In Praise of Tape

Tape is so great.

When you're a kid, you can make almost anything out of tape. This is for two reasons:

1. It's sticky and bendy, and

2. Grownups let you have it because it is not scissors.

Once you get past the annoying stage when you keep getting it stuck to itself, tape becomes a source of joy.

Plus, there are all those colored tapes you can get at craft stores.

Yesterday I was hanging out drawing with some kids, and two of them decided to put facial hair on, made from paper. They drew themselves beards and mustaches, then taped them to their faces. Then they would "shave," making a bzzzzzzt noise while pulling the beards off. Then they would make a longer beard or whatever, and do it again.

See? Tape. What a great thing.

Listening to Your Pencil

Have you ever just sat in a quiet room doodling with a pencil? 

The lead makes such a nice sound on the paper.

Try this sometime - just listen to the sounds the pencil makes as you make different types of marks. Don't worry too much about drawing something.

It's a very interesting way to draw.

In fact, you can get quite a bit of insight into your mood based on whether the sound is calm, or scratchy, or if you hear that snap of the lead breaking.

And, in the spirit of pencil drawing, here's a presentation I did a while back...

Ten Great Uses for a Pencil

View more presentations from betsystreeter.

Travel Expands the Mind. - Dr. Who

The United States is such a huge country that it's easy to forget that there are other countries sometimes.

We have these different states, but we have a tendency to argue amongst them rather than think of them as interesting cultures to visit.

When's the last time you heard someone say, "Those Colorado residents certainly have an interesting culture!"

But then, there's the Amish.

A week or so ago, we were in Iowa in an area where Amish settlers have moved in and bought land in recent years. They've built a school house, and they ride along the sides of the road in their hand-built buggies.

They refer to us non-Amish as "English." Who knew?

Anyway, we got to ride on a buggy, and I was struck by how much this was like visiting a foreign country. Even the sound of the buggy wheels was new.  And, everybody went out of their way not to offend one another. There was a back-and-forth that seemed a lot like how you deal with people when you don't speak the language or are not sure how to pay for something or are just trying to find the train station.

Whatever you might think of Amish culture, it certainly expanded the mind to visit with people whose entire lifestyle was, well, foreign. Right there in Iowa.

Comics at the Field Museum

Well, we're back from a week of adventures, with tons of ideas and thoughts to share.

Here's the first one that came to mind: Comics. Otherwise known as, visual storytelling.

Obviously I'm biased, but I think the cartooning/comic medium is sadly pidgeonholed and not really used to its vast potential.

One place we went was Chicago. While there, we got to the Field Museum, which has everything from Egyptian mummies to giant sloth skeletons.

It's amazing how many man-made artifacts were pretty much stories told in pictures. I mean, this room is a gigantic picture book. The place was filled with what we would see today as comics.

There were Greek urns with myths retold on them. There were walrus tusks with hunting stories. There were of course tons of hieroglyphics, and scrolls, and papyrus, and various other means of recording either things that happened or ideas that needed communicating.

We have used visual storytelling forever, on everything from cave walls to pottery, but lately it seems to have gotten shoved into a corner called "comics." I suppose that's because the comic genre has had such a following, and there's a particular look and feel and convention to the storytelling that really works. 

But when I see how kids draw, it really reminds me of those scrolls and tusks and all of it. Movies and TV are natural extensions of this idea, but sitting down and drawing out a story is such a magical and brain-expanding thing to do. I wish more kids got a chance to do it without having to think of their work as "just comics." I doubt that's how the Egyptians thought about it.

Creative Happiness - The Short List

Yesterday, my daughter was in a play. She's 7, but she got to wear granny glasses and wear a shawl while singing and dancing. It was fabulous. The whole cast was so great.

Afterward, my husband told her why he was so proud of her, and what he said next, I thought, was wisdom that could be applied to anyone pursuing creative happiness.

He said he was proud of her because:

1) She was really good at what she did,

2) She worked really really hard at it, and

3) It brought her great joy.

I thought, what a great way to look at whatever you pursue in life. That combination of things has been described endlessly. Malcolm Gladwell talks about #2 in his book "Outliers." Bazillions of books have been written about #1 and #3. But it's putting them all together that really causes great things to happen.

On a large scale or a small, community-theater scale.

So I'm going to keep that list in mind. Thanks to my husband, such an organized thinker who can lay things out like that and make them seem so clear. Much clearer than a shelf full of self-help books at the store.