Gopherite

　　To end the two weeks of creative exercises, Brother came up with an exercise that was going to test our creative writing skills which was closely related to artistic creativity. Brother first starts out with a little story, "Ok, pretend you are in the year 3000. We have learned and mastered space travel. Earth has successfully colonized every planet in the solar system. You are on a mission to find new life on other planets. You are sent to a planet named Gopher-X to find some intelligent life to bring back to earth. You arrive on Gopher-X and find a whole civilization of life forms. They are named Gopherites. You decide to take one of these Gopherite home with you to earth. When you first arrive on earth, the first thing that the Gopherite sees, he tries to describe to his Gopherite girlfriend back home. Now I want you guys to describe some common earth thing, but you guys as the Gopherite. Got it? Five minutes…starting now."

　　Everyone nodded and we started. We had about five minutes to describe our object in the eyes of a Gopherite. When Brother called time, I saw that nearly everyone did a car or an oven or a toothbrush.

　　Are these the only three things on earth?

　　Once again, every one was about a page long and decisively boring. All week, I had thought up ways to not work and still get credit, so I wasn't about to stop on the last day. While most the descriptions were along the lines of "It is a long object with a round end on one side and a flat end on the other. On the flat end there are bristles…" Which would be how they described a toothbrush, quite boring at best.

　　So we were reading them aloud and it came to me. Here was my first version, "As you know, Gopherites are a race of deaf, mute, and blind aliens, so a description would be impossible!"

　　Everyone laughed and clapped.

　　Brother never said a thing about us telling traits of gopherites. So, I decided, insgroupsto get out of writing a full page of mindless description, to make gopherites deaf, mute, and blind. Thus, they had no way of gaining any impressions of anything on earth, thus he would have nothing to describe.

　　Brother Wanda shook his head and still had to recognize that as my "creation".

　　Later that day, Brother grabbed me and said with a big grin, "That was very creative Kuan, but you are walking the line."

　　I said in reply, "The line?"

　　He smiled as he said, "Yeah, the line. There is a very thin line between something that is clever and creative and something that is just stupid, you are right on the middle. That'sswheresPicasso was."

　　After he was done, he just walked away laughing.