Creative Delirium

A friend of mine recently held a very successful "creativity party." The reasoning that, as a group of intelligent and creative people, his wide group of friends had a wide range of creative skills (drawing, painting, music, writing, origami, etc.), but few opportunities to really apply them. The objective, then, was to get a large group together and provide a social context for creating things. It was a "raw materials potluck," with people bringing things suitable to the tasks they knew well, and everyone (under the not-so-subtle peer pressure to "keep being creative" for the duration of the evening) was quite productive, with a substantial degree of cross-pollination (I, for example, did some of my first dabbling in electronic music in years). We plan to do it again soon, in large part because of how much fun it was the first time.

The problem, though, is that my desire to be creative is almost directly tied to how late in the day it is. In the morning, I exist in worker/dataminer mode, scanning digital headlines before diving into several hours of professional programming. By late afternoon, social impulses are often dominant. Actual creative urges don't seem to occur to me until quite late (midnight or later), during which time I'm usually already a little groggy. Last night, the muse kept whispering in my ear until around 5:20 AM, and now I'm seriously drunk on exhaustion. I haven't had the chance to go back and see how what I did really turned out, but I have this nagging fear (made dull and vague by the sleep deprivation headache I have) that it's actually crap. If so, it's like a pre-emptively wasted day today, as I'm clearly too tired to be overly productive. My objective is to make it to the end of my work day and then probably crash (which will make sleeping when I should be sleeping difficult). Dammit.

Stupid muse.