New Friends in the Dorm

This semester, I thought I would look forward to my Fridays.  I don’t have any classes, meaning I can sleep as long as I want and relax.  It’s basically like having three-day weekends all semester.  Much to my dismay, this was not the case today.  When I woke up this morning, the skies were gray and dreary, and there was fog so thick that I could barely see outside my dorm window.  My hopes of the day being bright and exciting vanished, and instead I looked forward to a day cooped inside reading about media ethics and analyzing poetry. 

Yuck.

My roommate left around mid-morning to run some errands for the day.  The skies finally cleared, but I was still drowning in my weekend homework, so it wasn’t like I could go outside and enjoy it quite yet.  I turned on my “pump-up” playlist on iTunes and got to work, swearing that I would go out at some point today…

I was alone until about 3:30 this afternoon, when my roommate returned with dorm snacks, a wall mirror, and two small mysterious jars filled with water.  When she placed them on her desk, I saw that each jar contained a male beta fish; one was red, and one was blue.

“We have some new friends,” my roomie said.

“Fantastic,” I replied, examining one of the betas.  “Can we name them?”

We tossed around ideas for a few minutes, trying to think of funny or witty name combinations.  Male beta fish have tendencies to fight one another, so we thought it’d be clever to name the fish after rival characters.

Batman and Joker?  Nah.

Superman and Lux Luther?  Nah.

Aladdin and Jafar?  Still nah.

Harry and Vold—I mean, You-Know-Who?  Convincing, but…nah.

Finally, it hit us, the perfect pair: the blue fish was dubbed Luke, and the red fish was dubbed Vader. 

Yes, we’re dorks, and perhaps we’re kind of nerds.  But you have to admit that’s pretty awesome.  Naming pets, even fish, after sci-fi characters makes me happy.