Cutting and pasting comic strips is one of my favorite ways to clear my brain. I especially like cutting up a whole page of the comics section and swapping dialogue from one strip to another. Here’s Blondie with dialogue from Garfield:
Then I love taking the scraps and making new one-panel cartoons:
Don’t feed the trolls. But what if you can feed off the trolls?
In Plutarch’s “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” he advises that rather than lashing out at your enemies or completely ignoring them, you should study them and see if they can be useful to you in some way. He writes that because our friends are not always frank and forthcoming with us about our shortcomings, “we have to depend on our enemies to hear the truth.” Your enemy will point out your weak spots for you, and even if he says something untrue, you can then analyze what made him say it.
If you respond to trolls, you feed them. But: If you take their terrible idea, and articulate the opposite, good idea, without ever mentioning them at all, they’ve effectively handed you a new piece of writing, and you can be grateful to them…
If you’ve watched my newest talk, “How To Keep Going,” you might remember the story about planting iris. These are purple and yellow iris blooming in our backyard, planted by the former owners of our house. Beauty brought to us by people we never even met…
After we put the boys to bed, my wife and I clean up the 3-year-old’s dozens of drawings he leaves all over his drawing space, deciding what to keep and what to recycle. The figures above were all drawn on the same piece of paper and I thought they could tell a story, so I cut them out and had my 5-year-old letter the speech balloons. They’re still too young to (peacefully) jam together, so I like doing these little orchestrated collaborations. (Previously: “What do you know?”)
This post has been updated here.
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