BOLTON: Students should reclaim creativity

This week on Dateline, Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute on "The Office") described his Web site SoulPancake.com as a place for people to "chew" on life's biggest questions regarding creativity and religion.

Perusing the "big" questions, I came across the following: Is creativity learned or inherent?

One concise comment made me sit back in my chair.

"It's inherent it's just educated out of us!" exclaimed Pplsprincess.

Well done, Pplsprincess. I believe, having experienced both noncreative and creative education, it is time to reclaim my creativity.

I spent my first three semesters of college in art school reeking of darkroom chemicals and all but bathed in paint and charcoal. While I do not regret the move to liberal arts, I did lose something about myself in the process.

Intellectually, I have become increasingly high-strung and short-fused. At orientation, I wish they had freely distributed candied Prozac accompanied with a pamphlet reading: "Graduate School Side Effects: Various sources of frustration resulting in cries of ‘meaninglessness,' crippling perfectionism pending nervous breakdowns and fear of intellectual rejection leading to academic conformity."

Recently, I came upon a book at the University Bookstore by Keri Smith that has proved instrumental to my creative reconnaissance mission. On the cover, scrawled in a handwritten, chicken-scratched typeface was "Wreck This Journal."
"To create is to destroy," it declared.  I turned the page.

"Instructions: 1. Carry this with you everywhere you go. 2. Follow the instructions on every page. 3. Order is not important, 4. Instructions are open to interpretation. 5. Experiment (work against your better judgment)."

I purchased the book immediately, ventured upstairs and found a seat near the coffee counter.

With anticipation and slight hesitation, I opened the journal to a random page. It read, "Poke holes in this page using a pencil."

I took my pencil and timidly poked one hole in the page. Keeping my head down, I peered around the union to see if anyone was watching. No one was paying attention.

So, holding the page upright with my left hand, I stabbed it a good 20 more times with the pencil.

Pleased, yet unsatisfied, I turned to another page. "Tear strips. Rip it up!" With growing zeal, I peeled back strips of paper like string cheese until the page looked like the bark of a birch tree, slivers of paper all curled up toward the top. I slammed the journal shut to crush them.

Next page. "This page is for handprints or fingerprints." I rubbed my thumb and index fingers on Daily Nebraskan newsprint and smeared fingerprints all over the page with a tingle of delight.

Canceling my workout plans, I opted to stroll around campus in search of items for my journal. I gathered a collection of various fall leaves and prairie grasses, discovering many plants on campus had some kind of berry on them. So I plucked a few cherry-like berries from trees in between Love Library and the College of Business Administration as well as smaller, "red-hot" berries, from a bush west of CBA.

"How do I get these berries in my journal?" I wondered.

Driving home, I decided the reasonable course of action would be to smash them with a hammer.  

To my surprise, when crushed the berries smelled like pumpkins and resemble pink and yellow fireworks splattered across and soaking though the pages of my journal. 

After I ran out of mysterious berries to demolish, I turned to the collection of prairie and ornamental grasses I had collected from the gardens by the Sheldon Museum of Art and Love Library. I noted there were four different types: One was a caterpillar, another a cheap, plastic underwater plant. I decided the other two were a limp, eight-fingered hand and a sparkler on fire. Then, reflecting on their shapes, I suspected that they would make excellent paintbrushes. 

I dunked the fluffy tops of the grasses, one by one, into ink on a dusty paint palette and flung them across drawing paper. My skin has been stained with turquoise ink for days, and I am quietly happy.  

This morning I opened the journal to this page: "Tongue Painting: 1. Eat some colorful candy. 2. Lick this page." I sucked on a Blue Raspberry Ring Pop while doing homework. Against my better judgment, I licked the page as a cat laps milk. Bizarre, yes, but it is time I quit taking myself so seriously, reclaim creativity and liberate myself from the grasps of over-intellectualization. If I have to light pages of a book on fire, take a journal for a walk or intentionally spill coffee all over – so be it.

Find a way to take back your creativity. Destroy this column if you'd like. Cut it out, then apart and rearrange it to say something else. E-mail me a photo.

Disclaimer: Do no harm to others in the process. I do not endorse criminal behavior. 

Erin Bolton is a graduate student in Community and Regional Planning. Reach her at erinbolton@dailynebraskan.com.