Lileks: Add 'creative' to the list of our Top 10 traits

Once again the Twin Cities area is high on a list of healthiest places to live, beating out Poisonville, Miss., and Rabies Gully, Ky., or any of the other hapless places where people start the day with a salmonella smoothie and a hand-rolled asbestos cigarette.

It's great to live in a healthy place, but it doesn't mean you get five years added to your life span just because you're here. Sir, the tests show you have high blood pressure. But that's impossible! They built a bike lane by my house!

Minneapolis was also named the "No. 1 City for Families" by a real-estate brokerage, which cited the schools in Westonka (not Minneapolis) and the housing prices in the western suburbs (really not Minneapolis.) In related news, the moon has been named "best climate" based on the average daily temperature of San Diego.

Want more? A new study says we are among the Top 10 cities for creativity. No. 6, to be exact. Let's be clear: "Creative" does not mean "people who have an unerring sense for which scarf goes with that belt — no, the other one, with the gold thread. Right, Marshalls, only $6, can you believe it?" It means creative professionals. Dancers, painters, singers, photographers.

Not to disparage photographers, but you cannot base an economy on photography unless it's 1955 and your town's main employer is Kodak. It's not like there are busy factories in the industrial sector where thousands work at assembly lines turning out three photographers per minute to be shipped all over the country. A city with a big grain-milling sector has a healthier, more diverse economy than one based on photography, although the latter is less likely to have a spectacular explosion. Unless the silly model just can't … take … directions.

One of the booming sectors is writers, which might encourage the dilettantes — Oh grand, a supportive community with workshops and readings! — but any honest writer looks at stats that say "among the highest per capita number of writers in the country" and thinks "wonderful: five cents a word."

Some professions are on the decline, though. Floral arranging took the biggest hit. It's down 29 percent over 10 years, probably because picking up a bouquet at the grocery store is easier than going to a shop. You might not think of floral arranging as a creative profession, but it is — and it reminds you that "creative" doesn't just mean the usual artsy trades.

These things are not art; they are skills. Art does not mean "a pretty result." Floral arrangement is not an art; painting floral arrangements is. But it does require skill and aesthetic judgment. So yes, it is creative.

But so are many other things. Meat butchery, for example. No one wants to look at a display of steaks that looks like the guy in the back is dealing with emotions that followed when his wife left him for a cattle rancher. It takes skill to cut it just so and arrange it nicely. When you consider the role of parsley garnish, it's almost floral arrangement.

Tax preparation is creative work, too, and for the brave. Police work is a form of acting, since cops are required to keep a straight face while someone is insisting that he just bought this car from some guy named John who didn't say anything about the burglar tools and the 26 car stereos in the trunk.

Fertility clinic staff are, by definition, creative. Someone who spends hours and hours scrapbooking to the point where she almost wishes someone in the extended family would break a leg because she found the cutest little puffy stickers in the shape of crutches — she's creative.

Just sitting in an office all day dealing with e-mails creates something of value to the company, or they wouldn't pay you to do it. Gardening is creative, inasmuch as it's floral arrangement plus set design. Everyone, in a sense, is creative.

Anyway, most people don't move to a city just because of its robust creative component. When I moved to D.C., it was known at the time for an excessive amount of lawyers and murderers. The primary outputs were tape: red and yellow. It was unaffordable and horrible for families.

Now it's booming. It's actually the No. 1 Most Creative metropolitan area, according to the same study.

Maybe so, but I wouldn't move back for anything. Not even the short, mild winters, the early long spring, the gorgeous autumns. Who needs that? Our weather is one of those things we love without reservation.

Lying to yourself is a form of fiction-writing, right? If that's the case, then we are all so very creative these days. Next year we should be No. 5.