Fans And Radiators

Every Winter, my roommate's room is nice and toasty, while mine is cold and unpleasant. Both of us have a radiator, but Will is a fixer and I am not.

I actually have two adjoining rooms, and the radiator is in one of them - the bedroom. So even when I manage to have a relatively warm bedroom, my living room is always cold.

Last year I noticed that there were actual gaps in the brickwork of one of the windows in my living room. I could feel the cold air hissing in against the palm of my hand. I plugged the holes with tissue paper, and taped plastic over the whole window, and that actually helped a little. But not much.

This year I decided to just look at what Will did in his room, and try to do it myself. So it turns out he has a big fan, bungied right to the radiator. It blows through the pipes, and sends an enormous emanation of hot air throughout the room.

I happen to have a big, powerful fan too. So I set it up and aimed it at the radiator, and right away my bedroom filled up with hot air, and was very comfortable. If it got too hot, I'd just turn off the fan. It worked like a charm. For the bedroom.

The living room, however, stayed cold. It was kind of impressive. The door between the bedroom and the living room is always open, and I could step from the cold air into the hot air, and back again. It was like there was an invisible wall keeping the hot air in the bedroom.

Will doesn't have a second room, so I asked him what he recommended. He said I should buy a box fan and mount it at the top of my door frame, and blow it out into the living room.

I didn't like the sound of that though. I envisioned wires trailing everywhere, and being unable to close the door, and possibly having the fan fall on my head some day.

But I did have another fan, a smaller one. So I set it up on the bedroom floor, and had it blow out into the living room.

The living room just got colder and colder, and the bedroom stayed nice and toasty. It seemed even toastier, actually. When I asked Will about it, he gave me a funny look, and said something along the lines of, "why are you using the fan to blow all the cold air off the bedroom floor and into the living room?"

He told me to put the fan on the living room floor instead, and have it blow into the bedroom. So I did. A little while later, both rooms were nice and toasty. Even the bathroom adjoining the living room warmed up; and that bathroom was well known as a cold, arctic land in the Winter.

What is it that defines a person's creativity? I know I'm an inventive person, with plenty of creative spark. I'm always coming up with cool stuff of one kind or another. And yet something as simple as the flow of hot air through an apartment, did not inspire me at all. Even when I was cold and uncomfortable, I just didn't care to imagine what the radiator was doing, and how to make it do it better.

My roommate, on the other hand, is constantly thinking about things like that. Keeping his room warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer is just one trivial example. Before Hurricane Sandy, he rigged up a connection between a double-A battery pack and a USB cable, so we could keep our phones and tablets charged during the power outage. He's modified, to one degree or other, virtually every tool or device he owns, not to mention the furniture. Everyone goes to him when they have hardware problems.

But Will wouldn't invent any of the things I create. When I was inventing my board game, he had a very tough time connecting to the ideas surrounding it or the problems confronting it, and really only expressed a mild interest out of friendship.

Or when I was developing any of the various dietary systems I've come up with, he had no interest in any of that, and even recoiled in horror at some of the ideas. They just didn't inspire him at all. But for me, they were wonderful playgrounds!

Or my work with Labanotation. Will has absolutely no interest in trying to explain complex ideas to other people. The idea of trying to write a text showing people how to use Labanotation is something very alien to him. I'm not even sure how he perceives my work in that area. Maybe he sees it as some kind of odd tick. I go in my room and twitch around on the keyboard, about Labanotation.

But so yeah. Ingenuity. Creativity. We're all so different in the things that inspire us; and that inspiration colors absolutely everything we perceive in the world. Will and I live in the same house, but we each see a completely different world around us.

When I was inventing my board game, and people started to play it and ask me what it was called, I couldn't tell them. I couldn't come up with a good name. But I asked Will about it, and he came up with a perfect name for it. He called it "crumble". And that name connects to a lot of the ideas that inspired it, that are woven all through its ruleset. Even though Will didn't connect to the problems involved in coming up with that ruleset, he did connect to the static ideas that ultimately came to be represented by the game. And he was able to synthesize those ideas into a name that captured exactly what I needed it to say.

Ingenuity. Creativity. We all live our lives surrounded by genius. But because any genius has a unique inspiration, it can be hard for us to see it in others sometimes. It's tempting to think of just ourselves as the smart ones, and everyone else as morons. I know a lot of people in retail who have succumbed to that belief. And in many sad cases, it's also tempting to think of everyone else as the smart ones, and only ourselves as the pathetic, uninspired worms. I know plenty of people who see themselves that way as well. I've dated plenty of people who saw themselves that way.

It's tragic. But the truth that I've come to in my wanderings, is that we really are all of us brilliantly inspired with creativity. If we think we encounter someone who isn't, it's just because we're not encountering them in their private, safe space. In one way or another, everyone is Henry Darger. Some of us just manage to be Darger in public.