being bad at work

today in our weekly Tuesday meeting, while a few people at the far end of the table were droning on and on off topic, M distracted me from taking notes by doodling on her meeting agenda. at first it was just circles, so i drew some circles on the clipboard on my lap. She kept drawing them and flashed me a glance that meant I hadn' t understood what she meant (my circles were not following the same line of thought as her circles..). So i drew a little wedge of Swiss cheese and a tiny mouse. I was getting colder. Next she draws a box around her circles, cutting some of them off. I was lost.
At this point, C,( M's husband, who's sitting on the other side of me) starts doodling on his notebook and throwing glances that I should pay attention to his paper. His doodles were more meeting-related, but as I glanced back and forth between the two of them and non-chalantly added wisps of lines and words here and there on my clipboard to communicate with both of them, i couldn't help but feel terribly unprofessional.
When I looked back at M's paper, she had changed from circles to squares, and I saw that she drew a patchwork quilt. M isn't a quilter, I was a little surprized, but she got my attention. Her drawing was a series of squares which she shaded in alternating blocks to form a checkerboard pattern. This of course inspires me to doodle quilt blocks too-- i quickly drew a few friendship star blocks and shaded them in (I whipped up a few on Sunday night from a bag of pre-cut blocks so the pattern was still dancing around my head). Then, with my doodled encouragements, C brings the meeting back on topic and we try to move along the agenda. The quilt doodles are forgotten until M stops me in the hall after the meeting and says she wants to make a quilt with circles.

Oh. now I get it. Or, well, I still don't know what entirely she has in mind (I doubt she's ready for piecing curves), but I may make a quilter out of her yet. :)