An open letter to would-be shooters

Do yourself first, please.

Not last. Not after the lover who left you, the wife and kids you'd rather see dead than free of you, the godless infidels in the public square or the young concertgoers daring to have fun in a world you've lost the ability to find joy in.

First. Not last.

For once in your meaningless life, do something of worth. Take yourself out before you start killing all those people you've been plotting for days or weeks or months or even years to kill.

Does that seem like a waste of all that time? Doesn't have to be. Here's an idea: write a nice long note describing all the killing you were going to do. Name names, if you can. Then explain the choice you made instead: to do yourself first.

I guarantee you that the media exposure will be just as plentiful—maybe more so—and that you'll be remembered long after all the feckless clichés who did it the other way around.

Let's face it. By this point, our initial shock at yet another mass murder gives way to indifference almost immediately after we post some obligatory "thoughts and prayers" bullshit and scroll down. So it's not like you were going to make a real mark anyway, beyond the lives you would have shattered. But here's the good news: by doing yourself first, you'll be the exception that truly stands out—"The One Who Let Them Live."

Some people will even come to think of you as a kind of hero.

Fine by me. As long as you do yourself first.

I don't give a fuck whether you're a jilted boyfriend, a shell-shocked soldier who saw a little too much, a jihadi wannabe with promises of glory rattling around in a mostly empty head or, more likely, just another disaffected white loser looking to settle a score with the privilege you keep hearing about but never experiencing. Nor do I care about whatever you've gone through that has brought you to consider such an extreme "solution." You got problems? We all got problems, brother. But if your problems have you fantasizing about blasting the heads off everyone in your office lottery pool, well, it's time for you to seek help.

I hope you do seek that help, and I hope it works. I really do. But if you won't bother to seek that help, you deserve no sympathy. Perhaps you deserve only the fate you have mapped out for yourself after you've managed to end as many people as you can and the cops are upon you and the enormity of what you've done has finally impinged on your dull consciousness.

So go ahead, Johnny, get your gun. And do it. But please, for all of us in this existence who see the beauty of it despite the bad and want to stick around for as long as we can, just do us one favour.

Do. Yourself. First. 

Unfortunate Twitter timing

I guess that answers that question... a minute before they asked it.

Emilie's first poem

Roses are red,
I sleep in my bed,
And this is my head.

A fine position to be in

I really like this position, which happened in a game against my phone a few days ago. Took me longer than it should have to see the right move, maybe because the Rook is such tempting bait. But that leads to stalemate.

White to mate in one

Flying south

Emilie: Daddy, look, more geese are flying south!

Me: Yes, there they go. Do you remember why they're flying south?

Emilie: That's because the snow is coming.

Me: That's right. And why do you think we stay here in the winter?

Emilie: That's because I'm still small. I don't have wings yet.

Um... clean diapers and dirty diapers?

A friend of mine, a better writer than I am, is working on an article about the joys and challenges of raising children. She asked me for a quote. Here's what I said:

The most joyful thing about raising a child is hard to define. One day it's seeing the light of discovery in her eyes when she learns something new. The next day it's hearing her laugh, or watching her dance. The next it's listening to her stream-of-consciousness babbling over supper.

And I guess that's the most challenging thing about raising a child, too: always reminding yourself that the kid knows more than you think she does, and always remembering that she'll learn far more from what you show her than from what you tell her.

I've got less than two years' experience as a parent, so I'm curious to know what the seasoned veterans out there would say. For that matter, I'm curious to know what people who don't have kids would say. What do you think is the most joyful thing about raising kids? What is the most challenging thing? Think it over and put it in a comment on this blog!

Passport Fail

A funny thing happened on the way to the passport office...

Prologue: July 30, 2011
My wife and I took babygirl to Wal-Mart to get her photo taken for her passport. If you've recently gone through the process of getting a passport photo, you know that getting a photo is easy. You also know that getting a usable passport photo is about as easy as sitting for a portrait by a Renaissance artist. And that's for an adult.

As it was, we spent 45 minutes trying to get the kid to avoid smiling—something she already knows she's expected to do when someone's pointing a camera at her. We ended up feeding her popcorn twists between shots so she'd keep her mouth closed.

With that battle won, all we had to do was

• get her to sit still on the stool (which we did by kneeling in front of her just below camera view and holding her in place)
• keep her head straight up (instead of leaning to one side like a quizzical dog, a pose she struck all too often)
• keep her looking right at the camera (which we did in classic parental style, snapping fingers, shaking toys and cajoling from behind the photographer)
• distract her attention from what was right beside her: a giant red build-your-own-stuffed-toy machine that looked like a loaner from Willy Wonka's factory
• keep her from freaking out over the unstuffed toy animals hanging on the opposite wall like prisoners in a dungeon (OK, that one was more about me than the kid)

After what seemed like 200 shots, we managed to get one the photographer thought might survive the scrutiny of the humourless clerks at the passport office. Might. But that was good enough for us, so off we went.

Flash forward: Yesterday
My wife took babygirl downtown early in the morning to hand in the paperwork, along with those hard-won images. The clerk took a look, scribbled something on a sheet and handed it to my wife. It may as well have been a big red stamp that said REJECTED.

The sheet was a checklist of 32 ways passport photos can be unacceptable. As it turns out, the clerk still needed the "Other" category to explain why Emilie's likeness didn't make the cut. Her pink shirt looked white against the white background, thus obscuring her "shoulder line." Oh, and there was a bit of glare on her forehead. Because nothing says "National Security Risk" like a 13-month-old toddler with a shiny forehead!

To my wife's credit, she didn't take the sarcastic route. Instead, she calmly took the kid over to the photo place in the same building and got the new picture taken. It took all of six seconds to get a good shot. When she noticed that babygirl's mouth was open, the photographer said, "Oh, that's no problem. She's only a year old. They don't worry about that!"