Ode to the Aquarium

On a day trip to San Diego for the purposes of visiting my brother, one of our destinations was the Birch aquarium at UCSD's Scripps Institute of Oceanography. 

There are two things that occasionally make me reconsider my English major, and they are 1. space and 2. the ocean. I cannot accurately state how much I love aquariums. I love them so much, I even wrote a short fiction piece on the topic (which you can access here if you would like). 

To me, an aquarium showcase some of the strangest, most intriguing things we can find on this planet. It is a place where five college-age students can revert to a joyful childhood of intellectual curiosity and wonder. A place where one finds whimsical things like pipefish that spend their entire lives swimming vertically, appropriately named "upside-down jellyfish" that pulsate with their bulbous heads to the ground, and odd, corkscrew-shaped packages that house baby leopard sharks. A place where one can poke an anemone and pet a lobster. A place where one can ponder and then share a good laugh over odd creatures that look more like victims than masterpieces of aquatic evolution. 

The aquarium remind us of how much more there is to life than a commute, a cubicle, a classroom. It puts us before something largely unknown, and widens the horizons of our imaginations.