Such animated conversation this Sunday afternoon between the three us there was, as I made the buttonholes in Laura's new black blouse. It was a philosophical conversation that got initiated earlier this weekend when watching an animated film 'Waking Life'. Various people caught in philosophizing are caught in this dreaming man's life. Actually, the people were filmed in digital mode, and then the animations drawn over them scene by scene. Having some familiarity with simpler digital processes, I could tell this even before watching the producer show how he'd done it. Quite creative it was, in any case, and both visually and mentally stimulating.

Added into this mix was the signature file someone in an email list we all subsribe to has: ''Question Empiricism''. Me not being all that highbrow, I had no idea what it meant. Julia trotted out one heavy book of our two-part dictionary and read out loud the defination for empiricism: ''The doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience through the senses.'' Well, we can question what our senses tell us, but I don't really know how else reality is determined. And I do so love that 'sensuous' experience of life, which comes, of course, through the senses. But maybe all of this is all too high-falutin' for me, and I can't really understand what the hell this is about.

Anyway, it prompted Laura to come up with a new signature file of her own:

I'm not too sure what 'insubstantial' means. I do know what perspiration is, however, and my, do I have a lot of that these days, living as I do in the hottest civilized place in the United States.

One day at work was particularily trial-filled, and I was feeling quite harried. I cried (silently) to the heavens, and said ''Lord, give me strength!''

Not too long afterwards, a rather STRONG aroma began arising from my armpits. ''This is NOT what I meant!'' I again (silently) shouted to the misunderstanding heavens.

Oh, perspiration we have in abundance. A small crystal rock of some salt type we have applied to the armpits seems to help its side effects, however, without the harmful effects of chemical preparations.

Yes, perspiration we have, but what of the imagination? I do believe I have a greater than average imagination quota. I am, while working and perspiring, doing an awful lot of imagining. I invent whole tales, and maybe this is how fiction writers get started. Using the background of Everquest's Norrathian worlds, I imagine whole sequences of events involving my game characters.

New character!

Kaaldar, my Dark Elf enchanter!
(and level 14 already)

The above blue beauty is my current favorite. Oh, he's a b-a-a-a-d boy, he is, and he loves seducing the fairer Elves. His seductions work, and he lives a very happy life.

I should write down some of his adventures. They might make a good story, and not just the sort of thing that later climaxes in, um, climaxes, um. Blush.

At any rate, imagination plays a large role in MY reality. Oh, one has to know it's imagination, of course. One doesn't go out into the world and see blue elves or talking apes, or Mork from Ork, naturally. But what a duller world it would be without these imagined fancies.