Speaking of … ☼7

…turning remnants into Good Stuff!

I got my annual report…?

I was sitting at our intimate xmas party sipping on some tea, having just watched a couple of works in progress from the year. I don’t know if I told you but M, N and I meet every few weeks or so in M’s living room. Over tea and biscuits we read each other’s drafts, watch rough cuts and other story things. The bigger the pile of bikkies, the more we need to pat someone on the shoulder. This year there were lots and lots of biscuits, fresh strawberries sometimes too, for when collaborators refused to hand over footage and when computers crashed and swallowed near-finished things whole.

We were an odd bunch that night. There were even a couple of the random but nice young men that always seem to appear out of nowhere in M’s hallways or in the kitchen asking for food - friends of her son, that seem to have just settled into one of the many rooms in the house indefinitely. We were all sitting together in the lounge room when M walked over to N and I with a couple of print-outs.
She smiled as she gave them to us. I scanned the heading suspiciously: “Annual Report 2008, Executive Summary.”

Following instructions, M’s daughter read the report out loud.

She read it rat-a-tat-a-tat-news-reporter style, and suddenly all the scrappy odds and ends of my year took shape and seemed like, well, progress of some kind. It was sort of thrilling to hear it all laid out in front of everyone. And it wasn’t laid out how I saw it, as a bit of a slow, stop-start year. Instead it was all very dramatic, ‘major downfalls’, ‘restive investors threatening to remove all stock’, ‘recent rallying due to support from team members’, ‘investor confidence taking awhile to return to former levels’. We even got portfolio summaries for each of us, I’m glad to say that mine had a “very strong finish to the year,” although “major commitments were slow to develop.” Too true.