Common App: Fish Expeditions
For the past three years, I’ve been a professional fish breeder. Like many kids, I’ve had my share of goldfish and guppies; however, my life changed when I brought home a shark.
One Friday night, my friends and I decided to explore. While out and about, spontaneous me thought that it’d be a great idea to buy a shark from the local fish store (yes, a shark) and hide it in my closet. Over several weeks, my clandestine pal relied on the three criteria to a healthy lifestyle: Water, Chipotle, and Gatorade. Guacamole quickly converted to inches and, after two months, the shark became too “unmanageable,” i.e. it was too big to flush, so it ended up in the Denver Aquarium; however, that escapade sparked my current fascination with exotic fish.
After weeks of convincing my parents, I flipped an ill-used storage space in my basement into a fish room. Now, I love spending my free time among the wooden beams slumped under hundreds of gallons of aquariums, rocks, filters, and tubes. Ironically, fish aren’t the cornerstone to my hobby; instead, I love the adventures gained traveling across multiple states buying, selling, and breeding rare fish.
It’s the satisfaction of visiting new places that I associate with my many weekday nights and weekend mornings as I, a modern Don Quixote, bump down empty roads for hundreds of miles through the borders of Colorado on my chivalrous horse - a coughing, fume-filled 96’ Saab - “fish hunting.” My steed and I sputter between fish business hotspots that include breeding rooms like mine, stores, and conventions: corn, skyscrapers, and mountains are the various backdrops to such travels. Journeys like these allow me to stretch my intellectual imagination: I’ve downloaded many podcasts to listen to while I’m driving: it’s NPR’s “This American Life” and their broad range of stories to which I attribute my embrace of constantly looking at the small things, and it’s to Jean Baudrillard, French guru, that I thank my willingness to probe suppressed phenomena such as the morality of the private prison system and rehabilitation vs. retribution. My phone is littered with Think-Tank colleagues who don’t know me... yet: I have Alain de Benoist, my favorite neoliberalism critic, on speed dial. Fish adventures are time to gaze out the window and place introspection above the status quo; here, I refine social confusion, writer’s block, and common adversity into melody.
After investigating salient discourse with my future colleagues, I methodically include a visit to the fish store “Golden Fish,” a haphazard assemblage of concrete tucked along a rough strip of north Denver. Aquatic wonders line the walls of the store, but it’s the people within that make the trip all the more appealing. With Maryll the owner, Frank the fish food guy, and an abundance of other outcast, yet essentially good people, I’ve come to be known as PK, Parkdog, PMacs, Parks and Rec, and (noxious story) Big Mac. Here, I thrive on new experiences. For example, I’ve learned how to network water piping for a business, barter electric eels with customers, analyze fish based on jaw structure, and catch stingrays! My time at Golden Fish is a unique satisfaction of challenge and exceedingly rare connections with ideas, people, and communities whom I’d never expect.
During drives home from expeditions, I’m invariably spotted climbing mountains with a sack of rocks slung over my back or waist-deep wading through rivers, searching for new stones and logs. I’m later gawked at in my backyard, meticulously cleaning my new raw materials that will soon enter my tanks (I spend hours creating wild biotypes for the fish: it’s become my own art form). Regardless of outside perception, two things are certain: I’ve always had an appetite for risk and I’ve always been fascinated with things atypical for my age, but I’m okay with that. Besides, dead fish go with the flow.