This is how computers actually work. I swear that it is true. I know, I know… I have on occasion stretched the truth just a bit… like down the block and around the corner where I tied it around a lamp post. But in my defense, I write fiction. This is not fiction. This is a narrative of actual experiences that I managed to live through and learn from.
You see, as I was working on my writing, I underwent a plethora of computer malfunctions that made me really, really mad. I took my rubber stress ball and threw it at the far wall. It bounced back directly into my left temple, making me see stars, and then, apparently, summoning a genii. He was standing there grinning at me.
“How can I be of service, master?” he said with magical sparkles in his white teeth.
“Oh, I just wish I could see inside the computer to know why it does these terrible things to me every time I press a key.”
“Your wish is my command, master.” He poofed me in a pink and blue cloud of genii magic, and suddenly I was tiny and digital, able to walk inside my computer and take a look.”
“What makes you the most mad, master?” the genii, whose name I learned was Computus, asked me.
“When it deletes stuff for no apparent reason…” I began.
“Ahh! You need to see the Desert of the Deletion Dervishes.”
So he took me to a digital field of file flowers, where all the files that contained my best saved work were growing peacefully. There were all the maniacal digital dervishes on digital horses, busy slashing the stems of my file flowers with their digital scimitars.
“Aagh! No!” I cried. “Why are they deleting my stuff?”
“Oh, do not worry. They are focusing on the files you use most and deleting only those. They are very efficient in carrying out their orders.”
“And who gives them these orders?”
“Why you do, sir. When you give the computer orders from a drop down menu, you are rarely clicking on the order you intended to. And “Save” is close enough to “Delete” to make our work simple.”
“And why do I keep having new windows opening up randomly where I don’t want them to?”
“Ah, the Public Pool of Pop-up Peris! Let us go see that too!”
So he poofed me into a pit of electrical fire filled with electrical fire beings who were busy crafting evil pop-up windows to plague me.
“So, these creatures are filling my screen with ads for hemorrhoid creams and Asian dating sites?”
“Yes, and surveys about why you love President Trump and thought Obama was terrible.”
“And why when I click on the X’s to get rid of them, do two more appear?”
“Oh that’s simple. They purposefully make the X’s so tiny and the surrounding area so sensitive that if you don’t hit the exact center of the X precisely, then it knows you want to see two more ads chosen specifically for you by the mind-reading genii.”
“But the ads are always the opposite of what I actually want to see!”
“Well, of course they are. Computer genii are the kind made entirely of fire. We call them Efrits, and they are the most powerful evil jinn we have available.”
So then I awoke with a painful knot on my forehead and a new understanding of why this post was so difficult to write. The computer treats me so evilly because that is precisely what it was designed to do.
Catch a Falling Star 
Aquarium, Terrarium, Planetarium
As a teenager I was very much into raising tropical fish in an aquarium. Having fish to watch and fuss around with is a healthy, mind-calming hobby that literally helps you learn about environmental issues. Keeping an aquarium is all about keeping fundamental forces of biology in relative balance.
Some fish are there just for beauty. The angelfish and gouramis I have pictured already are mainly that. Though you could also say that kissing fish, the pink kissing gouramis, also provide comic relief.
Keeping an aquarium is a balancing act.
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If you put the wrong fish together, problems ensue. Fully grown angelfish will eat expensive guppies and neon tetras. Goldfish waste so much fish food and make so much fish poop that the tank has to be cleaned nearly every day to prevent it become a befouled cesspool of toxic filth and bacteria. Unless…
You employ bottom-feeders like the corydorus catfish or the red-tailed black shark (actually a loach, not a shark) to feed on the waste and be the janitor-fish.
A carefully balanced tank is a living work of art that grows and changes and progresses…
…Until something goes wrong. Every fish tank I ever put together eventually had a crisis that made the whole ecology crash. All the fish would die and the tank would smell bad. This would usually happen when I wasn’t there to tend it as needed, when I was away at college or on vacation. Water has to be refreshed. The water can never be allowed to cool lower than seventy degrees, even in winter. The air pump can’t break down and stop aerating the aquarium. The filter has to be clean and unclogged. And disease has to be treated.
In a way, our entire planet earth is like that too. Of course, if it was all sealed under glass, it would be a terrarium, not an aquarium. But we can identify the same sorts of threats to the ecosystem of the terrarium we live in as would be found in a tropical fish tank. Donald Trump and his Republican fat-cats are the goldfish. Global warming threatens the air and water in the tank. An asteroid could break the glass and spill the contents out. So many things could crash our carefully balanced fish tank. And there is an even greater environment out there beyond the edges of our little solar system. Does the title make sense now in a way it didn’t before? No? Oh, well, I tried.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, humor
Tagged as aquarium, betta-fish, fish, pets, tropical-fish