Congratulations Professor Octopus!

Professor Octopus, we love you!

You teach at an undersea university, each student equally important in your eyes.

“You should hang out in anemonies more often,” you’ll tell a clown fish who is often being lured to bad neighborhoods by a barracuda who he was interested in dating. He’ll take your advice because he loves and respects you.

“You should just find out what you really want,” you’ll inform the related barracuda, who hasn’t been sanguine about a future where she functions as one of the world’s most vicious eating machines ever. Thanks to your advice she’ll free to pursue whatever occupation she wishes. She’ll pick art therapist, which isn’t the worst thing she could’ve gone for.

“Let your girl go,” you’ll tell the shark who raised the barracuda, who will think you’re sticking your tentacles where they don’t belong but will be restrained from the physical violence he so desperately wishes to commit by the presence of your assistant, a very physically imposing sperm whale who is considering graduate school.

“I’ll get by without you,” you’ll kindly inform the sperm whale, who will be tentatively asking you for letters of recommendation for a number of graduate institutions, most of them at the bottom of the ocean. With the force of your confidence he’ll propel himself into a fantastic career as one of the most prominent Melville Scholars in human history.

“I think we can make this work,” you’ll tell your wife, a giant squid whose family disapproved of your marriage from the start and who have, lately, begun to make your life quite difficult with their constant prodding and smack-talk about your octopus heritage. She’ll want to believe you quite badly, and she’ll know she still loves you, but it’ll be hard, so hard, for her to see the future.

She’ll rest her tentacle on yours and her black eyes will gaze into yours. She’ll long to lock her beak with yours so violently that she rips the delicate membrane surrounding it, but she won’t. Instead she’ll stroke the back of your adorably bulbous head with four of her arms.

“Okay,” she’ll tell you, smiling as best a squid can.

Congratulations Professor Octopus!