Singing the Passport Blues

Today I tried to apply for a passport, but my birth certificate doesn't bear a raised seal in the corner, so was invalid. My birth certificate was issued in Chicago a long time ago, has brown ink and a small brown seal. The clerk was on the phone trying to describe what mine looked like, and said, "No, this one is really OLD!"

Then, she looked at me, her eyes huge, and said, "Oh, I didn't mean it like that! Honest! Oh, I'm sorry! I apologize!" But I was laughing too hard to care. If you can't find humor wherever possible, you may as well hang it up.

Then I tried to order a new birth certificate online, answering pages of questions, till finally the order didn't seem to go through -- I simply was given what looked like an error screen with no further instructions.

It's a good thing we're not travelling anywhere soon. We only wanted to get our papers in order early, since Noah may be attending graduate school in Montreal, and travel to Canada will require a passport before long.