and all was well once again.
Eventually however, we decided we were done being rat moms, and they had to go. This posed a bit of a problem, as the pet shop was like 2 miles away, and we had not going to class and not studying to do. So, here’s what we did instead. We opened up the window of our dorm room, and we put the rats outside. We figured they were rats, they would forage, or whatever rats do. We were happy with our decision and went about our not going to class and not studying.
About a week later, Justin made a mad dash up Peter Barretts leg right outside the student center. Wanna know how me and Tanya handled it? We lied. Mmm hmm. That’s right. We looked everyone who asked in the eye and said “We took them to the pet store, they probably got fed to snakes.”
Yeah, I bet they bought it.
arrivederci, rebecca marie
I bought an aquarium, and a butt-load of fish. Mike, Carol, Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby, Cindy, Alice, Sam, Oliver and Tiger were their names. I’m not kidding either. The only one I could tell apart from the others was Oliver. He was a gold fish, like all the rest, but he was kinda bumpy and had these weird not-quite-freckle marks all over him and I felt sorry for him, so he just had to be Oliver.
Well, they all died in like a week, and that was probably for the best, cause I sure wasn’t going to fit cleaning the tank in with all of the not going to class and not studying I had to cram in to my schedule.
We also bought two rats. They were the coolest. We named them Justin and Fivel. I have no idea if that’s how you spell Fivel, but he was the rat or mouse or whatever from An American Tale, and Justin was the best rat ever from The Secret of Nimh. We bought them all the stuff they needed to be happy. We played with them an awful lot. We hid them away nicely, just in time for room check. We were great rat moms.
But, when Fivel turned out to be a pregnant chick? We were not as happy. Tanya took her home over winter break, and when the babies were born, they became snake food (don’t make me sing you “circle of life”), and all was well once again.
Eventually however, we decided we were done being rat moms, and they had to go. This posed a bit of a problem, as the pet shop was like 2 miles away, and we had not going to class and not studying to do. So, here’s what we did instead. We opened up the window of our dorm room, and we put the rats outside. We figured they were rats, they would forage, or whatever rats do. We were happy with our decision and went about our not going to class and not studying.
About a week later, Justin made a mad dash up Peter Barretts leg right outside the student center. Wanna know how me and Tanya handled it? We lied. Mmm hmm. That’s right. We looked everyone who asked in the eye and said “We took them to the pet store, they probably got fed to snakes.”
Yeah, I bet they bought it.
arrivederci, rebecca marie
proclaimed by rebecca marie at 9:05 PM
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