The Patience to Boil an Egg

As I made my hard-boiled egg lunch today, I chuckled, thinking about how my husband always tells me that an egg has to be in boiling water for 10 minutes before it is hard-boiled.  I, on the other hand, choose never to set the timer--I'll just put it in the water and have it boil for a while.  That'll work.  Which is fine when I have things to do and I let the egg boil for more than ten minutes before thinking about it again.  When, however, I'm in a rush, for myself, or for a child who needs to eat something before racing to the school bus, more often than not, my method results in not quite hard-boiled eggs, so unappetizing that the child would rather run to the bus hungry.

Why do hard-boiled eggs matter?  Well, they don't, really.  They just struck me as a way of thinking about how creativity, great as it is, often needs to go hand in hand with practicality in order to be fully realized.

When I was at One Life to Live, I was a little bit of both--the practical person, who made sure we did as much as possible with our studio time, and the creative person, who tried to find the best performances or camera angles to tell a story.  In either case, I worked side by side with the other type of person--as the practical person, I could say to a director or producer, "that egg won't be hard-boiled in six minutes."  As the creative person, I had to listen when a producer said to me, "if that egg can't be hard-boiled in six minutes, you should figure out a different kind of egg to make."

As a freelancer, particularly on jobs I do from home, I have to be both people, often without benefit of the "other type of person." It is up to me to say, "Much as I'd like to, I can't make you that kind of egg with that amount of time," or "what about trying this other kind of egg?"

I have to say, I really miss having my side-by-side people.  While I certainly enjoy both the creative and the practical sides of what I do, it is tremendously hard to do them together and alone, to be both the reminder and the remindee, both the creator and the technician, both the editor and the assistant.

Today's hard-boiled egg lunch turned out fine.  I was so busy working that my creative approach left them cooking just long enough to be good for egg salad.  But I was so impatient to eat them, I skipped the bread and went right for the bowl!