When I think about you I powerpoint myself

In which our Hero finds himself caught between a permanent marker and a stoned tablet

Sorry, my choices are to either ramble about work or to talk about Nocturne. Sometimes when she’s working on something, she’ll do her thinking on a whiteboard. Being a whiteboard person myself, I totally get it and so I’ve pointed her to an online whiteboarding site where she can A) noodle from her laptop and B) share with her me. And because I’m not doing fancy shmancy things with whiteboards, I tend to doodle in the margins of her work, where it won’t interfere.

Actually, with highly variable degrees of self-consciousness, I doodle in letters I send her too. Oh, also I send her letters. Anyway, I just draw little things, fast things, like modifications to the stationery, or just outright doodles just to fill gaps in the page. Trivial, silly, random, non-sequitur things.

And yesterday, I went back to her whiteboard after she asked if it was still open, and discovered she’d left me a note, wishing she could save all the little doodles and things in one place so she could look at them and think of me. I’ve never thought of them as something to archive. To me they’re just play, silly things to provoke subliminal smiles, reactions faster than the muscles of her face. Makes me glad I doodled in her letters.

So I want to insist that I’m not crazy, just crazy about her. Which is why one of my moments of whimsy resulted in, rather than a letter, a powerpoint presentation.

Okay. That sounds a little crazy. Especially considering that both she and I have occasionally bonded over the crapfest that is Powerpoint. But hold on, it makes sense. See, a long while back, one time she asked me to tell her a story. The theory was that she was tired and she just wanted to have my voice for the few minutes it’d take her to zonk out. Except I’ve got a weird sense of humour and this was an extemporaneous story. (The result was actually something I’m moderately proud of and wish we’d thought to record, a very long, rambling story about a dragon who picked up a stomach bug, in the form of a princess he’d swallowed whole and who proceeded to live in his stomach to his great embarrassment) So I figured that I could amuse her with a little story, and I wanted something.. bookey. And powerpoint is really suited to that kind of content.

So I wrote a little story, intending to add a doodle or two as graphics. Except a page or two in, it got… bigger. And suddenly I was mashing text around the page because “This would be a great spot to kind of have a doodle wind around a page.” Yeah, now that I write it, that’s probably where I crossed the line into crazy. But at the time it made perfect sense. I made a very short silly story, arranged it on the powerpoint pages.

Then I went though it again, and at each page that had a little [note to describe picture], I started to draw. Well, I tried to draw. Honestly, it was a catastrophic couple of attempts. I’d just started a hand-drawn project before this which had gone dreadfully awry because my pigment pens that I use to make the final version were dead, having been left imperfectly capped for over a year. And here, I plugged in my drawing tablet and… nothing. I still don’t know if it’s dead or not, I’m trying to decide if I care enough to try to diagnose it or if this is just an exploitable excuse for a new toy.

So. Plan B. I’ve been using a software package for many years called Sketchbook Pro. And when I discovered Sketchbook Mobile for my phone, I’d grabbed it as a toy to play with in meetings. (I can highly recommend the entire product family. Autodesk has really treated the product right since they bought Alias). And so… like the mouse (which I did end up sending to the Mouse eventually), I doodled on my phone.

And the results were not… great. But I wasn’t going for professional art, I was going for whimsy, and my hit-and-miss drawing style turned out to be just right for whimsy. Which turned into a hilarious (to me) couple of weeks spent sneaking time in meetings to draw for my powerpoint presentation to amuse my girlfriend.

Eventually it was done, and I sent it to her and made Nocturne read out loud so I could kind of flip through it with her. And I hate to say this because I’ve been putting together powerpoint decks for most of my professional career and even back as far as high school in the middle ages (Harvard Graphics, baby!), but I think this is the best presentation I’ve ever done.

Plus it made my sweetheart smile. (How is that crazy?)

Unfortunately, I’m not going to share it. My “look what I did” impulse is oddly curtailed by the feeling that this was for Nocturne, so it’s hers now.