well, hello. long time no see.
my life has gotten a little bit crazy. i guess i say that a lot. this morning i put up a hammock on the porch before going to the library for work. i’m working about 6 hours a day at this point, 11 – 5. i like that there’s a definitive end to my work day, it stops me from working too much, and helps me go relax. i also like that i wake up in the morning when it feels right for me. i usually don’t have to set an alarm, because naturally, i’ll wake up, at the latest, around 10 or so. and i go to bed a little bit after the sun goes down. it’s a good schedule.
i’ve gone out in the boat twice now, once for a ride, and once for a tutorial. i’m sure once i practice more i’ll get better at it, but for now i’d say i’m not too shabby. there’s always drama about our bosses being bad at communication – not telling us when to show up, or what the schedule is, or whatnot – but it’s not the end of the world.
i’m going home next week, too, because my sister & nana are coming. but if you’re in syracuse, we should hang out.
i had more profound things to say last night, but i just feel bad now. see, yesterday, when i woke up, i was drinking some tea and walking by the water, when i noticed five or six very large fishes (i’d say the length of my forearm, sans exaggeration) hangin out under a tree. i think they’d gotten trapped in that pool of water, which was deep enough for ‘em, but the exit was too shallow to get back to the lake. now, i’m not a great fisherman, and my previous attempts to catch a fish here have failed, so i saw an opportunity & got excited. i ran to grab a net, and it turned into some kind of battle of wits, with the fishes being faster, but me wanting not to be outsmarted by a fish. and so i won, and netted one. and then, thinking that there were a few and that we could eat it later, i netted another.
heather convinced me that the humane way to kill the fish was to freeze them. i was skeptical, but, being on my way to work, i didn’t want to gut ‘em then & there, so i went along with it, and we put them in the freezer. heather said it slowed their heartbeats, to the point of being calm & sleepy, and then they’d die in their sleep. my dad later confirmed that it’s better to just kill them, but by then it was too late, and i was not at the cabin.
i researched what kind of fish they were. i know this lake is big on lake trout, which i’m told are tasty, but, to my dismay, they turned out to be carp. when i told heather this, she gawked and said those are "bottom feeders" & "garbage eaters" and that they aren’t safe to eat. i panicked a little, and my dad, and most of the internet confirmed. i wanted to make sure, so saved images and wikipedia articles to take home and check.
it turned out, they were carp. i wasn’t sure what to do. i didn’t want to have killed these creatures in vain, but i was nervous about eating them. this lake isn’t the cleanest lake in the world, really. i decided i was gonna eat them anyway, simply because it felt so wrong to have killed them just to… what, throw them away? i thawed one of em, fretting about it the entire time. it got dark, and i couldn’t put it off any longer, so with a fire going and an oil lamp to light my hands, i got a knife & worked up the courage to pick the fish up with my fingers. i hesitated. not just because i felt bad about killing a fish, but because i wasn’t sure i was strong enough to remove his insides. i cut, like my grandpa had done when i was kid – a straight line from his tail to his chin. it started to bleed.
i couldn’t do it.
i hope that it was a mix of compassion & guilt & the fact that i knew this would be gross to eat. i decided that i couldn’t throw him away, that he deserved more respect than that, and so, while i apologized in my brain and went over what happened, trying to send good thoughts to his spirit and let him know that i was naiive, and excited, and i knew now what i’d done. so i set him, sort of ritualistically, in the fire. i thought of it was a respectful way of apologizing, i guess.
it’s all a little crazy, but i feel like i should have thought about what i was doing, made sure i was doing it for the right reasons, and not just jumped at an opportunity to catch something. catching something isn’t even a good enough phrase; it was an opportunity to kill something, and it isn’t that i’m entirely against killing for food, it’s that killing something just should not be taken lightly.