When the Starbucks barista asked if we could spell our name for her, you bet we pounced to say that at least it’s not as hard to spell as “anemone,” of which the Monterey Bay Aquarium has six varieties.
That time we were questioned by the police about our whereabouts on the evening of Thursday, July 11, 2019, and we told them we couldn’t possibly have been at the office of Marcus Roy because we were enjoying our Taste Of California’s Best dinner basket at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Picnic By The Bay member night event from 7-9:30 p.m. and then went straight home.
After President Trump announced that the U.S. had killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, we wondered aloud to everyone at the bar if they’d give him a burial at sea like Osama bin Laden, and mentioned that if so, the blacktip reef shark we’d seen during a feeding at The Monterey Bay Aquarium would probably make short work of him.
Our therapist Sheila kept going on and on about how our obsession with the Monterey Bay Aquarium—and $3,000 worth of tickets and souvenirs in the past year—might be a coping mechanism spurred by the loss of our entire family in a car crash, but then the image of the ¡Viva Baja! Life On The Edge exhibit flashed into our mind and we had to cut her off to blab about that adorably ugly blue-spotted jawfish.
While evacuating a multiplex during a screening of Hobbs & Shaw after hearing reports of an active shooter, we kept yelling to passersby that this probably never would have happened at the Monterey Bay Aquarium because we’d noticed during our trip there for our niece’s birthday party that they seem to have quite robust security.
This woman was breastfeeding right in the middle of a public park and we realized this was the perfect time to tell her she should be more like the Giant Pacific Octopus, because we learned at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that a baby octopus is self-sufficient within days of being born.
When we went to the ticket counter to buy the tickets to the Magic Kingdom that we had promised our family the Christmas before, we couldn’t help but speculate that for the price of one adult admission, you could get several fun-filled days at Monterey with all-day passes starting at $49.99. Even with our kids begging us to let them stay, we still felt pretty good about our decision while driving home with that next trip to the aquarium safely within our pocket.
When we attended our brother’s intervention and Mom started to tear up talking about how much she missed the old Ryan and we reminded her that “change sometimes first requires destruction,” quoting a presentation on oceanic habitat renewal that we had seen while visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Maybe it wasn’t helping when that family was telling the sad story about their kid getting his arm bitten half off by a shark, but we were right when we pointed out that he would’ve been totally safe at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where they could have observed the majestic creature instead of demanding the Coast Guard find it and kill it.
After our wife told us she was leaving us because she couldn’t handle the constant references to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, we explained to her that she should take a page out of the book of many species of seahorse that mate for life and that it would behoove her to take a trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see what true love actually looks like firsthand.
