I contain multitudes. Maybe not in that good way, though.

After the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler, a number of friends were talking about so-and-so's finish time. The so-and-so in question was happy about finishing in two hours. "That's really good!" someone said. "Not really," I snorted back. Someone else replied, "Oh, so on top of everything else, you're going to be a running snob now?"

Emphasis added by me, because I'm pretty sure the meaning was not that I would become a running snob on top of everything else that I am, but rather that I would be a running snob on top of all the other things about which I am already snobby. Not a flattering comment, but it gets me to thinking about some of the typical issues that involve being an active participant in something, as opposed to being an ironic chortler who never does anything and makes snide comments about active participants in anything.

We all know it is better (healthier? more rewarding?) to be the former, and that it is easier (less risk-taking, more hip-seeming) to be the latter. And we all know more people in the latter category than we do in the former, I'm waging. I would also venture that theirs are often the little nagging voices we hear whenever we choose to cross the line that separates passive criticism from active involvement. To be clear, I think there's a good argument to be made that good cynical commentary can be a creative act, and lord knows, I've made it an art form.

In fact, the few times I've tried my hand at songwriting, I've failed miserably to get beyond my own critical mindset - a really frustrating experience. I haven't had this problem as much when writing poems, but I think that so few people read and write good poetry anyway that it seems less daunting for some reason. If you have no peers in something, it's easier to be fearless about it, I suppose. So then, I started to notice fairly recently that I was having a harder time being as intellectually sharp about why I might like or dislike something. More and more, I seem to be able to appreciate books, movies, albums, meals, etc, on their own terms, rather than according to some arbitrary criteria established by and known only to me. I think this is good for me as a human, and I think it's not coincidental that this personality change is a staple of a certain kind of fiction: the excessively self-conscious or cerebral kid who one day manages to say "yes" and just rock out on the guitar (Nick Hornby alone is responsible for two examples of this - About A Boy and High Fidelity).

There is no doubt that I can be snobby, cutting, sardonic, and cowardly. I am fussy and finnicky, and sometimes if I look around me and only see things I judge to be mediocre, I disappear inside myself pretty quickly for fear that I'll somehow be engulfed by it (this happens at packed bars, usually.) But lately, I have been able to reserve most of my vitriol for commercials that I think lack internal cohesion. Oh boy have I become good at that. I've even thought about making critiques of commercials a regular feature here, and I may yet do that.

[Example: The A1 steak sauce commercial set in a fancy restaurant. One snooty diner looks over and sees an everyman about to bite into a burger lathered in A1 sauce. Snooty diner says something like, "A1? What a marvelous idea! Mind if I try?" Everyman reaches to hand the bottle over, but snooty diner takes the whole burger instead. Tagline is something like, "Class up the burger." What I take issue with is that what's clearly incongruous about the commercial is not that Everyman is using A1 - it's that he's eating a burger in a super-classy old-money restaurant. The classing up of the burger is a result of the setting, not the A1. Way to undermine your own product, people.]

But what I am getting at is something that needs emphasizing, and I would have to give a significant amount of credit to Amanda at Creative DC (because she and her husband are among the most creative people I know) for this spirit - just as I imagine certain nagging voices when I want to beat up on myself for my lack of originality, I think Amanda's is the voice I hear when I need an internal optimist reminding me that creativity is always about the process, first and foremost. The quality of the end product (or your perception of that quality) should never deter you from the process of creating. So something I wrote may be overwrought. Or it may be untrue. Or it may suffer from that cloying quality that afflicts most Internet writing.

Or I may look at something the minute I'm finished with it, and find that the "me" in the piece is completely unrecognizable. That's ok, because as I was just reminded a few weeks ago, reading an excellent interview with the brilliant basketball writer Britt Robson, writing is always about forgetting and surprising yourself - like a gifted athlete who inexplicably finds him/herself looking two or three moves ahead of everyone else:

Internally, I want to be able to be writing something at two in the morning, having looked at three or four different sources and be able to pull things out of the air that I didn’t even know I knew. Then begin to make connections, draw analogies, and throw words around that come from me-but as the classic cliche goes, you don’t know where it comes from-and all of a sudden your game is elevated.

And the only way you can get there is by moving through the issue, by traveling from one sentence to the next. You can't take shortcuts, at least not that I've found.

But now that I've indulged two very lengthy me-centric posts, I'm ready to give myself a rest and get back to using the space for highlighting the huh-ness of life as we know it. To end this on a very affirming note about the role that stories and poetry (and by extension, creativity) can play in our lives, here's an insightful bit from a lecture by Alberto Manguel called "The City of Words" - a series of talks designed to look at what great thinkers and writers have told us about multiculturalism and intolerance, and how literature can fill the gaps created by bad policy:

This is the paradox. The language of politics, on the one hand, which purports to address real categories, freezes identities into static definitions, segregates but fails to individualize. The language of poetry and stories, on the other hand, which acknowledges the impossibility of naming accurately and definitively, groups us under a common and fluid humanity while granting us, at the same time, self-revelatory identities. In the first case, the label bestowed on us by a passport and the conventional image of who we are supposed to be under a certain flag and within certain borders, as well as the blanketing eye that we in turn cast upon the people who appear to share a certain tongue, a certain religion, a certain piece of land, pin us all to a coloured map crossed by imaginary longitudes and latitudes that we take to be the real world. In the second, there are no labels, no borders, no finitudes.
...
To the limiting imagination of bureacracies, to the restricted use of language in politics, stories can oppose an open, unlimited mirror-universe of words to help us perceive an image of ourselves together. In the realm of storytelling, as Plato realized, nothing is held to what the ideal city requires: the maker does not build to order and, though readings can be co-opted and poetry can become propaganda, stories continue to offer [their] readers other imaginary cities whose ideals are likely to contradict or subvert those of the official Republic. Plato's concern seemed to be, not that Cassandra was cursed, but that the curse might not be effective and that, in spite of Apollo's deviousness, readers would still believe her words. Perhaps...this cautious faith lies at the heart of every maker's craft.