Notes From a Non-Creative Person

I’m a bear of little brain so I listened to it twice and if I still don’t get it, well, I probably won’t.

It all started when I read an article by a model who gave a TED talk about the fact that she didn’t deserve her luck. She makes zillions of dollars because of genetics: she’s tall and willowy and white. Oh, and also symmetrical. So everybody has decided, “wow, she’s hot,” and that’s very useful because you can sell things with sex and that’s important because, well, that’s how the world works.

So now the video has been seen by more than a million people and people are approaching her with book deals and TV shows and she’ll probably end up the Mistress of the Universe and we’ll all have to bow down six times a day to her Loveliness, as well as cede all our property to her and half of our sons.

Sense annoyance?

Dammit—I had a message I wanted to give through TED, and it was a hell of a lot more important than that. And guess what? They turned me down, in order to give a supremely entitled person a chance to be even MORE entitled. Of course beautiful people get everything, of course it’s the handsome guy who becomes the CEO or the senator or the whatever-he-wants-to-be. Remember high school? That’s what you learned there.

Now—thanks for asking—my message was this: you can organize your death just as my mother did. You don’t need to rot away from Alzheimer’s or cancer or just plain boredom. When the time comes, you stop eating and drinking. And no, it’s not a bad death—quite the opposite, really.

Well, I was storming or steaming my way through the article of Her Absolute and Obnoxious Loveliness who has, by the way, just graduated magna cum laude from Columbia (presumably Harvard and all the other Ivy League colleges were lusting to have her; she chose Columbia to be in New York, the center of the modeling world….) and watching my fists ball and hearing my nose snort when I came to a little link: Ted.com, Amy Tan on Where Creativity Hides.

Well, I have a particular debt to Amy Tan because in theory she follows me on Twitter—still think the whole thing had to have been a mistake—and I’ve never read any of her books and I feel badly about that. Come clean—I have read half of one of her books, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and loved it, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I finish it? Because the second part is set in a foreign place and I can’t read about foreign places. But aren’t you living in a foreign place, you ask?

It’s just a thing about me and you know what? OK, I’ll stop being defensive.

OK, so I can live in a foreign place but not read about them, would my debt to Amy be cancelled if I watched her talk about creativity? And what, by the way, is the word that defines your relationship with someone following you on Twitter? A twitterite? A fellow bird? Twitty?

So here she is talking about creativity, and I am understanding only a third of it, although I’m totally enjoying the humor of the slides and also the creative elements in them and I’m in trouble because whatever Amy says about not understanding quantum mechanics is exactly what I’m feeling about her talk.

I’m lost.

Which is totally not good because (sorry about that jump there—I was screwing around with those little callouts, in case you hadn’t noticed, although really shouldn’t there be a person attached? Just a sec—let me run over to the Internet…..)

Right—what I was saying before these damn dogs walked into the post was that I didn’t get any of what Amy was saying about creativity and that’s terrible because I want to be creative and think I should be creative but guess what?

I’m not.

(Though I have discovered where the dogs live on the computer and fiddled around for ten minutes with the callouts—every time I moved the callouts, the dog moved. Oh, and also discovered the spelling of “jejune”—thought it was jejeune….)

And there’s this thing lurking in my head—I have to write a novel.

Which is absolutely awful because it will take a million years and I’ll have to figure out about character development and structure and stuff I don’t even know that I should know.

The only thing I know about creativity is that I was compelled to do it and

WHAT! Shit, that’s my father, dead these two decades, come from the grave to tell me to write a novel?

She had more of a gift than I, and when I died, I stood by her side and watched her write, and then in the evenings and nights I went into the back bedroom where she wrote and cleared away the coffee cups and put her glasses where she could find them and then I read what she had written that day. Just the way you do, at five o’clock every day. And then she died and it fell to you and your gift is greater and she knew it and who kept you from throwing yourself in the traffic that day.

Domine.

Yes.

Thank you…and I’m fucked.