Welcome back, all you porch performers! Last week we stepped inside the circle, studying the symbolism of rings or what it means to be watched by the polite robots we’ve installed on millions of front porches. Perhaps you staged a humorous pratfall for a neighbor’s Ring or tapped out secret messages on flat surfaces with your wedding band. Maybe you noticed how those small gestures—circular, repetitive, intentional—started to feel like a kind of language. Or maybe you just enjoyed the strange comfort of performing for an audience that may or may not ever watch.
This week’s creative nudge comes from the kitchen drawer, the drying rack, or that cabinet where pots and pans hide between performances: the strainer. I cook a lot; I have a few metal ones, a large plastic one for Sunday pasta dinner, and a fourth one I’m not entirely sure what kind of food to use it on.
A strainer does some of the least glamorous but most important work in a kitchen. It separates, catches, rinses, skims, and clarifies. It helps us finish sauces, rinse produce, pull fat from what we cook without sacrificing flavor, and rescue dinner from becoming a soggy disappointment. Sometimes what we leave out is exactly what lets the rest shine.
And then there’s the part that gets discarded. A strainer reminds us that what gets filtered out isn’t automatically worthless. Anyone who has ever saved a mug of cloudy pasta water to help a sauce come together already knows the so-called waste can be the thing that makes the whole dish work.
I’ve been thinking about the metaphorical ways we strain our digital diets. The headlines we skip. The opinions we let pass through. The noise we turn down. The petty nonsense we decide not to carry forward. Recognizing that we do this isn’t selfish. It’s often how we protect the most creative and positive parts of ourselves. We strain not just to remove, but to support what we hope will remain.
Let’s use that wisdom of the kitchen by applying our creative efforts for several minutes using one or more of these nudges:
1. MeshLens: Hold a strainer up between your eye and something ordinary: a window, your face in a mirror, the afternoon sky. What changes when the world is broken into dozens of little openings? Photograph what you see or sketch the distorted view. What becomes pattern? What disappears? What suddenly feels framed, protected, or far away?
2. Drain tap: Set the strainer beneath a thin stream of water, or tap its rim, bowl, and handle with a spoon or a chopstick. Build a short rhythm or sound collage from those noises. This is kitchen percussion with practical origins. Bonus points if you perform it while waiting for the noodles.
3. Strainular: Instead of treating the strained-out part as waste, give it star treatment. Save a little pasta water and use it to thin out sauce. Or choose another edible leftover—a broth, softened vegetables, steeped fruit, even seasoned drippings—and turn it into a tiny improvement or invention. Write a short recipe card or tasting note devoted to the thing that usually gets tossed. What became desirable the moment you paid attention?
4. The Pour Off: Hold the strainer, trace the rim, the handle, the mesh, the places where things catch. Then make two lists: one for what you want more of in your life, and one for what you’d like to see less. Noise? Doomscrolling? Other people’s urgency? Your own perfectionism? Turn those lists into a short poem or a note to yourself. This is about recognizing how much care it takes to keep your creative side fed.
5. Friend App: Invent a strainer for a friend. Not just one that handles pasta or stock, but one that filters something literal and something metaphorical. Maybe it removes seeds and self-doubt. Maybe it catches burnt bits, bad advice, spam texts, and unnecessary guilt while letting humor, courage, and flavor through. Draw it like a patent sketch or write the directions that would come in the box. Who gets this gift? What, exactly, are you hoping they no longer have to carry?
Strainers remind us that creativity isn’t only about adding more. Sometimes it’s about choosing what gets through. Sometimes it’s about rescuing what nearly got thrown away. And sometimes it’s about trusting that a few well-placed holes in your process makes the whole thing work better.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT, used here as a creative collaborator to bring some new ways of thinking into the world.
