Self-Taught Homework #7: Fish are friends?

The quick moment and disappearance of fish has really got you thinking.

Fish week: always poorly timed.

One week you’re making yourself cross-eyed writing out a “statement of purpose,” a paper that induces a mindset of certainty in your qualities and ambitions until you hit send and pass it along for someone else to decide.

Another week you started your week on Wednesday, the third day of the new year. In a firework conclusion of a year, you hold a baby then leave for the city where you hold a small dog named Cricket and dance to Abba in someone’s living room where the theme was “birds.” Those who follow the theme with plastic-bulbed eyeballs on bird-head masks are the most disturbing. You stay in town and watch the dark evening phase of the Philadelphia Mummer’s Parade. The more you ask about how people become a mummer, the more it seems to become a question of “who do you know.”

By the time you’re back in your apartment, the itchy anticipation of resolutions has dulled, and the crumbs and bad habits from the last year have found a way under the cracked …