A Creatively Worded Compliment

I...hate...creative people.

By "creative people," I mean those people who have cooler blogs than mine (note: everybody's blog is cooler than mine), or who are better writers than I am, or who are more tech geeky than I'll ever be, or who can take a blank piece of paper and a No. 2 pencil and create more than stick figures, or who can make a musical instrument spring to life, or who see things through a camera's lens in a way I never could.

And by "hate"...I, of course, mean "admire more than all the words in the dictionary can say and want so desperately to be like."

I'm in the process of updating my sidebar, if you haven't glanced in that direction...adding some more blogs that I visit regularly or on occasion, or some that have made a good enough first impression on me to warrant a link in the hope that I'll return to visit again. That list will be ever-growing and changing, as will the other categories of hobbies or topics of interest or related miscellany.

It never fails to amaze me the things I find when I go off on a random link-clicking romp through the internets, jumping from one blog to the next, looking for something to catch my eye and hold me there for more than a quick scan of the first few posts.

I find laugh-out-loud funny, utterly flawless writing. And I find people who obviously know what the acronym HTML stands for (Howard Taft Made Lasagna. right?), because their sites are crisp and clean and all neat and tidy 'n stuff.

And I come back to this little corner I call my own, and tell myself I better learn a few more five-syllable words. And then I try to bribe my tech geek buddies into giving me free pointers on how to be a killer code jockey. (see? I can't even make up cool nicknames like that on my own. I stole that from an e-mail I got a year or so ago.)

This little rant was born a couple weeks ago, but was reaffirmed last night as I was trying to place the golf photos in my previous post, along with captions, and make everything look all copacetic in its end result. Blogger wasn't being very cooperative, and was mocking me by proving that it'll do anything it damn well pleases with the hard return, no matter how carefully you insert them. It's not a difficult concept, is it? Hit the "Enter" key on your keyboard, and a space should appear. Or not. Or...sometimes two spaces appear.

After more attempts than I'd care to admit, and many f-bombs dropped, I finally got something resembling a visually acceptable post. And then I went and had a nervous breakdown, clutching an HTML 4 manual in my carpal-tunneled hands.

But I digress.

There are wheelbarrows of creative talent all over this big wide InterWeb. And as I discover more and more, I expect my sidebar to continue to stretch vertically.

Some are writers of the highest caliber, who don't even write for a living. Some take breathtakingly gorgeous photographs. Some discuss ideas that make you stop and think, and then think some more. Some are outrageously funny.

And some...are all of the above, rolled together into one big creative über-stud.

Those are the people I really hate.

And I couldn't be more grateful that they're there to help carry me through my day.

"Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity."

—Edwin H. Land

"A hunch is creativity

trying to tell you something."

—Frank Capra