It was a simple task, really. For each child at Malcolm’s preschool’s birthday, the child’s parents are supposed to put together a collage of photos to tell a story about how the child has spent the past year. I did the collage last year, and while it wasn’t necessarily a thing of beauty, it got the job done. This year, like so many other things that I have set my mind to recently, it was a bit of a disaster. Here is what Malcolm’s friends at school got to see: 
I think Malcolm may be on the lookout for a brand new daddy for his birthday.
The first problem with the collage o’ crap was that the pictures were terrible, in almost every way. I realized last night that our printer was out of ink, so I had to rush out this morning to the office store to buy new cartridges. Why I chose this occasion to purchase cheap ink made by Office Max and not Canon for the first time, I do not know, but I certainly regretted the decision as soon as I started printing out the pictures. The pictures were the wrong color and had stripes in them. Malcolm’s skin and hair are really not carrot colored, but you wouldn’t know that looking at the collage. They ended up turning out looking like they were taken by a surveillance camera and printed out on slides from the 1970’s. The colors on each side of the pictures are also different, which forced me to crop the pictures using our kitchen shears (evidently the only scissors we own now.) I don’t know how to cut straight, so it looks like Malcolm did the chopping himself, after a night of drinking whiskey. To cap it all off, I didn’t even want to use most of these pictures, but most of the pictures we have taken this year are on a flash memory card which is now hiding somewhere in the house where I cannot find them. Maybe the scissors and the memory card are silently laughing at me somewhere underneath the couch, but rest assured I am blaming them for the poor picture quality in the collage.
The second thing wrong with the collage is that it has my writing on them. My handwriting normally looks as if it were done by an irate chicken dipping its talons in ink. When I have left myself a grand total of 15 minutes to get the whole collage done, it looks as if the chicken is irate, a little bit typsy herself, and an old doctor. Taking a closer look, you’ll see that my handiwork is done in two different inks, the result of me deciding that I wasn’t able to space the words well with a black Sharpie, and switching to the only pen I could find in our house (a blue one.) The other pens that we own must be really having a good time with the scissors and the memory card. I was really crushing it while wrapping up the “project” so you will notice the many mistakes I made while writing and the almost total lack of punctuation. Having satisfied myself that the kids aren’t able to read yet anyways, I flew off to school, where I arrived late, and had to endure the scowls of the teachers who were filling time waiting for me. When I arrived, they looked at me as if to say, “This is it? This is how you are honoring your son?” I didn’t have the heart to tell them that Malcolm was going to have four or five other birthday celebrations this year and that I didn’t really care about this one.
As I skulked off into the corner, I decided to check out the other collages that parents had put together for the November birthdays at Malcolm’s school. It was precisely then that I realized my third mistake. My job was not to chronicle what Malcolm had done during his third year, but rather detail the milestones that he had reached on each of his birthdays. I basically needed to present a photo growth chart of Malcolm, and I, in my ultimate wisdom decided to present them with striped pictures in odd hues of Malcolm eating smores and riding in a tractor. I was supposed to stick around and watch the circle time presentation forMalcolm’s birthday, but I was so humiliated by my own ineptitude that I just bolted for the door without saying goodbye. Honestly, I think I would have been better off if I would have just wiped a bunch of cat shit on a piece of paper and then typed the words, “This is my life” underneath. Sorry Malcolm, you’re stuck with a pretty bad dad.
Tags: paul does silly things
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Oh, dear, I think I might be a dad!
I like it! (BTW – I think the memory card is on the bar)