Last week I went to a jazz bar with my friend Yuko and she made fun of me at the bar for ordering the same drink (vodka lemonade) every time.

“Don’t you want to try something new? Give him a vodka cranberry.”

In the opening of There’s a Tale to This City, my alter ego Rick Walkow suffered a similar fate, where the barista Lauren made fun of his habit of ordering the same cup of English Breakfast tea around the clock.

“Oh, can’t you just change it up a bit?”

Whenever I went to the French Café down Little Flinders Lane, the waiters no longer bothered to take my order.

“Alors, un latte avec deux sucre? Pas de soucis! (A latte with two sugars? No problem!)

And, when I used to work for a café bookstore, the chef wavered me away when I was on my lunch break:

“No more beef pie for you! My word, you had the same thing every day for two weeks!”

I’m a boring person. I like to pick one item from the menu, one flavor of ice cream (choc-chip mint), or one seat at the café and stick to it until someone chases me away with extraordinary effort.

A part of me yearns for a high-creative lifestyle. Pub crawling, couch surfing, and trying out a different drink every time I end up somewhere new. But after a little taste of it, I had to bow down to my aversion to novelty.

That’s not to say I won’t ever try anything new, it’s just that I believe a creative life is supposed to be boring. If I fall into the rabbit hole of using my art to justify endless novelty, I’d run the risk of busying myself with too much fun, but too little time for creating. Because at the end of the day, creativity is just that: boring work. And to reach that conclusion, we need another comparison.

An artist’s life in movies

1: Drinking near a typewriter

2: Smoking cigarettes with fellow artists on the terrace

3: Stuffing around in an art gallery

4: Clubbing every other day

5: Sleeping in a pile of sketches, writing, and canvases because inspiration might strike at 3 am

An artist’s life as I know it

1: Staring at a blank word document at a café every morning.

2: Ordering a bottle of Coca-Cola feels sinful

3: Unless it’s with a group of visual art students, I wouldn’t go to a gallery alone because I’m out of my depth

4: Sitting at a bar wishing I was home, reading Warhol’s biography

5: Inspiration is a whole bunch of malarkey. Chaining myself to a chair is the best policy

Take these daily scrapbook posts for example. If I was too busy deciding where to write, I’d have less time to think about what to write about. Instead, I found myself at the same seat, at the same café, ordering the same Rueben sandwich for breakfast just to get this post out on time.