There’s a new book, ”The Cabinet” by Un-su Kim, which describes an office worker who, ”while navigating the extreme boredom of his office job, discovers Cabinet 13: a filing cabinet filled with extraordinary accounts of ‘symptomers,’ people experiencing strange and marvelous occurrences and abilities…symptomers describe sleeping for months (”torporers”), seeing their doubles (”doppelgangers”) and growing gingko trees from their fingers (”chimeras”). The office worker starts interviewing them to hear their stories. What do they tell him?

For more than 10 years an artist has been writing every word of Marcel Proust’s ”In Search of Los Time” on grains of rice. When finished he plans to place all the words inscribed on these rice grains in a giant hourglass. It is said that there also was once another artist who painted a polo horsemen scene on a grain of rice. These are amazing feats.

What if you could do these things, too, such as write words of grains or paint a scene on a grain of rice? What book would you choose to inscribe its words on rice grains, or what kind of scene would you want to draw on a rice grain?

Or, better yet, what kind of extraordinary artistic achievement would you like to undertake?

The New Year’s Eve Wishing Wall is back in Times Square, urging people to write their wishes for the new year on pieces of confetti that were then scheduled to be blasted through the sky at midnight on New Year’s Eve as the ball drops. What wish would you put up on the wall?

As you enter the new year ahead, what dream do you have that would like to see come true? It can be a small dream or a big one, but it makes you happy to think about.
Is there, too, a tiny step you can take to make that dream come true?

Suddenly, late at night, when the room was dark, she started to hear strange voices coming from her stuffed animals. They were talking to one another, and this is the strange and amazing story she heard them tell…

(You can also write your response in the form of a comic strip created at MakeBeliefsComix.com)

The two friends, fearful of the killings in their small town in Latin America, decide to flee their country late at night and hop upon a freight train bound for a new land. This is the adventure they had. This is what happened to them.

(You can also write your response in the form of a comic strip created at MakeBeliefsComix.com)