The major problem with our culture is the lack of a classical education and the ingestion of accelerent drugs. There. I’ve said it. Accelerent drugs is a term I made up. I’m talking about everything that revs us up too soon and too fast, from speed to diet pills to coffee or sugar–whatever makes you angry, roadrageous, and mean. When we are any of those things, we cannot learn.

Our future depends on learning.
A long time ago, education’s purpose was to show children that other people thought differently, behaved differently, and spoke differently. The purpose was not to extol one’s own culture, but to learn how to work in coalition with others. How to get along with others who don’t think like we do.

Once the industrial revolution hit, education branched off into vocational training–for those whose lives were to be spent in factories and at machine trades, and the upper classes, who studied languages and philosophy to learn how to think.

Somewhere in the 1960s, we hit a roadblock. If a subject didn’t have an immediate practical application, it was frowned upon. That quickly led to a “path” of learning. By seventh grade you were on the college track or on the vocational track, and you took courses accordingly.

And now we are paying for it. Children aren’t going to school, they are going to test-preparation classes. We aren’t teaching them how to think, or even what to think, we are teaching them to pass a test so schools can look like they are doing their job, which seems to be taking knives and guns away from armed kids.

We are way beyond “no child left behind,” what we are doing is leaving a nation behind.

Right from the beginning, we are training creativity out of our children. We want them to color in the lines, and make sure the sky is blue, please. We teach them that there is only one right answer to every question. We take away the arts, music, dance, and replace them with organized sports that don’t allow for individual creativity, but praise competition and winning. Our educational system today is not appropriate for the 21st century. It is narrow, destructive of creativity and human potential, and squashes the one thing that will bring us safely into the future: original ideas that are practical and work. In a word, creativity.

Everyone is born creative. To paraphrase Picasso, the problem is not in creative children, it’s in remaining creative as we grow up. Instead of asking, “Is this the only answer?” we ask “Is this the answer that we need to know for the test?”

When a teacher is explaining something, the best result would be “Huh. That’s interesting. Wonder what would happen if. . .” Instead, the question at the end of a raised hand is, “Will that be on the test?”

Wally Olins, Founder, Wolff-Olins says, “Competitive advantage does not come from the Internet. It comes from leveraging creativity. ” Maybe it’s time we remembered what education means. It comes from the Latin and means “to bring out of” and not “to stuff into.”

For a great take on creativity and education, watch Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on education. It’s not only bright, it’s very funny.

–Image: www.brown.edu

–Quinn McDonald had a classical education and thinks she’s still creative because of it. That, and she isn’t afraid of making mistakes. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

While having breakfast in a restaurant this morning, I listened as someone lost his job. I won’t mention the town, as that scene happens in any town. Probably not over a rooty-tooty pancake ‘n’ ham, but the instant it became clear what was happening, I understood why this was being done over breakfast: No office scene, no work disrupted, and breakfast is the cheapest meal of the day. It wouldn’t even cost the company a lot to get rid of the employee.

While I was eavesdropping on this life-shattering conversation, it became obvious that the boss had done this more than once. He kept repeating the same phrases.

“You’ll get over this, it’s not the end of your life.”
“You’ll find another job quickly.”
“You’ll look back on this and laugh.”
No one was laughing at the time, and the employee was in shock. He kept citing statistics of the fine work he had done, the deadlines he had met, the extra work he had taken on and completed successfully. It didn’t matter. Nothing he could say made a difference. The decision to have him gone was made before he arrived to meet his boss for breakfast. I wondered where he would go for the rest of the day, how he would tell his family.
Listening in, I remembered one of my clients telling me that she was indispensable. I smiled as I listened to the certainty, and two months later, I nodded my head as she cried, “They can’t do this to me. I’m the only ones who know how to run the program.” And yet, the program ran, and she was out on her ear, out of a job.

It can happen to you. Somewhere, someone reading this and smiling. Secure. You work hard. You are really indispensable. You have traded family life and balance for the job security. You gave up nights with your kids to cement security with your company.

That’s what the guy at breakfast thought. That’s what I thought right before I was laid off.
Everyone is replaceable. The company that demands your time and your life and your loyalty does not return the same. They pay you and that, in their minds, is all they owe you. America is all about money and dedication and being “passionate” about your career, but less so about the other side of the coin.

I wish our corporate culture were a bit more passionate about loyalty, and caring and being reasonable. So, while you are reading this, what would you do if your job disappeared today?
If you are a perfectionist, this is particularly for you. . .perfectionism is about control, and you are far less in control that you think.

If you don’t have a plan about what to do if you are dumped, now might be a good time to think about it. How much of a financial cushion do you have? How much would you need if it took you 3 months to find a job? What jobs other than the one you are doing now are you qualified for? What wold it take to make you competitive in your field? When was the last time you updated your resume?

Take a look at your co-workers today. One of them will be gone in three months.

–Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach. She won’t be dumped from her job because she owns the company. But she keeps changing her goals. See what she does at QuinnCreative.com Photos: pancakes: myspace.com, drawing: furiousball.com

If your mom is an artist, or likes doodling, this gift will be just right for Mother’s Day. Buy (or make) a flower pot with an inspiring phrase on it. This one says “thrive,” which is great for both the plants and mom.

You’ll need:
Terra-cotta flower pot, about 4-inch diameter, with base
A 1-lb bag of rice or beans, in any color
A small piece of plastic wrap
Masking tape
Colored paper. I used Mei-teintes for color-fastness
5 Prismacolor pencils, unsharpened
5 pink pencil-top erasers
Scissors

Line the pot with plastic wrap to keep the beans in the pot and not sliding out the drainage hole. Fill the pot with (uncooked) beans or rice. Beans are less messy. Pinto beans (as shown) give a nice variegated look.

Buy several colored pencils, watercolor pencils, pastel pencils–whatever Mom uses most. The picture shows Prismacolor pencils in various shades of green to make the stems more believable. Buy the pink pencil-top erasers you used in grade-school, too.

Put the erasers on the end of the pencil that doesn’t have the SKU barcode printed on it. Sink the end with the barcode into the pot, hiding it.

Cut pointy ovals from colored paper. I cut them freehand, they don’t need to be perfect. In fact, slightly different sizes and shapes give them a realistic look. If you are ambitious, cut out green ovals that are smaller and skinnier than the petal ovals.

Cut a strip of masking tape (about 3 inches) in half lengthwise. (It comes in different widths, but can easily be cut to fit) about the width of the eraser edge. Holding a leaf against the eraser, press the tape over it. Alternate colors, or, if you are using green for the sepals, alternate those. Keep the tape tight, but don’t overwork this. It takes a bit of patience, but it’s not hard.

Continue around the eraser till you have attached four or six petals. You can use any number, but simpler is better.

Repeat with all the other pencils and tuck pretty tissue around the pot, tuck in a box or bag.

–Image and tutorial by Quinn McDonald. Quinn is a certified creativity coach and artist. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Still haven’t found a summer purse. Can’t carry the black leather tote in the summer because I’ll poach the phone in a black bag. So I’m on the lookout for a summer tote.  But aliens have invaded the brains of purse designers, making them design backs with enough buckles, straps, and whip ends to win the Preakness without a jockey. And never fear them breaking delicate ankles. The bags I saw tonight were thicker than the skin of a politician cheating on his wife. Who needs to be carrying a bag with an 8-inch bottom?  Get an LL Bean tote if you need that, but please give me a tote that doesn’t make me look as wide as a street sweeper.

In fact, here are some rules for all you purse designers to sell on Etsy, Ebay and store outlets:

1. Stop using magnets. Please. I know they are cheaper than zippers. They also mess up debit cards, metro passes, hotel room keys and iPhones. And no, I don’t want to carry my iPhone in a separate bag. One, good, big bag will do. I looked at 300 bags tonight, and two of them (both priced at more than $300) were magnet free.

2. Use a lining that isn’t black. I don’t want to have to carry a flashlight to find something in the dark recesses of my purse. Use a lighter lining–tan, gray, red. Just not black.

3. If you are going to add a cellphone pocket, please measure a cellphone first. And not just yours. Measure an iPhone, too. The purses I saw tonight are apparently designed for gum-chewers, as  the pockets were neither deep enough nor wide enough to hold my cell phone.

4. All those samples from Restoration Hardware you’ve attached to the outside of the purse can be exchanged for a decent outside pocket. It’s where I’d like to put my keys or cellphone, or my boarding pass or even that tower of precarious bills, change and receipt that the grocery checker  balances on your palm, leaving you to walk out of the store carrying because you need both hands to put it away.

5. If you are going to build a vertical purse, please put a lot of pockets on the walls. Otherwise, everything falls into the dark bottom and bulges. I already have a body that looks like that, please make my purse more practical.

6. Make the strap adjustable. I know the Size 00 you designed it for can get it over her tiny shoulder, but if the strap is so short that I have to apply antiperspirant to the bag  to be able to wear it without ruining it, the strap is too short.

7. Give the top a closure I can use with one hand. No magnets, please. In addition to the problems in Item #1, a magnet shuts the middle, leaving both ends open, inviting the pickpocket riding next to me on the Metro to help himself. A zipper is the best. A zipper that closes from both sides is best of all.

8. Please don’t tuck that extra foot of lining you have leftover into the bag. A lining that fills up the bag and hides half the contents of the bag is no friend to those of us in a hurry to find the checkbook.

9. If you are going to use a double handle, measure carefully. If they aren’t the same size, the longer one will keep flopping off our shoulders.

10. Many women like to carry a magazine or a file folder in their bag. Please don’t make it 1/8 of an inch too short. Make it fit, or make it a lot smaller. Don’t be a tease.

–Bags, from top:  Red, shiny bag: Antonio Melani Small Hobo Bag $199.00 at Dillards; turquoise pleated bag: Prada Tessuto Gaufre Hobo $1,195.00 at Neiman Marcus; taupe multi-pocket bag: Plenty by Tracy Reese Multi Pocket Drawstring Hobo, $335.00 at Nordstrom.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who carries a journal, colored pencils, an iPhone, and a book in her purse. She is convinced that the right purse is out there, with clean lines and no frou-frou. See Quinn’s website at QuinnCreative.com

For years I’ve been interested in dreams. I’ve had recurring dreams, meaningful dreams that I still remember vividly, and dreams that have come true much as I dreamed them. I once dreamed a portion of someone else’s lif and had them verify it.

What’s bothered me about dreams is that they seem personal and meaningful, but dream interpretation seems to be a impersonal, reduced to symbol searches. Many books list the items in dreams and assign them a meaning. You dream of flying, it’s a sign someone is going to die. In another book, flying is sex. (In that book, everything is sex. It doesn’t need to be 300 pages long, one would have been plenty.) [Editor's note: WordPress automatically assigns links to posts based on keywords. Please be careful before clicking on the automatically generated links below this post.]

Another school of thought says that you are everyone in your dream. I’m not sure that works for me, either. Many of the people in my dream are known to me and many unknown that represent an idea or warning for me, but they aren’t me.

I think dreams are far more meaningful, and I don’t believe they are random images your brain fans out because you’ve eaten pepperoni pizza late at night. I believe dreams are a connection to the collective unconscious–the past of your cultural ancestors. I think dreams are a map of our lives, a colorful tapestry of adventures, a guide to the path we have chosen, an illuminated manuscript of both our imagination and our possibilities.

Currently, I’m enrolled in a seminar on dreaming, run by Robert Moss, the originator of active dreaming. Moss believes we can re-enter dreams, either in meditation or in subsequent dreams.

I’m keeping track of all this dreaming for both my dream journaling course and for some workshops on how to wake up to dreams, making them a useful part of your daydreams and waking life.

May 9 update: I had a dream in which I saw a woman who was a potential client in a crowd. She was very blond, almost glowing. The rest of the crowd was very dun-colored, as if a gray wash had been put over the whole scene. She began to bekon to me, but I couldn’t get to her, the crowd was too thick and not moving. [end of dream]  I woke up and had this strong urge to email this person. So I did. Two days later she called me and said she had had a job come in, and hadn’t thought of me until she saw my email. I accepted the freelance job. I’m calling this a Quinncidence.

–Image: Dreamer, color pencil, aquarelle pencils on 100-lb. Bristol Board, Quinn McDonald (c) 2008 All rights reserved. This post is also under copyright by Quinn McDonald, who is a workshop developer and leader as well as a certified creativity coach. See her website at QuinnCreative.com

There it was again. In a reputable magazine for artists. “The collage peaked my interest.” Luckily, it didn’t, or you would never have a peak experience again. The collage piqued your interest. Totally different word. It’s from the French and it means to give it a little stab of interest. Peek is to look, peak is a top of a mountain, and pique (pronounced peek, that’s why it’s a problem) means to be interested in.

Last week, in the newspaper, I read that woman had performed while she was ill. “She was a real trooper.” Only if she was a policeman. In this case, she was a trouper. Because she was in a troupe of actors, dancers, or other performers. And the show must go on.

In today’s newspaper, I saw a grocery store that had a “souper sale.” I thought it was a joke, maybe tomato or chicken noodle soup was on sale. Nope, just a typo. A super big one.

Some other words that give us trouble:

It’s is never the possessive. When its tail comes to rest, the dragon will be sleeping. No apostrophe. That’s hard, but the only meaning of it’s (with an apostrophe) is it is.

Disinterested means fair or impartial. It has nothing to do with not being interested.

Peruse means to read carefully, not to skim.

Lie is to recline, lay is to place. I lie down on the bed, I lay the baby back in bed.

That’s enough for one day.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved. Image: altaread-austin.org

Early summer is here in Phoenix, and the trees and cacti are doing their best to put bright colors into the landscape. There is a tree with blooms like a purple wisteria (it’s not, but I don’t know what it is), and another one with amazing purple-and-white blossoms that look like orchids. Mulberry trees grow here, which I find amazing; I thought they needed more humidity.

Having learned to distinguish an agave (native) from an aloe (not native to the desert, but have adapted well from their Mediterranean climate), I’m caught up in the flowers. The agave sends up a post of bright yellow flowers before it dies. The aloe blooms year after year, once it reaches maturity. My favorites are the on

the thin-leaved aloes, with long, waving stalks of coral flowers that look like bells. They develop a small, deeply lobed green and purplish-red fruit that grows on the stalk, attached on a short stem.

I’m keeping notes; in a year it will all be commonplace.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who believes that nature has lessons for us, if we’d only get out and notice. Quinn develops and runs workshops on creativity, communicating simply and effectively, and journal-writing. Image: from Quinn’s visual journal. (c) QuinnCreative.com 2008. All rights reserved.

Standing at the kitchen stove, cooking supper, I reached for the pepper grinder. Almost out. When I bought the jar that stored pepper as well as ground it, I was horrified at the expense. “Oh, well,” I thought, by the time I need more pepper, I’ll just use the peppercorns from the pantry.

I remember not wanting to buy large quantities of paper towels, toilet paper, detergent. I wouldn’t be in the apartment long. I refused to buy spices, as it was a waste when my husband would be joining me shortly, and I’d have my kitchen back.

So when I ground the last of the pepper tonight, I counted how long I’d been out here alone: Six months. Half a year. The house is still on the market (C’mon, St. Joeseph!), I talk to my husband on a cell phone, and I have no TV, no real furniture, and most of my art supplies are packed in boxes in the basement across the country, waiting to be moved.

I’ll admit I’ve purchased art supplies. I simply caved around month three, and have added to them since then. But the spices just did me in. I’ve ground my way through entire jar of peppercorns, waiting.

No doubt, other women have waited longer. I was one of the women who waited for a husband to come back from Vietnam. The best way to tell that story is to say that the one I’m waiting for now is not the same man I waited for then. It was a long time ago.

Day by day, I’m changing and so is he. No longer all that young, we are learning how to live apart, how to do without, how to create independent lives. None of these lessons are ones I wanted to get advanced skills in. Neither do I want to move back. I like it here.

So we are caught in time. Him there, me here, running out of spices.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and training developer in communications topics: writing, giving presentations and dealing with the corporate culture you find yourself in. She is also a certified creativity coach. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

There’s a clip on YouTube of a man drawing Bette Davis with mascara. It’s speeded up, and it may be edited, but the result is amazing. He uses the mascara wand as a brush and makes it work with line, shading and value.

After seeing it, I wondered if it was real. So I grabbed by two mascaras–Avon and L’Oreal Voluminous, both in brown/black, and went to work. Surprisingly, neither one had enough color to make it work well. The Avon wand was also quite flexible, great for applying mascara to eyelashes (after all, that was what it was designed for) making it hard to control.

A trip to the drug store, and I had my teen-reliable mascara–Maybelline in double black. The bottom of the container is pink, the top green. I don’t think it’s changed in 30 years. And it worked.

The trunk worked best because the uneven application makes great rough spots. The branches benefit from the the application of the brush held so the bristles create the long leaves of the willow tree.

Ink, brush, paper: cheap. Art in mascara: Not priceless, but washable.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She is a collage artist and teaches workshops, but not in mascara painting. Yet. Image: “Don’t weep, willow” Mascara on paper. (c) 2008 Quinn McDonald, All rights reserved.

Once upon a time I had a job that paid very well. Almost from the beginning, I began to see some problems. My boss was often vague and unclear, and I worked hard to protect the writers whom I supervised.

Then, one day, my boss vanished. He was there on Friday, gone on Monday. There was a reorganization, and a new boss appeared. During the first week, she asked me at least a dozen times if I minded that I now had a female boss younger than my oldest child. Each time I said (truthfully) that I was happy for new leadership and clear direction.

All went well for a while. When my boss encouraged me to exercise (I was an early morning gym rat at the time), I thought she was concerned about life/work balance. Turns out she thought I was fat. (I prefer to think of myself as “sturdy.”) She never said it directly to me, I overheard it in the bathroom one day, when she didn’t see me in the last stall.

When she began to set work goals I could not meet, I began to work harder and longer, but as I jumped through one hoop, it would be discounted and the next hoop held up. Some of them seemed to be on fire. My boss wanted me to push out one of my direct reports because she wasn’t bright enough (she was plenty smart) and another one because he didn’t have the right “corporate image,” which translated as “looks geeky and is overweight.”

The last year of my time in that company was torture. I began to believe that I could not do anything right. Some of the people who worked with me began to see the writing on the wall and avoided me. After years of a good relationship with one direct report, she reported me to human resources because the plant in my office had outgrown my title. (Yep, in that company you could have plants only if they were in accord with your station. Big, important plants were for corner offices only.)

I was especially slow on catching on. I worked harder, longer, and desperately. In the end I left because I was going to be pushed out. I took a job at less pay, in a smaller company, and eventually opened my own business doing what I know and what I love: coaching, writing, and leading workshops

Some jobs are not worth the money you get paid, even if it’s good money. There are times you have to save your own life and leave a job that is eating your soul alive.

Jennifer Alvey, a smart woman who left the practice of law when it began to suck her soul out, now helps other attorneys who are unhappy leave their work. Don’t wait until you develop ulcers or serious health problems. And if you are ready to leave the law, drop by Jennifer’s blogsite.

–Image: Shrewsbury-ma.gov

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who helps people in transition, including from one job to the next. (c) 2008. All rights reserved.