Creative time

The last posting took me back to this really distinct memory from third grade. Every day in Mrs. Nowak's class we were forced to write creative sorts of things in these journals for 30 minutes. No drawings allowed, only writing. Then we handed them in and got checks, check-plusses, or check-minuses. Long story short, I pretty much thought this was the dumbest thing ever, and the pressure of having to write something creative in under 30 minutes made my pencil sweat in my 8-year old hands. So I started copying jokes out of a joke book, word for word, which I kept hidden in between my lap and the front shelf of my desk. All was well and good until one week when I wrote a joke deemed 'too mature' by Mrs. Nowak to be credited to a third grader, even to a creative plagiarist like me. My desk was checked during recess and I had a stern-talking-to afterwards, which of course made me hate that 30 minutes of my daily routine even more. It was explained to me that copying jokes out of a joke book was not good use of my creative time, especially if the jokes were about a drunk guy wanting to get with a pretty lady. That same day a boy named S_____ also got a stern-talking-to for drawing 'his girlfriend' over and over in his journal, a tall stick figure with pointy nipple-less breasts (he showed me later). Take it from me, Mrs Nowak, it doesn't get much more creative than that. There are graduate students here at CCA who only aspire to such mastery.