"if there was a gun to your head, what song would you sing?"

so i'm making these xmas cards. in reality, this shouldn't be a hefty undertaking, at least as i have done it before, but in the spirit of this-is-one-of-my-flaws-kids, i have to fashion the project as a huge mountain, ridden with trip-ups, potholes and "almost-impossible!"-spots. one aspect of the "vision of the xmas card" [fitting, yes; it came to me when in pre-nap twilight one sunday evening] includes a photo [internet theft] of winter trees on rather-heavy, twilight-hued, semi-iridescent-sheen-ed cardstock. two weeks of inactivity have resulted because i've been unable to begin mounting the mt. everest that is getting this photo on this paper. while constructing the scrimmage/pilot card, i opened the photo in photoshop, tweaked the contrast for visibility on dark paper, resized it and printed it. my printer, while quite the multi-tasker with its fax, copy and scan abilities, proved to be far from a printing ox. decidedly not a printing cash cow. it fell victim to my pleading: "pick it up! pick the paper up! eat it! you can! sure it's heavy, but just eat the paper! i know you can do it, i think i've seen you do this before!" failure. then my scolding: "motherfucker! i always knew you were a piece of shit printer! you're shit as a fax and your ADF feeder or whatever the fuck you call it never worked! no scanning! eat the fucking paper!" it yielded to my motherfucks, scooped up the paper and offered me the image in the middle of the page, ink not dry because of the paper's sheen. but this was acceptable; i had a lot of motherfucks left in me [like the time the fax refused to ever function in my west dearborn apartment], and the ink did eventually dry. so what i wanted to do was measure out to the quarter-of-an-inch where i wanted to place the image on the paper four times so i could maximize my paper use [50 cents a sheet!]. and hell if i can figure that out. my photoshop skills quickly would be rivaled by a pterodactyl putzing around with the program for fifteen minutes. additionally, i'm admittedly "not spacial," so the whole idea of measuring something and then measuring something inside of it and placing it within specific measurements makes me feel like my head is being held under water. i spent more than a week of fretting and bitching about not being able to do it myself, not having anyone to do it for me, and finally, i was resigned. i yesterday i was all ready to take it old-school and use a tree rubberstamp on the cardstock, throwing out the photo [the subject of much of my adoration lately] idea entirely. then, while sipping a water alone at the belmont last night, i realized what a complete dunce i had been. not only a dunce-dunce but a flat-out thinking-in-a-21st-century-tenchological-box-DUNCE. how did we make flyers back in the day? how did were get all those different images on a sheet of paper? WE FUCKING CUT THEM OUT AND TAPED THEM ON THERE AND MADE A FUCKING COPY. fuck. dumb. dumb.

i'm going to go sit in the corner now and think about the terms of my grounding from technology.