I'm not going to bitch about my family, because I do love them even though they drive me crazy (and vice versa). That much is understood.

However, this morning I learned a lot about my family, and therefore, me since most of these traits I'm going to describe are either inherited or learned.

Today my parents cleaned out the fish tank. A simple task, really. Until you take into account that these were tropical fish, that need special instructions. They don't know these instructions, either because they were never told or they didn't read the instructions that were given/told to them when they purchased the fish.

Nevertheless, they attempted to clean out the tank, using a soap cleanser, various other chemicals and a scrub brush. They then filled the tank with ice cold water, and dumped (and i do mean dump) the fish in.

Any fish afficonado knows that this is death for those fish (and oh, they did die) for a number of reason but the top three being 1. you don't use soaps or chemicals on a tank since they leave toxic residue, 2. you never change the temperature in a tank since just a degree off can pull them into shock and shortly thereafter, death and 3. you never dump fish. NEVER (well, maybe bettas since they are more resilient than most fish, but certainly not neons).

They didn't know this, of course, and I wouldn't know it either unless I had read up on it.

Nevertheless, today I learned these things about my family:

1. We need instructions. Seriously. We lack a thing called 'common sense', and that makes us cause accidents. We don't know why we cause these accidents, and we usually don't know how to ameliorate them - we just feel sorry and silly. So, please - when giving us a complicated task (or even a simple one)- include step by step instructions, and I do mean step by step because if you leave out a seemingly obvious step such as 'dump out the water', we will forgo it completely or screw it up somehow.

2. We're stubborn. We're always the last to admit that we don't know what we're doing, so we will continue doing whatever we're doing until something awful happens or you correct us, and when you correct us we'll give you some kind of excuse like 'oh, sorry, this is the way they do it in Italy' or some other such nonsense, thereby sparing our own egos.

3. Although we're clumsy and stubborn, we do love passionately- others, animals - and we just want to help, really. The tank was cleaned because it was filthy, and they wanted the fish to have a nicer living space. We just don't understand people, or animals - we can't see their personal umvelt, so we just assume what's best for them and do it for them. This causes us to inadvertently hurt people (or kill animals). Afterwards, we feel awful and usually berate ourselves (and each other) for being so idiotic, so rushed, so __insert adjective here___.

4. After that, we all take our own personal stances to what just occurred. Some of us ignore it entirely, blaming the victim for being weak and consistently declare that we were just trying to help (although inside we feel awful). Some of us try to figure out what we did wrong, and mostly go about doing this in an over the top way - buying a series of books about the subject, calling numerous amounts of friends, or just talking it out (side note- when it comes to people, we usually never learn until years later what actually happened). The rest of us make attempts to ameliorate the problem, help the victim, erase the pain - and these are mostly done in vain since the A------ rarely make a small mistake, but usually a huge, painful one. And sometimes we do all of them, or none of them or something completely different.

So, there you have it. I know it's a lot to get from a fish tank fiasco, but it's nothing short from the truth.