20060808 A Program Is Born

This certainly has been no slam-dunk. I’ve been working on a bear slide presentation for a couple of weeks now. At least. Maybe longer. I’ve lost track of the hours and the days I have struggled with this thing. It’s not writer’s block exactly. I guess I’d call it writer’s constipation. A lot went into it but nothing was coming out. Nothing good anyway.

I had done the research for the program, including reading two books and taking detailed notes. I had copies of PowerPoint presentations the bear biologists had given at training and the audio to go along with them. But even with all the preparation handy, I just could not get the program to flow.

The program was due on August 1, and this is now the 8th. Due to some luck in scheduling, I had but one evening program in that eight-day period. The audience that night was not aware that “The Name’s the Thing”, a history program I developed in June, was not the program I should have been presenting. But I knew. And my supervisor Peter knew. Still, thanks to Peter’s forbearance the pressure has been entirely internal.

The original premise was to be ‘bear body language’ but without much image support for body language alone, I broadened the topic to bear communication. Even so, image availability has shaped the result somewhat. In some cases I strained to make fit images that did not exactly illustrate the point.

This afternoon as I arranged images in Keynote, the Apple version of PowerPoint, a different program organization plan occurred to me. An organization plan that is clearly much more solid and logical than the one to which I was committed. Alas, I haven’t the time to flush the old and start again. I pressed on.

Today the program is finished. Version 1 anyway. What a relief! I cannot exactly relax as I’ll need to rehearse it a few times before Thursday night, but at least I have it out of my system.

For the first time in weeks, after finishing the program I felt like getting out of the house for some exercise. Peter and I shot hoops for a couple of hours. The workout has made me feel so much better psychologically. I should have been exercising all along—it would have cleared my head.