When I was a kid, I did something really terrible. My father bought me two goldfish and named them "Iasc" and" Iasc Elie". He told me that meant "Fish" and "Other Fish" in Irish. To an eight-year-old child, the names seemed really boring.
These boring names made me feel the goldfish were boring, too. They did nothing more than swim around in their bowl. Sometimes, for fun, they would swim to the bottom of their bowl and dance around along the bottom, looking for interesting pieces of gravel.
I tried many ways to make the goldfish more exciting. The most interesting thing was to see how long they could live out of the water. I took a fish out of the water with my hands and watched it gasping for air. Then I put it back in the bowl. And then I would take them out of the water again, for longer and longer each time.
Iasc and Iasc Elie started swimming towards the top of the water, not moving very much. Then they started floating on the top of the water. In other words, they were dead.
I thought that bigger pets are more exciting, such as a cat and a dog. It would live longer than a goldfish, and then I kept a dog as my pet.
