Not too long ago I spoke with someone I work for. During which it was basically said that I wasn’t creative, that I didn’t like change and that my strength rested in creating analytical algorithms. Two weeks later I was repositioned in the company. The new position essentially removes analytical algorithm development from the list. The change is because, as it was explained, it would bring the company more money.

It was evident that me being a (tongue-in-cheek) wuss had its hand in the decision more than money alone. I’ve always been a push-over, a wuss, an easy bite. I like flowers and cooking and topiaries. I hate boxing and football and burly guys who generally used me for practicing their punches and tackles.

Now that my wussiness had come out of the closet, I had to stare at my navel. After some serious hairy-wus navel staring, I’ve come to the conclusion that some wrong assumptions were made. I had to look at the evidence, though, to convince myself of this.

“What is creativity?”, I had to ask. I would define it as a strong imaginative involvement in the design. Skill would be the ability to execute that design. Van Gogh as a grown painter was both creative and skilled. A three year old Van Gogh with a box of crayons would only be creative – not skilled, though Jackson Pollock might disagree. Hand a fourteen year old Van Gogh a pencil and add the careful instruction of Huysmans and that begins to change.

So where did I show creativity and execute it skillfully?

1. 1992 Founded and moderated the first wan-based network poetry conference for bitnet, a national university network before their use of the internet.
2. 1993 Won position in Texas State University’s annual creative writing competition, “personna”.
3. 1994 Constructed the university’s first public web server based off of CERN’s HTTP but rewritten to allow extend server side script interpretation, advanced logging and basic load balancing.
4. 1994 Began construction of one of the first world wide web’s romance themed sites. There were only a few thousand sites on the internet at the time. This site, “Romantic Gestures” became internationally renown; articles about it were published in Germany, Sweden, the UK and Japan. It also won accolades in the United States, including one from Netscape for most innovative use of technology.
5. 1995 Wrote one of the worlds first web-based graphical web-usage applications. It would generate its own charts rather than spit out the web log file. This application was purchased with my employment to Promus.
6. 1996 Worked with a highly intelligent crew at Promus Hotels to create the world’s first real-time online reservation service of anything. At this time, all reservations from competitors were nothing more than glorified emails to a reservation agent. We allowed direct access to the database and provided features that weren’t even available to agents at the time, such as alternate availability in close proximity locations when your initial parameters couldn’t be fulfilled.
7. 1996 Developed one of the world’s first virtual reality hotel room previews. This preview wasn’t designed for people making reservations, but rather for potential franchise buyers. The technology is, however, still similar but extended beyond QuickTime VR. It incorporated Director and VRML in a stand-alone application wrapper.
8. 1997 Worked with Netscape and FedEx to build the world premier of push-pull technology. Here we used a product called Marimba, which was a RAD environment for creating Java applets. I had direct involvement with field testing the Internet Foundation Classes, that pre-cursored Swing.
9. 1998 Went freelance. Won Pixelpalooza honorable mention. Designed and developed intranet solutions for Omnipoint.
10. 1999 Began working as a consultant employee. During this time many hats including lead application design, software engineering, software development, testing and deployment, IT infrastructure development, management and maintenance. Additionally, my creative talents were called to create the company’s website, providing its first high-profile image on the web.
11. 1999 Began other cool super secret fuzzy logic projects that used the following 529 skills: [insert 2 pages of semantic keyword expressions here to impress my friends and make them cower in Dilbert-like inadequacy at my foreboding ability to throw out acronyms - mua hah hah haaaaa].

That’s just the business aspect – over the years up until two years ago I used to be engaged in: writing children’s music, leading worship in my church’s children’s ministry, photoshopping contests, graphic development, icon contests, flash development, multimedia kiosk design and development, even proof-checking web design books. These abilities require a combination of analytical and creative skills.

What changed two years ago? I’m not sure. I started feeling inadequate and lost my muse. The music stopped. I left the ministry and became dormant. The energy and will to express creativity just wasn’t there. I withheld many of my opinions. Rather than seeing conflict as a door for challenges and an opportunity to view different viewpoints, I began to experience conflict as … just wearisome conflict that could cost me my job. Not practicing my instruments made me rusty, which made me feel more inadequate and discouraged.

In all reality, the whole world is not pitted against me, but I allowed myself to only see points where it was.

The past year, however, something started brewing. I began posting photos up on flickr. A photo got published in DC Guide. Other photos ranked high on the interestingness pages. I am nowhere near the high level of talent posted on flickr… but I’m a part of it. Now I’m exploring venues to express my creativity again.

There is, however, one assumption that is deserved. That is, if my employer inversely equates change with stability then he’s right. I like stability… something or someone I can depend on and rely on. On the flip-side, I appreciate having the reputation of being someone others could rely upon even in pressing matters and undesirable tasks. Loyalty is possibly more important to me than it is in the mob. When I realize that I let anyone down, I take it hard … really hard … then I try hard to rebuild that reputation.

But I just have this drive to be creative. What to do? I have satisfaction in knowing three things.

First, it’s an incredible company even with my position, which by definition forces career growth to pass me by. The people in it are generally committed and highly intelligent. Besides, there are unspoken benefits to my position. It’s like having the ability to be a doctor, but choosing to be a nurse because it has different rewards.

Second, God has me where He wants me. I can’t argue with that. In fact, I have to remind myself that I ultimately work for God, not a company. He’s not pleased when I give anything less than my best – so I give my best at the workplace. I’m working on changing myself to also give just as much to my household. It’s a tough order to fill, and I won’t be perfect, but by trying my best there’s that satisfaction.

Finally, because it’s considered that the creativity I have doesn’t offer the company value, there are fewer business demands on my time. This could be a very good thing. It allows me to cut back my hours to a more regular 45 hour weeks, take my vacation time and spend this (extra) time with my family and going back to grass roots – creating what I love: writing music, designing websites, building ideas.

My dad invented incredible equipment that revolutionized the aviation industry. My grandfather built incredible rides and amusements in Disneyland. My mom is an accomplished painter, my grandmother a philanthropist. Even my father-in-law has impressive credentials. I don’t intend on watering down the talented achievements that flower our family tree with an apathetic complacency.

Creativity is not merely self expression – it enhances and defines our culture and philosophies. It speaks spiritually and is attentive to those who receive it. It is the evidence of liberty.

Creativity encompasses and explores its boundaries then expands them like puffing into an inflatable latex glove. It brightens our lives with humor and insight, giving it all double meaning. It defines who we are, yet at the same time is little more than a mirror of the definition we give ourselves.

Two days after another school shooting, this time at Virginia Tech, some of the dust has settled. The media has started to move on and certain concerns have begun to wane. One of the most involving topics regarding this incident is that of the “Copycat Effect”.

The Copycat Effect is something that I personally think is just hype on a more generic concept: “branding”. I don’t know anyone who best described this as well as coined the concept than Ze Frank.

“A brand is an emotional aftertaste that’s conjured up by, but not necessarily dependent on, a series of experiences. … everything’s a potential brand!”

Once a high profile event occurs, it’s inevitable that someone will want to become a part of that “emotional aftertaste”. We try to brand ourselves even if it’s only temporary and not always do we brand ourselves deliberately. We tend to brand ourselves with a high profile event to give ourselves greater meaning than … well … than what meaning we usually give ourselves. The more insecure a person is with his or her identity, the greater that person will brand him or herself to any event, no matter how small. Those who are more secure tend to brand themselves through empathy rather than association.

This is why I find nerds not only tie themselves emotionally to Star Wars and Star Trek, but they actually associate their lives so much with these programs it becomes some type of religious philosophy. The matrix did the same thing, only because of it’s layers of abstracted eastern doctrine the general public felt the “Neo-Zionists” were elite by incorporating lines in the movie as life lessons.

I remember after a friend committed suicide that suddenly people she hated and who had obviously reciprocated the emotion started calling her a “dear friend”. After school séances became the popular past time. This was not for the merit of trying to find inner peace, but for bragging rights. Something along the lines of “We could summon [her] from the dead, what could you do?” It was a macabre form of typical arrogant gossiping. Like gossip it made them feel elite because they were part of a circle of events larger than themselves.

That model is the entire benefit of motion picture franchise. You show someone an involving film and try to make a strong emotional aftertaste. After the movie, they’ll want to savor that aftertaste longer by buying your junk. This is true even if it’s a crappy horror movie. Remember all the “Blair-Witch Project” paraphernalia in the stores?

Emotion is one of the defining properties of sentient life. What would you rather live with? A dry Vulcan life or an emotional yet defining life? Our dull, busy, industrial, unemotional, hurried lifestyles (in America at least) have distanced us from one of the most important definitions of “self”. We have become the “Tin Man”, devoid of understanding that we have an emotion that needs to be nurtured.

By pushing a fresh thought or emotion into someone who lives an otherwise dry life, we feel energized and in some respect hold onto that emotion with all of our being.

Sadly, that becomes all the more evident during devastating events such as school shootings. People are hurt and angry and filled with so much more emotion that they’ve ever had that they don’t know how to deal with it. The result is usually to absolve to guilt that they have no involvement in, such as false confessions, or to become active in the crime itself, such as calling in bomb threats.

After the hanging of Saddam Hussein, at least 8 people (some children) died while repeating the act on themselves.

Perhaps this act of hatred on the Virginia Tech campus is only appropriate for this time of year. Yom Hashoah, the day of Holocaust Remembrance was just the day before on Sun April 15th (27th day of Nisan). April 1933 is when Hitler began aggressively persecuting the Jews. April 15th is also the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. The anniversary of the Columbine shooting is only 4 days later on April 20. A Google search of “april massacre” reveals other grisly historic events. With such a harsh history during this period of April, I have to ask myself if there’s some horrible imbalance that has to be set out, like sending the scape goats to Lilith to suffer terribly as some type of otherworldly atonement.

We all try to wrap our brains around these events, the school massacres and wars, but it’s just too big for us to do that with. Even though I am distinctly separated from the Virginia Tech event itself, I’m tied to it; it’s a battle within me that finds an odd necessity to relate with it just to reel in the great questions of life: why are we here? what is life good for? what does this all mean? how do I fit in to the big picture? how important is this blog – really?

It’s our natural tendency to associate ourselves; It’s part of our ego and helps us define who we are.

Microsoft EULA Haiku takes text directly from Microsoft’s End User Legal Agreement (EULA) for Windows XP Home Edition and forms it into beautiful, if not disturbing, poetry.

Click on the image to the right to get started.

Some of my favorite results are:

contact Microsoft
for loss of business profits
serving your country

Suppliers shall not
copy, or use this software
you do not agree

and the very succinct:

Have Fun. If you find a result that is particularly amusing, please tell me about it.