(Seal)

My often too-real-for-comfort, but imaginary friend Kate absolutely hates seals. She believes they’re yappy, yippy smooth-skinned and stupid. They stick their ugly noses in the air for no reason whatsoever! They ask dumb questions like, “What are you?” when everyone should know that Kate’s an otter. That’s what Kate thinks. I do believe she could be more tolerant, but everybody needs someone to pick on, I suppose. I had to slam the door on Kate the last time she went on a rant about seals. It was about to get ugly. It’s never cool to have a physical fight with imaginary friends. Someone comes out looking the worse for wear, and then there have to be real explanations.
“How can you get so dirty and bruised playing by yourself?”
At that the imaginary friend rubs salt in the wound by whispering to the inner ear, “Yeah. Explain that, you loser!” And you can’t respond for obvious reasons of furthering your already tarnished reputation of being nuts.
I figure she knows nothing of seals, but for some reason has this crazy imagination that they’re all bad. She never got close to one through childhood, but her mother kept harping on and on about how nasty they were. Whenever some scary tugboat would whistle, or wolves would howl in the bushes near her ocean, Kate’s Mother would soothe her with, “It’s those darned seals again.” So little wonder my friend has a bias.
Then, unfortunately the one time she did encounter one, it happened to be a dumb nosy one. So this experience aided the already existing negative stereotype. Angela from California may not have been the brightest seal, but then again maybe it was a personality clash. The other possibility (not my POV) could be that Kate’s intelligent, and doesn’t know it, so everybody seems dumb – according to her, anyway.