Oh What a Slug I Am

I have decided that I have the self-esteem of your average ordinary garden slug but not of the kind that lives near the tomato plants in your average ordinary garden because my invisible friend Zoe told me that the slugs that live near the tomato plants are the high-class slugs so surely they've got a lot of self esteem because they have it made in life although I doubt that they believe that I have an invisible friend Zoe because noone else seems to believe it either even though I tell them not to sit in the chair next to me at lunch because she's sitting there already but they go ahead and sit down and then they squish her and blood and guts go flying everywhere but at least they're invisible blood and guts so you don't have to worry too much about cleaning up afterward because noone notices until it starts to smell but then people just blame it on the food which would be great except there's Zoe laying in a pile of blood and guts which would be pretty horrible if she weren't able to make herself all better which she says she can't actually do and that it's her imaginary friend that puts her back together again but I don't really believe her when she tells me that because if her friend is imaginary how could he do anything to put her back together but she says that he's a magician from the planet Zeist so he can do wonderful things like working in the real world even though he's imaginary so I still don't believe her but at least she gets well every time although people do still think that I don't have a real friend because they can't see her and they think that she's imaginary and so they look at me like I'm crazy and sometimes they call me crazy to my face and I'm thinking that I might start believing it myself and that's why I think I have the self-esteem of your ordinary garden slug.

The Legend of the Sleeping Cat

The imagination is a wonderful thing, a great way to use up a rainy day, or to make a ten-hour drive fly by. Or is a great way to put off a twenty-page paper. Coming up with reasons why a paper might not be due in four hours can occupy more than the four hours remaining. And if there are more people to help come up with ideas, the game could be played for /years/ before the paper gets started.

Given a group of intelligent people and the bare bones of a plot line, some pretty fun things can happen. A pretty amazing story or theory or plan to take over the world can result, just by hours of brainstorming. Many fascinating ideas have come from such sessions and hours to spare.

Of course, for things to work well, everyone has to be interested in the same goal. The produce something worth producing. Sadly, it doesn't always work this way, sadly people often aren't willing to sacrifice their wild ideas for some sense of coherence. Or everyone at least has to understand the point.

There's a card game, "Once Upon a Time," in which each player gets 7 cards. Each has an word or phrase on it (Spell, Night, Time Passes, etc.), which are used to produce a story. The "goal" of the game is to play all your cards, bringing the story to an end. But the "point" of the game is to tell an interesting story. Alas, as a camp counselor, when my kids wanted to play my card game, they understood the goal, but not the point. Somehow, I never won.

But neither did they.

Once upon a time, a ring found on an island that was at sea went and transformed someone's parent into a sleeping cat. It died. The end.