Just Go Away [redux]
I hear it's getting chilly there, already, and I know it will snow in a couple of months, and maybe then I won't miss it so much, but right now I'm terribly, terribly homesick.Plus, I feel like stomping on bunnies, so please keep yours safely out of my path.
I just got off the phone with the local Social Security Administration office. The office where, five weeks ago today I brought my passport and my I-94 form. They looked at my original documents. They photocopied them. The day before that, the Homeland Security officers at the border had looked at them, scanned them through their system, and allowed me legally to enter this country.
But now, five weeks later, for reasons beyond the comprehension of any reasonable person, I remain without a social security number because "my application hasn't been verified yet."
Keep those bunnies safe.
Please, I beg you.
In the next story, Postmodern Sass navigates the mystery of the American health care system.
5 Comments:
When I first moved to the US (from the UK) I was told to expect a rollercoaster ride of emotions, and they were right. Apparently this is a well known phenomenon in psychological circles.
When you first move to new country it's like being vacation because everything is new and exciting but then all of a sudden things start getting hard and they get continue getting harder and harder until eventually you don't want to get out of bed. But sooner or later things start to pick up (your SSN will arrive) and your emotions swing back to the positive zone, although not to the high that you had in the first couple of weeks. Then the cycle repeats again and again, although the amplitude of the peaks and troughs decrease with each cycle.
Eventually the emotional oscillations damp out (although it takes longer than you might imagine) and you are left feeling about as happy as you were when you lived in your old country, which is about where I am now.
People look at me funny when I say that living in the US isn't any better or worse than living in the UK, it's just different. Almost everybody expects me to have an opinion that one is much better than the other, and you can't always tell which country they expect to be better.
Stay away from the bunnies; give it to the man instead.
Andrew: I know exactly what you mean about being on vacation. What's even weirder is that I actually am on vacation. My friend Kay is here and we're down in Monterey. Last night we were chatting with some locals. I told them I'd been here only five weeks and the first thing they asked me was, "Do you like it better than Canada?"
If I live here for fifty years I'll never understand Americans.
My guess is that Americans are as proud of the U.S. as Canadians are of Canada, so they were just hoping you would say that California is better than Canada.
I'm curious as to who you are, You Know Who. 'Cause, well, I don't know. But I do know what you're saying, why those people asked that question -- because they were hoping I'd like a foreign country that I've been living in for all of five weeks "better" than the country I was born and raised and have spent all of my life living in. Sorry, but that's beyond stupid.
Unless it is the case that those people believed Canada to be a third world nation, where my rights were threatened, or I felt compelled to emigrate to avoid persecution. In which case... well, what's a word for beyond beyond stupid? :-)
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