Suicide Watch

I've heard it said that the holidays are the time when most people decide to off themselves. I think it's probably true. People with nothing, or who used to have somebody but now have nobody, or people who don't want to be with anybody and can't find a way out--these are the particularly susceptible ones.

It strikes me that those kinds of people are very sad...

Okay. Now that I got that ridiculously obvious observation out of my system, I have a story for you.

A couple weeks ago I was on Facebook, since I do that again, and decided to try out some new apps. There was this one app, a hilarious-looking piece of work called suicide test. Since I had just read A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, and he talked about suicide tests, I decided to try it out.

And I answered the questions as honestly as I could.

And it told me I was at medium risk for suicide.

Bullshit.

That was the first thing that went through my mind. I'm one of the happiest people I know. I have never even considered suicide. Never even joked about it for more than a couple seconds at a time. I've never manipulated girls into liking me or staying with me by saying that I would kill myself. I've never even made emergency plans, like, "If I'm not where I want to be in life by the time I'm thirty-two, I'll start to consider self murder as an option." I'm just not like that.

And the second thing that went through my mind was, "This is a terrible app." It had just posted that I'd scored a medium risk of suicide to all my friends. What are they supposed to do about that? It's just a terribly awkward situation. It looks like a cry for help, or a call for pity, and I can't hold with that nonsense. If I need help, I know where to get it. The liquor store.

That was half of a joke.

Seriously, though, that app should be banned. Personally, I don't want to know if someone is thinking about killing themselves. If they do it, then I'll be sorry, but most people don't, and that's just another thing to worry about.

Maybe I should discuss sometime soon about how people mistakenly perceive that I have a lack of empathy.