• Believe in your fucking self
• Stay up all fucking night
• Work outside of your fucking habits
• Know when to fucking speak up
• Fucking collaborate
• Don’t fucking procrastinate
• Get over your fucking self
• Keep fucking learning
• Form follows fucking function
• A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad fucking ideas
• Find fucking inspiration everywhere
• Fucking network
• Educate your fucking client
• Trust your fucking gut
• Ask for fucking help
• Make it fucking sustainable
• Question fucking everything
• Have a fucking concept
• Learn to take some fucking criticism
• Make me fucking care
• Use fucking spell check
• Do your fucking research
• Sketch more fucking ideas
• The problem contains the fucking solution
• Think about all the fucking possibilities

[updated to add: if anyone knows the author, I'd love to link to them...]

Tonight, as part of The Sackville Film Society’s fall series, I watched Werner Herzog’s wonderful, quirky documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

The film was an exploration of what it means to be human, to share experiences through story-telling, through what people in the art community call mark-making.

Reaching back as far as 35,000 years, these oldest known cave paintings show that their makers had an intimate knowledge of horses, bison, rhinos, lions, bears, and more, that mocks the facile notion of the artists as primitives. Their lines are as practiced, as stylistic and as skilled as any human can make.

As someone whose personal drawing style tends towards contour drawings, I felt an immediate connection with whoever rendered these magnificent images on rock. It’s impossible to know if they were teaching aids (be successful; be safe), storytelling devices, spiritual touchstones, pure decoration, or the only thing an artist could do to express something inside them that they needed to share in order to feel human. To be human.

I also couldn’t help but wonder what these people would have thought of the technologies we have at our fingertips today; cameras, smartphones, video, communications satellites. We’re not really doing anything fundamentally different with them than they did with these paintings. We congratulate ourselves that our great-great-grandparents would be mystified by iPhones and instant, global communication, but we use them to tell the same stories. Be successful. Be safe. Learn. Share. Marvel. Wonder.

These long-dead artists can’t see us, but we can see them. They’re a little out-of-focus, but they look familiar. They’re not so different, are they?

I don’t know if this qualifies as dumb, exactly, but it was wrong and it has stuck with me for a long time.

When I was in second grade, I noticed the moon up in the sky as I was walking to school in the morning, probably around 8:45 am.

With a child’s knowledge of astronomy, that didn’t fit with what I thought I knew — that the sun was up in the daytime and the moon only came out at night.

Excited by my ‘discovery’, I told my second-grade teacher about it when I got to class, and she proceeded to tell me — in front of everyone — that I was wrong and that everyone knew the moon only came out at night.

I was 7. I wasn’t a rebel, and I wasn’t about to tell her to look out the window. I was taught that teachers were authority figures, and that they were to be respected.

Looking back on it, I suppose she was just a kid herself; probably new to teaching, overwhelmed by having 30-some 6- & 7-year-olds to deal with, maybe not enough time for coffee that day, and who-knows-what kinds of problems outside of the classroom, but the way she dismissed me out-of-hand was wrong.

While it may have seemed like an easy way to deal with a question that didn’t line up with the day’s lesson plan, or maybe made her feel insecure about her lack of astronomy knowledge (I have lectured in introductory astronomy at the undergraduate level — trust me, even most educated people have a very limited grasp of astronomy), it was wrong.

She no doubt forgot it immediately, if not sooner. It was more than 30 years ago and I remember it like it was yesterday.

It wasn’t a crushing humiliation; I wasn’t scarred by it. I don’t remember the other kids teasing me about it or even mentioning it.

‘Teachers pretend to know more than they do’ was the most important thing I learned in second grade, though. I guess she did me a big favour.