Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 26, 1992 TAG: 9203250245
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: Adults are creative, sometimes, but they aren't pointlessly creative the way children are. Children create for the sake of creation. They play make-believe games for no purpose other than to "make-believe." They draw pictures for no reason other than to draw. Children are adrift in a world of pointlessness.
Only gradually do their parents and teachers drum into their thick skulls the idea that art is a product and that they should feel bad if it's no good. And then we teach them that rather than playing like little kids they should engage in competitive sports, the better to learn how truly incompetent they are compared to other, larger, more talented and ultimately more valuable children.
Eventually they turn into mature, purposeful adults who have goals and aims and ambitions and daily lists of Things To Do, filled with entries like:
1. Make a list of Things To Do.
27. Scrape grouting between bathroom tiles.
183. Learn Japanese.
It's not that adults aren't creative. But it's a different kind of creativity, according to Brian Dorval of the Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College. Adults are more efficient when they create; their creativity is of a more useful nature. The bad news is that as we get older and more discerning about what is good and bad, we lose the instinct for novelty, for open-ended experimentation, for creativity for its own sake. Even our margin-of-memo doodling becomes standardized!
"Children have a lot more of the novelty in them, because they haven't learned what works and what doesn't, because they haven't put up the screens on their imagination," Dorval says.
"The reason children are more creative than adults is they haven't learned to mistrust their instincts," says auxiliary Why staffer Anne Cushman, an editor at Yoga Journal who recently authored a widely reprinted essay on creativity. "School is designed to prepare you for a work force in which creativity is dangerous. I think there's a deep belief that creativity disturbs the status quo."
Adult society values creativity only with rigid limitations. Society values order; creativity is almost intrinsically disorderly. To take a simple example: Go into any office building and look at how men dress. They wear uniforms, basically. No one has purple hair!
It's certainly true that some kinds of creativity are rewarded, which is why there are many professional artists and musicians and many more struggling to make it. There is a market for creative ideas, funny scripts, beautiful paintings. But societal standards are discriminatory: We only value what's good. Only good artists are supposed to make art. Only good writers are supposed to write. This is the orderly, hierarchical, capitalist way of running a society.
Unfortunately, most of us don't have any talent. And so we end up as passive consumers of someone else's creativity. We listen to someone else's music. We look at someone else's art. We watch a lot of TV.
And we wonder why the shows are so bad.
\ Q: Why does your leg tingle, as though it is being stuck with needles, when it "falls asleep"?
A: You realize it has nothing to do with sleep, right? Good. We say our leg is "asleep" because it would be awkward to say "My peroneal nerve has been compressed." Likewise it would sound pretentious to say, when our hand is asleep, "My ulnar nerve is suffering from ischemia."
The peroneal nerve is adjacent to a bony part of the knee, and the ulnar nerve is your "funny bone," in that groove in your elbow. When compressed, these nerves cease sending signals and the limb becomes numb. When the compression stops, the blood supply resumes and you get a brief period of sporadic, spontaneous signals along the nerve, according to Doug Goodin, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco who studies the nervous system.
The reason you feel a tingling, rather than, say, a hot feeling or an ache, is simply that the small nerves that communicate sharp, tingling sensations to the brain are more likely to send sporadic signals when the blood flow resumes. So let's just say some nerves sleep better.
\ The mailbag:
Paul H. and Mike O. of Orlando, Fla., ask, "Why is there juice inside a package of hot dogs? What is it? Is it some kind of hot dog excretion? Can you drink it?"
Dear Paul and Mike: We spoke to Shelagh Thomee, spokeswoman for Oscar Mayer Foods Corp., and she said that stuff falls under the heading of "natural juices." You have to understand that a hot dog is 18.6 percent water in its natural, just-manufactured condition. Then it has to be vacuum-sealed. As they suck out the air they also suck out some of the watery hot dog juice.
"That's perfectly OK to use," she said of the juice.
Though how you would use hot dog juice is something we can't even contemplate. (With enough hot dogs you could probably extract a pint of juice, boil it down to a thick paste and then spread it on Ritz crackers for a singular taste sensation.)
Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.
by CNB