Is suicide the answer? No. Muppet porn is the answer.

I've decided to become a better person.  Some of you might think that this means living a healthier lifestyle, or picking up litter, or not kicking infants with terminal diseases.  No, none of these.  I have decided to join a suicide hotline.

Actually, I decided to interview.  I'm not quite sure if I want to do it yet since it requires 40 hours of training, three 5-hours shifts and one weekday overnight shift a month, and is fairly high-stress.

The interview was in the village, which I haven't explored nearly enough, so I went 3 hours early.  I found a Chipotle (yay!) and a pet store, but more about that later.  When I finally got to the interview place (a church), they had me fill out an application.  It had a lot of odd questions on it, such as "How would you describe your political / religious / moral views?"  They left 2 lines for me to answer.  First, I thought "Screw you, that is none of your goddamn business.  All you need to know is that I don't think people should kill themselves."  Second - two lines?!  You're asking me to put my entire philosophy on everything in two lines?!  I ended up writing something incredibly vague, like "I think puppies should not be made into large jackets." Thankfully they didn't question me on it.

As I was filling out this odd application, a mouse ran out of the bench I was sitting on, hit my foot, paused, then ran back in.  No one else saw it, but I'm pretty sure I now have the plague.  I then tried to catch it, keep it as a pet, and name it Sigmund, but failed miserably.

When we had all filled out our applications (except Sigmund, who may or may not actually exist), we all crowded into a tiny elevator to get to the second floor. The doors closed, and we didn't go anywhere. Apparently you need to press the floor you were on, the floor you wanted to go to, and then the floor you were on again. It took them a while to figure it out, and I was incredibly tempted to screan "I'M GOING TO KILL MYSELF IF I DON'T GET OUT OF THIS ELEVATOR!," just to see what an elevator full of suicide counselors would do. I didn't scream anything, though, and now I regret it.

During the actual one on one interview, they seemed to really want to find some horrible event in my past that made me want to be a hotline worker. Finally my interviewer said "Well, we can't all be schizophrenic incest survivors." I think he was kidding... I think...

I'm also looking at other volunteer opportunities. I'm waiting to hear back from the Harlem YMCA and I submitted an application to CASA-NYC (http://www.casa-nyc.org/). If you have any ideas of other stuff I can do, let me know.

And no, Jason, that's not what I meant.