Immigration – the bureaucracy that penalises for doing the right thing

i am surprised that i would ever have to use the immigration tag on a post again. i thought after two, three, four, i honestly lost track, years of dealing with the multiple name changes bureaucracy that is the INS i was done and i would have to mention them again. not so lucky.

the story is a follows, all those eons ago when victoria and i were filling out form after form after form, they all required you put in the names of your children. no problem, right? well it shouldn’t be, except lo and behold yesterday my younger daughter presented herself at the us embassy in trinidad to get her student visa so she could take advantage of a scholarship and the consular officer declared that there is an immigrant visa application associated with her name so he’s denying her application on those grounds.

i don’t even know where to begin with this. actually i do. one of the cornerstones of my job is to assume positive intent. i tried, for about 30 seconds i tried and then i realised that if this particular consular officer had taken the same 30 seconds that i gave him to do his job right i wouldn’t be typing this post.

in 30 seconds he might have seen that it was an 8 year old application for her parent that was processed and approved. in another 30 seconds that the child had a visitor visa issued within that 8 year period and had travelled to the us and returned, twice.

so here we are with two weeks before the child is due to report and we have little recourse. our congressional consular liaison sent a request for the embassy in trinidad to reconsider and approve the application and the school is also attempting to get them to reconsider. barring that we can throw more money at the embassy, reapply and hope for a different officer and a more sensible response.

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Tags: immigration, scholarship, student visa

Flex

the reason i haven’t actually used this space for its intended purpose is the same reason i’ve written this sentence about 12 times. it’s not that i’ve run out of opinions, i think i’ve lost the impetus to write. i sit at the keyboard and all the brilliant thoughts i had immediately evaporate, i thought the FFF would work but then i was working and after i lost my job i was too busy with the 12 million things i was working on to keep afloat and now that i have a full time job i’m down to 11 million things, because while it affords me relative luxuries like health insurance and a 401k plan, it pays for squat, so i’m still scrambling to keep afloat.

all of this to say that i’m going to try harder because i still have a lot to say.

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riddle me this

Five Questions

These questions were sent to me by cajunscorpiogirl and originally came from White Apples by Jonathan Carroll. She liked them so much, they made it into her quote book.

Feel free to fill in your own answers.

What three meals from your past would you like to eat again?

1) Growing up I couldn’t eat on the plane and every trip back from Jamaica my grandmother would make rice and peas and curry goat. That amazing smell would waft through the plane, I can still smell it now.

2) Vic and I sitting on a bed in a hotel in Knoxville feeding each other.

3) My birthday dinner three years ago at the Mirror, surrounded by family and friends.

What two objects would you like to possess again?

1)  One of two books: Last Chance to See – Douglas Adams or The Meaning of Liff – Douglas Adams

2) My original wedding band, not necessarily for sentiment, but it was a well crafted piece of jewellery that i actually liked..

What is the one act in your life you wish you could take back or erase?
I think I am who I am now because of all of my experiences, good and bad.

What one person would you like to see again?
Douglas Adams, seems to be a theme. I had an opportunity to talk to him and wasted it on idle chit chat.

What one experience do you wish you could repeat?
Living in London

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Tags: meme, personality, white apples

fun in the sun

good times, good people, good food, good music. everything you need for a good vacation

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Tags: family, friends, photographs, photos, trinidad, vacation

one of life’s defining moments

i’m in trinidad for a week, primarily for this reason:

My first born

father/daughter dance

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Tags: daughter, family, graduation, trinidad

a brief history of something

in writing about my travels and travails in 2000, i mentioned briefly mentioned `the project` but never got into any details about it. it wasn`t anything top secret but years later it`s still one of my favourite pieces in my portfolio.

first let me give you some background. i started in the advertising business as a typesetter but my interest in design was peaked one summer when i worked at a printery.  we have a one color Heidelberg press that required a blood sacrifice before every job. the Heidelberg was an old fashioned letter press, you had to pick your letters and numbers out of a box, put them in a frame, add your leading and your spaces, use the kerning knife to scrape the sides of the letter blocks. then when you thought you were done, you locked the whole thing in place and you put on the press and ran a sheet to check. because of the sharp edges and the heavy blocks of type the likelihood that you`d get cut or squeeze your fingers in something was pretty high, hence the joke about the printer requiring a blood sacrifice. the owner of the printery had actually lost the top two knuckles of his right hand to the press before i even started there.

so with my interest in printing and design peaked, i started work at an advertising agency as a typesetter. this was in the early days of the transition to computer graphic design. we had 13 fonts on a Mac SE and the traditional designers would come in, specify a type and size they needed, i`d type it up and we`d send it out to one of two companies that actually had a laser printer at the time and if we didn`t have the typeface on the computer, we could request one that the output house had. and if they didn`t have it, there was good old Letraset.

i could go on reminiscing about the good old days but they only lasted about a year and a half and that`s a story for another day. the agency i worked for, had the fortune and misfortune of having my name on the building. the fortune being, when i called vendors, they usually responded, the misfortune being people thought i was a close relative of the owner and expected me to coast along. coasting is not my speed. i spent five years at the agency and then they merged and they were filled with art directors and creative directors and more designers than you could shake a stick at, so i requested a lateral promotion to the sys admin job that i`d been doing and they denied me, so i quit and the agency imploded.

i did freelance design for a little while and then i got lured back into another agency and the only job i`d ever been fired from. which in itself is strange because the guy that fired me recommended me for another job and everytime i ask, writes the most glowing references. after i left that job, i swore that i was out of the advertising industy for good and like all such threats, it went the way of the dinosaur. in three months i was back at another agency thinking i was going to be working with a creative director i had a great deal of respect for. his last day was the day i started, which was interesting to say the least. they hired another creative director who i got along with fabulously but i had problems with management so i quit, not just burning that bridge but applying copious amounts of dynamite on my way out. hoping against hope that i wouldn`t get sucked back into advertising again.

fortuitously, at the same i left that job, a friend of mine offered me a place in his studio doing pretty much whatever helped pay my way and about a month after i started that, i got a job being webmaster for the national airline, which is a whole batch of stories on its own.

during my first trip to London, an ex introduced me to a friend of hers who was running a production company. they did promotion for up and coming artists, urban marketing and trend prediction and what turned out to be their last hurrah as a company they organised the Playstation 2 launch in London.

working on this project actually completely disenfranchised me with advertising and marketing in Trinidad, which always was and still is a hard sell. this launch was subtle, everyone on the planet knew what a PS 2 so why make launch a hard sell, instead  they went with Mi Corazon, the Summer of Low Rider.

the concept was to bring Lowrider culture from LA to London. and it wasn`t going to be a half measure; cars, bikes, people, all had to be organised, paid for, transported and hosted. and the people who couldn`t make it, had to be photographed and recorded. it was a logistical nightmare and my job in all of this?

i designed the logo, the powerpoint presentation and the website and keep the computers running. i had a blast. i`d never worked on a project of that magnitude and this was the real world. in Trinidad, everyone knew who i was and knew my work, here i was in London, a tiny, insignificant fish in a huge pond and my work could stand the test.

i realised as i was writing this, aside from the logo, i don`t have anything else for this project. the cd that i`d backed up that years work on is scratched and damaged so all the image files that make up the website are inaccessible. i should try harder to recover those materials, because without this project i don`t think i would have had the confidence to make a lot of changes in my life since then.

it`s also kind of weird in this day and age, where you can google anything i can`t seem to find anything about the event.

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Tags: 2000, design, london, travel

back in the saddle again

having gone through the immigration process once to get my residency, i can tell you there is nothing simple or cheap about it. and the odds are stacked against you from the get go. even without a lawyer we spent over $4000 between 2004 – 2006 for filing fees, medical, notarised copies. vic and i are native english speakers and are fairly intelligent people and it would take us hours to decipher the instructions for most of the forms.

that said, we’re about to jump back into the fray, thanks to the generous contributions of friends, i’ve got the necessary funds to start my citizenship application. and with this multipage submission begins a new descent into the bureaucratic hell hole that is USCIS. more copies of our married and divorce decrees, tax returns, proof of address.

plus there are the biometric services, ie photographing and fingerprinting, bearing in mind that i’ve been photographed and fingerprinted by this same organisation on multiple occasions and it’s not covered by the $585 filing fee you’re required to submit with the forms.

why am i doing this again? so i can enjoy the same illusion that everyone else has – my vote can make a difference. wish me luck.

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Tags: bureaucracy, citizenship, forms, immigration, USCIS

help desk

it’s interesting that this came up, considering i got my personality test results back this week.

my support system is a small handful people, all of them close friends that i can rely on for unfiltered and completely honest opinions and if i need help of some sort they`ll be there for me.

growing up it was just my mother and myself and for most of my childhood, i was a latch key child and when i was out with my mother i was with adults of the `children should be seen and not heard` school and that was fine by me, i sat quietly and observed and read. and i came away with some warped life lessons, most of them having to do with the unreliable nature of people in general and only relying on yourself to get stuff done properly.

as an adult i applied that to my working life, so much that for a long time i ended up doing more work than i needed to and got a reputation as a control freak. in my personal life i was the person that couldn`t say no and tried to please everybody and took on more than i could handle because i didn`t trust people to do what i asked, no matter how clear my instructions were. it`s kind of hard to build a support system with that kind of attitude.

about the same time i was suffering from insomnia and realising that i could possibly spend the rest of my life alone, i was figuring out that having people i could rely on would not necessarily a bad thing. it`s a work in progress. i`m still incredibly self reliant and i`ll still bend over backwards to help people, but i am mastering the art of saying no and if i need help i`m learning to ask for it.

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Tags: asking for help, controlling, friendship, self-reliance, trust

seven words

it`s hard to pick a favourite book.

when vic and i moved into our duplex, the first things we unpacked were the books and when we getting ready to get renters` insurance we had to double our coverage  just for our books. it was the same when we moved into the house and the replacement rider on our homeowners policy is what saved us a massive amount of heartache when we got robbed last year. we have got close to 1500 books all neatly catalogued on the computer and backed up in a number of locations. they`re mostly organised by category and then alphabetically and the first thing you see when you walk in the door are the four 7-foot tall bookcases. our first spring cleaning revolved around reorganising the books because we`d acquired a new bookshelf. and even with that reorganisation we`re still side stacking books because we don`t have enough shelf space.

two and a half of the 7-foot bookshelves are occupied by vic`s cooking resources. it is an amazing collection and every trip to a second-hand store sees us with an addition. the other shelves run the gamut – travel, poetry, art history, craft, religious, classics and fiction. we also have a lot of books of erotic and on sexuality but they`re on the special bookshelf in the bedroom.

the fiction is divided into two sections, mostly so we could have space for it all. all the mass market paperbacks are stacked sideways on a shelf in the office and the rest of the stuff takes up the top three rows of one of the 7-foot bookshelves.

the point of all this? that`s a lot of books to attempt to pick favorites from but i`m going to give it a whirl.

i`ve realised in attempting this, that i don`t have have favourite books, i have favourite authors. i read something i like it and i then proceed to read everything i can find by the author. it`s what got me started on the collections of Stephen King, Terry Prachett, Hunter S. Thompson, Neal Stephenson, Clive Barker, Douglas Adams, William Gibson, Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Roald Dahl, Jasper Fforde and Isaac Asimov. I`m also a big fan of graphic novels and interestingly our house is one of the few, if not the only one, you could have find Alan Moore`s From Hell and Milton`s Paradise Lost side by side.

it`s also very hard for me to pick a favourtie book because i`m a sucker for the short form – essays, short stories, novellas are my absolute favourite forms of writing. all of my favourite authors have written something in the short form. my love for Hunter S. Thompson and Issac Asimov come more from they short form writing that their long form.

which brings me to my favorite piece of writing ever; see there was a point to all this preamble – i should learn the short form myself; it`s called Appointment in Samarra and is credited to Sommerset Maugham:

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.

I will go to Samarra and there death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse and the servant mounted it and dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

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Tags: appointment in samarra, author, books, collections, favourite author, favourite book, short stories

curiosity? poor cat

in a sentence, i met vic nine years ago in the personals section of nerve.com. but that sentence doesn`t begin to do us any justice.

nine years ago i was in London working on a project, plagued by insomnia. when you`re only sleeping an average of three hours a night, you find yourself thinking of a lot of things. i realised that on the verge of turning 29, i was divorced, with two children i didn`t see enough of, i had ruined three good relationships and was lucky not to take the friendships down with them too, i wasn`t a prize catch and i was probably going to be alone for the rest of my life. i accepted that and decided it wasn`t something that should depress me, i should just work on fixing me and making myself happy.

i had never been a big fan of personals websites, but the project photographer came back from LA with a copy from the short-lived nerve print magazine and during one of my sleepless nights, i read the magazine and then interest piqued, i went to the website. the personal section was funny and irreverent and featured areas you had to fill out like, best and worse lie you ever told and blank is sexy but blank is sexier. it was fun and it didn`t have to be a meat market if you didn`t want it too. i wasn`t looking for a relationship and that was cool, there were other people on nerve that were looking email/im buddies as well.

i think you have two options when you meet someone online, you could lie like hell and soon or later, you`ll get caught or you can be brutally honest about yourself, flaws and foibles writ large and if they can`t accept that then all you`ve done is displace a few electrons.

each profile on nerve, had a two mandatories,  a username and what amounted to a tagline. mine was a Raoul Duke classic “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” and vic`s lured me in from the word go; “curiosity? poor cat.” i was hooked, i messaged her immediately with my email address and less than a day later we`d exchanged im addresses. for the next six weeks we im`d all day and at least two hours a night, talking about anything and everything. basically becoming friends.

about a week before the 2000 Olympic Games were scheduled to begin i was on a plane heading to Miami with a plan to rent a car, meet vic and another person i`d been chatting with from nerve and go see a long time friend in MS. i got to miami and couldn`t rent a car without a credit card, so i decided to continue my adventure by greyhound. i spent 22 hours on that bus endured strange people playing in my hair as i tried to sleep and arrived in Knoxville road weary and unwashed and wondered if this woman would take one look at me at the bus station and drive away, abandoning me to a strange city. vic didn`t she got out the car and smiled at me. if there was ever a moment when i fell completely and totally in love with victoria, that was it.

i was supposed to stay four days, i ended up staying almost two weeks. the following January i drove 11 hours to propose and we were married a year later, almost to the day.

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Tags: long distance relationships, marriage, nerve.com, online personals, relationship, wyf