9-to-5, A Decidedly Unrotten Tomato

Dear CF,

I’ve watched 254 training videos in the last week. 254 exactly. I know because the service I’m using counts them. I’m watching them because I’m trying to learn Adobe CS5–or part of it. Illustrator and InDesign and Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I just want to grab images and make them do my will. But every time I skip steps and try I end up with an unchangeable chunk of image with crawling ants around it. Chastened, I go back and rewatch videos like “Using Rules and Grids in Illustrator” or “How to Manage Your Files in Dreamweaver.” They are mind-numbing, and yet I need them.

A happy side effect of all this is that I have a new appreciation for how insanely easy it is to draw on paper. It’s a technological miracle! No layers! No panels! No selection tools or brush sizes or fills and strokes or anti-alias or pixel previews! No RGB or CMYK! Just your hand, paper, and something to mark the paper.

Here is a tomato I drew and then ate while watching 9-to-5, which is on Netflix Instant, and which everyone should watch if they haven’t because it is COMEDY GOLD. That stupid movie with Justin Bateman that we reviewed—Horrible Bosses, that’s what it was called—was its sad shadowy echo. The dream sequences! The fact that at one point a boss actually gets trussed up with telephone cord. The miraculous reappropriation of a garage door! It’s so ballsy, and God, I wish Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda had become a comedy trio after that. I would have bought every single thing they made.

In conclusion, here is some magical asparagus:

Fondly,
M