Have you ever been kept awake by gold fish? Noisy gold fish? I have. I never would have dreamed that gold fish were capable of making noise, but they do, they can gulp air. I was sleeping on a friends couch in Seattle, he was babysitting a pair of gold fish, sitting in a gold fish bowl on the dining room table twenty feet from my couch. We suspected that the water was tainted or something because they kept gulping air, and it seemed a little more cloudy than before. I guess fish need oxygen in their water, and if they don't get enough of it they come to the surface to suck air, making little popping sounds with their little fish lips.

It might not have been so bad if I wasn't worried about them, what if they drowned? I couldn't allow myself to become callous about their tiny wet lives. We had tried changing the water to make it fresher, but I was afraid to change too much of it because I thought I remembered something about fish being really sensitive to tap water and acidity or chlorine or something. So there I lay awake, worried about fish lives and water quality. What keeps you awake at night? (edit 534) Permalink