This was my day: I walked around campus with a dead fish in a cup. Not just any dead fish, but a dead fish covered in some sort of ethereal cloud of fuzz. Then I rode with said fish on the bus to the pet store from whence he came.

Percursor to this odd story: My roommate comes home on Sunday with her brand-new betta fish, a pretty little slip of a fishie she decided to (ironically) name "Fluffy." Her friend, who works at a pet store, advised her to buy a small filter tank designed just for bettas and to use bottled water in caring for the Fluffmeister. So she comes home, sets up her cool new tank and plops her little fishy in the bottled water. I wake up the next day, and Jen summons me to look at the fish . . . he has . . . fur . . . or . . . fuzz . . . or, um, fluff of some sort protruding from certain parts of his little fishy body. Frantically, she calls the petstore at certain points during the day. They tell her that there is a medicine that could help Fluffy, so we agree to go and get it for her the next day, since we all have class on Monday. She spends much of the evening, post-movie watching session, agonizing over her fish, especially because we return to find him with his fins caught in the filter tube.

Heather and I look at Fluffy today before breakfast, and boy, oh, boy is he fucking fluffy. And dead. Way dead. Caught up in the little plastic plants in his tank. Well, we have to get him out of there somehow to take him back to the petstore. I make Heather do it. (I think she used my spoon, though . . .)

So, after class, we trek across campus, dead fishie in hand, and nab the bus downtown, dead fishie in Heather's hand, now. At the pet store, the fishmonger tells us that Fluffy was the victim of "the ick." You see, bettas are very sensitive pussy fish, which is odd considering they are fighting fish. These little guys don't deal well with temperature changes. That's why you can't put them in direct sunlight. Now, as to the bottled water problem . . . yeah . . . bottled water has more chlorine in it than tap water, and chlorine strips off the bettas protective coating, allowing all of the bacteria in the water to eat away its skin. "The Ick." Fuck.

She's gonna beat up her friend from the petstore.

We got her a new fish. We're gonna try not to kill this one this time.