Right now, at this point in time, I have three red notebooks that I purchased on a whim at Office Depot about three weeks ago. I wrote Foraker on one, General on another, and Fundraising on a third. In retrospect, I should have purchased three notebooks of differing colors. These are maroon, with soft covers. Or maybe I should have purchased a single notebook with three dividers.

I say I should have because going with the three identical maroon notebooks is not working. They are alike, and they get separated, so I grab what’s handy and write in it. So my General notebook has Foraker training notes in it.

I am a very sloppy notetaker. I am all over the page, and I pick up on salient details. I do not write outlines or focus on the bigger picture. I also at times doodle, making the slop look sloppier.books with me. Thank dog.

Bootleg

If I look at my notes after a few days of their being written, I can’t make sense of them.

This has been a lifelong problem. Why is this?

At the Foraker Group training, one person took notes, she friggin typed them, as a group of four of us talked. She then shared these very logical and organized notes with the group as a whole. As she did this, I glanced at my notes and was appalled. If I was the notetaker I would have been deemed to be more than a few bubbles off plumb. (There is a better phrase for this, but I do not know what it is.) Most definitely, I would not have been considered, ahem, executive director material.

I keep telling people that I created a job for which I am not qualified, and I add that this is a truism. My inability to move from self to audience-centered notes is proof of this.

I’m sure that something is wrong with me and my note taking is reflective of this. If there is a positive side to this, it’s the very creative drawings. I look back on them and I am awed by my high degree of creativity. When I draw, I draw what comes to mind. Later I see that what seemed banal is quite imaginative.

Sometimes I wish that, like Ros Chast, who draws cartoons for the New Yorker, that I’d seen that there might be a niche for me as a cartoonist. She determined that this was what she wanted to do and found an audience for her work.

I’d like to teach a memoir writing class, using graphic arts books as texts. Hmm, I pause. What a great idea.

Well, I’m in Anchorage. There’s an inverse relationship between my looking forward to (anticipating) something and how it meets my expectations. I looked forward to this sojourn, and thus far, I have to say that it hasn’t met my expectations.

I walked into this room full of people and they were engaged in an icebreaking session, one in which they had pieces of paper, and on the paper, squares indicating (I think) the various roles of the conference attendees. I didn’t understand it. Everyone was talking. I didn’t see an inroad. I started to panic and quickly left the room. This was like a bad dream.

The Highlander hotel is a nice place. I like it more than the Marriot, thus far. Tomorrow I will resume the dog and pony show, and undoubtedly it will go just fine. I brought

Next: 51.2/20/25: Have I got a Story for You