Truth: I can't cut.

There is this Everybody Loves Raymond episode where Ray has to go to a parent-teacher conference because one of the twins cannot cut a straight line. They have the two samples side by side and one is straight cut on a line and the other is a cut all about the page.

I am the second page. The saddest part is I TRY to cut on the line. I concentrate and look closely and hold the scissors about this far from my face and still, STILL, the line goes all about the page. ALL ABOUT THE PAGE.

So, for the most part I avoid cutting. I secure friends and relatives to complete the task for me. I got a roommate with a fancy cutter thing and I still make her use it. I don't even own scissors, it's just not worth it. (Besides, my mom taught me you can use your teeth for everything.)

Using a paper cutter does not help and it simply adds an element of danger to an already complicated situation. So today at work when it came time to cut 100 pages four times each, I turned on my desk lamp, pulled everything close to me and set to work.

An hour later, when the Boss man had called to see how everything was coming I told him that I was really slow and so I hadn't gotten through very many.

"That's alright," he said, "it's better to be slow and careful than do it too fast. When we did it too fast last week the pages didn't fit and you could see the black lines."

Appreciating the encouragement, despite the fact that I had done 15 PAGES in that hour, I looked at my completed pages.

Sure enough, you could see the black lines.