Episode 3: Pets and Creativity: A Pawsitive Influence

• In this episode of the Creative Work Hour Podcast, titled "Pets and Creativity: A Pawsitive Influence," we explore how pets inspire our creative processes. Hosts and guests share stories about how their furry friends, like Nikki the rescue dog and Baby Boo the Korat cat, break creative blocks and manage emotions. 
• We discuss the role of pets in photography, international pet sitting experiences, and their impact on creative communities. Plus, we delve into cultural references such as Blake Snyder's "Save the Cat" method. 
• Join hosts Alessandra, Greg, Dr. Melanie, Devin, Bobby W., Penelope, and Adriane for an engaging discussion on pets and creativity.

So this is day three of the creative work hour podcast for the NaPodPoMo and we were talking just a little bit ago between ourselves about pets and a lot of people are pet lovers here on creative work hours. So I wanted to pose the question: Pets, help with creativity? Popcorn style and just let the conversation flow wherever it goes. What are your thoughts on that? Do pets help with creativity?

I'll start. Yes. Yeah. It's, uh, it's interesting because with my, with my pet who's now older, I need to give her different types of attention, but just, I don't know, it just, I can be silly with her. I can do, you know, I can kind of get out of my shell and I, it's just not a distraction. Sometimes it's a distraction, but other times it's, it's just you get out of your head. And that's, that's how I, that's how I think about it.

You have a dog? A cat? What do you have?

I have a dog. I have a 14 and a half year old rescue dog. She's

And she's big.

She, she's2

What's her name?

Her name is Nikki.

She's a, she's a guard dog that can't hear or see anymore. She still looks really scary, so don't tell anyone.

And she, so she sits on the balcony and only when you're in the direct line of sight, can she hear or see you. 

Animals are smart. Animals are definitely really, really intelligent. You know, when dogs have been trained to, drug sniffing, detecting cancer, epilepsy, all kinds of things. Very intelligent.

Well, cats are too. I mean I, the, the last, we've had three Korats. It's, a breed. K-O-R-A-T. And our second Korat was named Baby Boo and she had a lock on my nervous system and she could help me regulate just like a down and out depression or an over the top anxiety attack. She was amazing. Just one paw on me was like, "You're okay, you're okay." You know? And to do creative work you have to first stop being so crazy, you can do something, right? 

So you can make something happen like Bobby was saying, you know, help you get out of your own head, out of your own, out of your own way, that you're not alone. And besides feeding and providing water and safety and whatever bathroom habits need to be seen to, you know, they don't ask anything of you.

They just, they just love you. And it helps you, I think. Well, it helps me be at ease with myself, which

Giving the teachers vulnerability. Oh yeah.

And being vulnerable is part of being creative, right? Like Brene Brown's work.

That's the word. That is the word. Greg,

What's that? Brene Brown.

Vulnerable.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. So, what, what, so we talk about creativity, what does being creative mean? Different things to different people, right?

Well, I will say back to like the pet thing, just so I get this,

Yeah, absolutely. Please.

Is that I take pictures of my dog sometimes and you should put them into memes really, honestly, but, but they help with creativity because they, they have like this, you're capturing, they almost are like human like, they become like you and so like, she'll have this moments where she'll have this complete human moment of a look on her face. 

One could be like, sometimes I'm thinking like, she's a deep thought, like contemplating the universe, and I'll think about that and that picture and be thinking like, "Oh my gosh, this is like, what if I'm contemplating the universe? What would I be thinking right now?" And then I could write or create something.

Or when she has her belly up like this and her, she's completely passed out, or living a good life, right? Because if they have their belly, it means they feel safe, right? And so I think about those kinds of things like, how would that be able to feel like, because they have such great emotion. And if you take those, like, pictures of them, I like doing it just to like capture those things, or like when she takes over my entire bed, it makes room for herself and she'll redo the blanket. I'm like, "Oh really?" You know what I mean?

Comfortable just watching them do that, like how they take on a lot of you as well, like your dogs become like you. It's kind of weird. Like, so it's just being able to like capture those moments and be in that moment of what is that feeling when it relates to a human feeling, You know? 

People, everyone loves seeing pet photographs. So I bet it would go down a treat if you were to post that over in Discord. And if you're not sure what Discord is, like if anyone is listening to this on the podcast, it's, it was originally developed, right, for gamers, but it's such a diverse platform. You can do video on it. You can do voice on it, text channels, and share. They have bots as well, right? Discord bots are a big thing apparently. So yeah, it would be really cool to see some pictures.

But part of me was like, go ahead.

I have a hard time separating out the difference between pets and where they contribute and my travel experiences because we've done international pet sitting in  countries and  assignments. We've looked after 63 dogs and 64 cats at this point, 

And we've done it over a period of six years. And so, you know, because the brain is so stimulated when you go somewhere different anyway and that's very creative, that's very creative. But then we have the balancing effect of falling in love with meeting someone's pets. And I think what really strikes me about it is how their owners can leave the next morning.

You know, we have a meal with them the night before and we orient ourselves to the house and the grounds and the gardener and the maid and whatever comes with the package and the dogs get up in the morning or the cats and they kind of look at you and if you feed them they fall in love with you.

So you've already cleared security.

Yes. Yes. Thank you. So you're, you're, thank you. You are, you're right away, you are no longer persona non grata, you know? They, they just imp-, place their implicit trust and their whole sense of wellbeing just switches to you. You are my person. What, Person right now.

And I love that. I love that. So it's very, I think that's very creative, so it's getting coffee in the middle of, nice, something. Cheers.

Yeah. We really are the center of their world, right? And they can be the center of our world, too.

Yeah. That's why. And unfortunately we do not own pets anymore. We've had lots of pets, everything from horses to turtles. And we do not own any as a choice so that we can have the freedom to occasionally and go live in that lifestyle because that lifestyle is the whole package. 

That's creative. It's not only the dog. It's the dog's environment. It's the dog's family. It's, it's the whole thing. So it's, What an adventure.

It is the whole adventure, which of course is just creativity, right?

Yeah. And one of the things about creative work hours is when we have a chance to see each other just, you know, on the one-offs here and there, we get to meet the pets in person that we've been seeing on the camera. Like, I know Jasper is there in Dr. Melanie's square somewhere. "What are you doing Jasper?" And the pets will come to recognize the voices here. It's the funniest thing. Hey, Jasper. You recognize my voice? I know you do. 

Yeah. I went to Dr. Melanie's house and we had a slumber party. So, I spent the night there and the next morning after we got back from coffee, I went over to little Jasper and I was wearing my cat eye glasses, right? And he just loves me and I just love him and I'm just having this conversation with him and he just like, what, knocks those glasses off my head.

Yeah, he got a little too stimulated. Like, wait a minute, how is this?

Wow.

I think they're a combination of like responsibility, like you're responsible for them, which gives you a certain anchor and the whole thing about getting out of your to-do list.

They don't give a shit about your to-do list.

No. So that means that, you know, you can, um, you have to leave that narrow bit of mind. And if, if you have to figure out ways to play with them, that's actually going to the part of your brain that uses, you know, some, okay, what do I think about this? So, maybe I take a break to play with him and then I don't go back to the bloody to-do list and I do something else or I, I remember a thought or whatever.

Well, it's like an RPG, a roleplaying game in that to come up with what would be fun for the pet to play, you kind of have to like to put yourself in their paws for a minute. What would be fun? Or if in the case of a missing toy mouse, it's like, well, if I were a cat, where would I, might, where could it be that I might bat that mouse so that we can find some toys? Hint, under the sofa.

Someties I have to go under the sofa, man. Pain in the, yes.

Now Devin was talking about the collapsible cat tunnel that he'd got for,

Boo. Yeah. Oh, there it is. I see it.

I thought Jasper would hate the tunnel. He used to four or three years ago when he was little. Now he loves it. I came home after being away overnight. He went through that damn thing like a bat out of hell about six times. I was surprised. You know, I was like, "Oh, are you happy to see me?" Cool. They're always happy to see you, right?

Yeah.

And they never complain about eating the same thing.

When I came home from London, he screamed for two hours. He was pissed.

He's like, "What the hell did you do? You didn't take me." So,

Well yeah, our little, our little group, Dr. Melanie and I were lucky enough to get to spend a week together in England, but she had to pay for it when she got home.

He screamed. I never heard him do that before.

And actually, right now I'm the one doing the cat sitting. I'm in Devon's apartment while he's in Vegas and I'm babysitting Nissabu and then I fly back out to England on Tuesday. So, it's, it's, it is, it's, it, it's part of it. It's part of creativity because even the most hateful, disgruntled person in the world, if they have a pet, there's a soft place in their heart.

Well, just something Alexandre has heard me say so much and that came up a lot this weekend because I'm here in Vegas. The real reason was to see the Eagles, but we spent the weekend. I was with my songwriting partner. We're writing a musical. We spent a lot of time working on the musical while we were sort of out of our normal routines. And one of my favorite concepts of storytelling, screenwriting, was by a guy. I should have looked up his name before I started talking, but he wrote a book called Save the Cat. And it was a simple concept of successful screenwriting. 

And "Save the Cat" means if you have someone, a hero, you want your audience to root for, have them do something simple like get a kitten out of a tree early in the movie and that way, if they save the cat, we're going to love them. We're going to root for them from then on because we know they're a good guy and we're going to cheer for them succeeding in their hero's journey. So, and just as an example, that's how important someone who is, does something kind for an animal like, "Oh, that's a good person. Okay, I'm, I'm going to be supporting you throughout this narrative."

But if they're drowning baby kittens at the beginning of Gunsmoke, not so much. Bad.

Oh my god, Greg, how did, how did we do?

Right on the, right on the money.

Wow. This is, this is fun. Thank you for doing that. So what, what Greg has been doing really, the heavy lifting of the Creative Work Hour podcast. I've given it two goes and dropped it and killed the baby both times. So Greg is like, "I will help you, Penelope." And so, this, this is part of, of the podcast is, he'll do some sampling out of this. The format that we're using is closest to a format that I fell in love with like  years ago and it's not the TED Talks, but it's a show creatively made by NPR from the TED Talks where the speaker gets interviewed and then they hear a little of the presentation on the TED stage, and that show is called, call the, the NPR TED Radio Hour.

Mhm.

And that's the basic, that's the basic format of, of our podcast. Now that's quite a heavy lift. And so, this season, Greg is leading us into just creating a very simple minimum viable product of the Creative Work Hour podcast. So,

I have assignments every day. And then he's like, "Hey, how about that assignment from yesterday?" I'm like, "Oh." So, we'll actually have something coming out because he is just very, he knows, he knows how to manage my, my task aversion, we'll call it. Does anybody else have task aversion all the time?

Well, I'm going to turn off the recorder now and I, I've got my eye on the ball.