As a kid growing up, I was always under the impression that people were creative or not.  I equated creativity with being a painter, musician, etc.  For some reason, it seemed ingrained in me that creative people just had all their ideas just pop into their head without trying, and even when I tried to be creative, I always ended up being less productive than usual.

This conception of mine persisted through most of high school and into college.  Not as acute as when I was a kid, but I still never felt that I could be much of an artist or anything because I never saw myself as being creative.  I tried writing, but was plagued by perpetual writers block.  I outright avoided painting or drawing because I couldn’t do either very well, let alone even come up with creative ideas to put on paper.

To compound things, growing up I was always a thinker.  I always approached things I did as some what of input/output, even without really recognizing or labeling it as such.  From school work to fiddling with my computer, there was always some thing there that I took, processed, and came up with something else.  This was my M.O.  This was just how my mind worked because I wasn’t creative, despite getting comments from adults from time to time about my creativity.  Since I didn’t feel like I was doing anything special, just input/output, I never thought anything of those comments.

Through the past two and a half years(?) or so though, I’ve been reexamining how I approach everything in life, creativity included.  I’ve figured out how to hack my mindset to become more social and to be able to actually enjoy the single life, so why not hack in some creativity while I’m at it.  After all, my approach to those should be generalizable, right?

I’ve posted about reframing before, and it end’s up coming into the picture (hah, get it?) again here.  I had to start off examining what creativity is at its base.  As a kid, I always saw the end product of creativity, not the process.  I saw paintings or heard music and thought, “how in the world could someone make that? I never could do that.”  It only took me finishing college for me to put all the pieces together.  I know, I’m a bit of a slow learner at times, but when things click, I see fireworks.

I kept seeing creativity as a gift, some talent people innately had, instead of a process people went through.  Between doing more photography and having control over my own direction at work, I finally figured out just how creative I can be, and how I actually work.  My process is still amorphous and in the making, but more and more lately, I’ve found myself more full of new ideas than ever before.  My problem in the past was trying to be creative, trying to produce new ideas through shear force of will.  Misguided, yes, but so are many things that people grow up believing.

By changing how I viewed creativity and it’s relationship to me, I think I’ve managed to reconnect with something I had as a child, but got trampled by public education and it’s focus on input/output.  As those who work with me know, I have a bit of a propensity for being mildly ADD.  I’ve found though, that therein lies the key to my creativity.  I’ll be off working on XYZ and think of some random idea to improve ABC.  I can’t just sit down and think through “what kind of iphone app could I make for phone?”  For a nerdy analogy, I’m more GPU than CPU. (lots of slower pipelines vs one big fast one).

I suppose the best analogy for my creative process is this comic from XKCD.

I’ll start with one thing, think of a couple related things, and repeat.  Eventually I can find a way to combine my love of technical things and my love of photography into a project of building my own intervalometer to take time-lapse night scenes of East Lansing.  I’ve found I have a knack for mixing up and manipulating things, and I’ve finally consciously realized that that’s the heart of creativity.

It’s not randomly pulling ideas out of your ass, but putting a bunch of random ideas in there, mixing them together, and then pulling something new out.

Hopefully this wasn’t too rambly and made a bit of sense, but this is basically how my thoughts flow.

I moved back in the end of July, so that’s a good excuse as any to change other things up in my life.  With all that going on, I didn’t have much time/energy for things outside of work and moving in.  Luckily, the past couple weeks I’ve managed to get back out taking pictures again after a month or two of not doing a whole lot.  Partly inspired by this article, http://bit.ly/pfGmu, and partly because I got some free time at night and was bored,  I started messing around with some night photography around campus.

The results:

For now the whole set is only a handful of pictures, but I think I want to eventually turn this into a whole project around campus.  Most of these were taken on top of the parking structure on campus just off Grand River during welcome week.  Luckily, there was plenty of traffic at night to get some nice headlight lines.  The really cool part is that I’ve already had two people say they’re using the top one as their desktop.  It’s a good feeling to know other people appreciate something you make.  More-so when it’s something trying to be ‘art.’ Results like this end up helping me form a better idea of what I want to do with my photography and come up with some goals to work towards.

One of the main problems I’ve had with getting out and doing more photography is from a lack of inspiration.  I’m the kind of person that needs a known goal to work towards in order to be productive without just putting out crap.  Even if it’s a goal that’s changing/moving, it still gives me something to work with and an idea of how to change what I’m doing for better results.

That said, I think it’s time for a beer.

Everyone knows growing up is hard.  Everyone has a different experience of it and learned thing from different places.  When they have kids, everyone also seems to either forget what growing up was like, or had a different enough experience than their children that teaching certain things gets lost.

From my experience, it seems children never get to see or hear about the troubles the adults they know also went through while growing up.  Sure, parents talk about stories from their childhood here and there, but how often do they talk about the one time they were really drunk in college and went home with some random person.  It doesn’t seem till after kids go through the same or similar experience that their parents bring it up.

Growing up, I always viewed the adults around me in positions of authority as relatively infallible.  It was just something I noticed and it seems became a bit ingrained in me as I aged.   As I grew up, my parents never really talked about their childhood mistakes or the hardships they went through growing up.  Who likes talking about all the times they screwed up, or made morally questionable decisions anyways?

I know that parents tell kids that it’s OK to make mistakes in life, but how often do parents give examples of themselves making mistakes before their kids make the same ones?  It wasn’t until recently that the infallibilty perception began to wear off for me.  My lack of posting recently has been caused by some trying times in my life, but as part of that, I’ve found my parents are more human than the perception left from my childhood let on.   It wasn’t until one night at dinner when my dad came out and said he’s made the same mistakes before that I felt on the same level as them.

Perhaps this is an experience unique to me, or maybe I’m just a late bloomer (wouldn’t be the first time), but  I have a feeling that this is something everyone goes through.  Knowing what mistakes one’s parents made makes it that much easier to understand that mistakes aren’t something to be feared, but are something to learn from.  Though, it’s not like I can blame parents for keeping their mistakes to themselves until their children make the same ones, they are human too afterall.

Not my own mental breakdown, but that of a close friend of mine.  At first I had to be there for her at the end of the day, when we both were done with out obligations.  After a bit she began skipping more and more of those obligations because of this, and thus began siphoning more and more of my time.  As time went on, there she was, online more and more wanting to talk about things and getting upset if I had other things to do.  In a short period of time, I came to realize that I was the only person she really talked to anymore.  She’d stopped going to class and hanging out with friends.

Often I know I come off as a bit emotionally empty, but when asked for help or presented with someone in need, I can’t say no.  Thus, I’ve been carving out more and more of my time to try to help out my friend, though nothing I’ve done has helped her (aside from getting her to start therapy).  Recently, she’s been upset nearly 24/7 and because of it feels she needs me to be talking to her constantly, even though I have a full-time job and need to maintain a regular sleep schedule.  More often than not though, she ends up resenting me for not being there for her for the entire time she’s upset, which would be a bit impossible to do without sacrificing my job and own health.

At what point is  too much being asked of me?  At what point am I able to exercise my right to live my own life when someone is this unstable?  I’d feel terrible just abandoning her, but I also don’t want to be a parent at this point in my life.

After doing a bit of reading about this author, he seems to be pretty well recognized as an ID supporter that actually adheres to some standard of intellectual honesty.  I know a few people reading this will have instantly though “ID supporter? he must be retarded,” but that is exactly the type of intellectual dishonesty that this guy tries to avoid.  Specifically take a look at #1 and #7.

Intellectual honesty was a concept that had fallen to the back of my mind.  When I first saw that title of the post in my reddit feed all of the thoughts I’ve had about it in the past, while taking philosophy classes, came rushing back.  More than anything else, I respect people for being intellectually honest, not matter which way they’re leaning.

It seems that intellectual honesty is a rare thing in this day and age.  From simple advertisements, to the travesty that is Fox News, the world at large seems to be quite an intellectually dishonest wasteland.  So much so that I am extraordinarily refreshed by the rare occurrences of honesty that I come across.  Even amongst people I talk to every day, I can pick out inconsistencies and double standards on a regular basis.  Hell, often I catch myself doing it.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

Though it’s left me quite mentally tired, it’s helped get my brain churning again.  About a week ago while hanging out at a coffee shop with friends, we started philosophizing about the prospect of free will.  (Granted, this was after an absurd philosophic inquiry into what makes a questions a good vs worthwhile vs valid question.)  I haven’t had a good philosophy session in a while, and I think it might have been because I’ve become quite mentally lazy.  While I was on the snagit team, I often got stuck with less than mentally stimulating tasks (fix this or that bug, blah blah).  Switching to the new platform and having to deal with that learning curve seems to have jolted my brain awake again.

Throughout my day-to-day routine, I’ve been more aware of my surroundings.  I’ve also picked back up a philosophy book I started reading about six months ago, but ran out of time to sit and read.  It’s nice to get back to reading it, though I now see that had I finished this when I started, it would have given me answers to quite a few questions that were raised during my most recent philosophic discussions.  Now I just need to find a way to satisfy my craving to get out and work on my photography.  If only I knew of some more interesting spots to take pictures.

With that, I leave you with a picture of the happiest i’ve ever seen my trunk.  That’s right, five and a half cases of really tasty beer.

I’ve been procrastinating learning obj-c for about a year now.  I’ve been planning to learn objective C to write a media organizer for my mac media center but have never actually gotten off my ass to start.  Now that I have an artificially imposed outside deadline, however, I’m sitting at a coffee shop after work trying to figure this shit out.  If only I could find some sort of similar outside motivators for other stuff I’m trying to do since I’m pretty terrible at self-motivation.

After an hour or so (including learning curve), here’s what I came up with: http://screencast.com/t/w8kRupWcuAm.   That’s after a day of programming exercises at work.  Hopefully learning the rest of this stuff starts speeding up as I keep going.  So far the biggest hurdle has been getting used to the new syntax.

What better way to chip away at my social inhibitions than with a monetary motivator?  Get out there and talk to people or suck at your job.  Personally, I’ve always taken pride in all the jobs I’ve had when interacting with people and this should be no different.  Practice makes perfect afterall.  And hell, I’m getting paid for it too.

Looking back, I was always incredibly outgoing when working at the movie theater in high school.  When I was in that uniform I became a different person.  That simple change of appearance gave me extraordinary amounts of self-esteem and I could say anything to anyone there without flinching.  (Probably part of the reason why I got so many more girls there than from just meeting people as myself in college).

Either way, it’s nice to have more motivation than just myself to dive into more and more social situations. And if all else fails, there’s at least a really good brewery on the way in which i can down my sorrows.