I'm Waiting For The Man

I’m Waiting For The Man – Velvet Underground

Yesterday I went snowboarding, for the first time in my life. At Hunter Mountain, a place ‘dedicated to creating mountain memories, one smile at a time’ – that’s right. These past weeks, the Winter Olympics have been presenting the world with smiling professionals, the white of their teeth only outshone by the whites of their eyes as they effortlessly fly down the Vancouver mountainsides in pursuit of the gold.
Sure, the Olympics have also presented us with spectacular crashes, making for great sports TV, but so far, the athletes that somersaulted when they should have slalomed jump back up from their wipeouts disappointed but unscathed, tousled thumbs up. Winter sports are loads of easy-going fun! Snow is a welcoming, happy place to fall into! The fastest competitors beam at the cameras as their challengers at the top of the slope are lining up for their share of the joy, determined to avoid the snow angel traces left on the run.

Since yesterday I have learned two things.
First, that snowboarding is ruthless. I took a beating on the baby slope. It wasn’t pretty. I mean, I’m not the world’s most physical girl. I’m as clumsy as they come, but I had never imagined to be bested by a three degree incline. For every one time I got up, I was knocked down twice.

The thing is: a snowboard has the disposition of a very, very disgruntled bull. Riding it is like being roped onto the back of an angry, accident-prone rhinoceros in an uncharacteristically cold climate. Every time you think you might be on the verge of gaining any control, it tries to throw you off, either catapulting you into the trees or driving you into the snow – meaning, a tightly packed wall of white. ‘Don’t fight the board’, my sweetheart – a former semi-professional boarder, so he knows these things – advises. ‘You have to feel the board. Only by letting the board take you for a ride can you learn how to ride it.’ That’s all very Zen, but what it means is this: I either struggle with the board, and fall on my face; or I surrender to the board, and fall on my ass. I’m screwed either way.

I have also learned that when it comes to falling, snow is not a happy place to plummet into; once, maybe, but certainly not twenty-seven times in a row. It is not soft and fluffy, like bunnies; it is unyielding and impregnable, like the Berlin Wall. At some point, your tail bone feels like it stuck its head inside a church tower bell right when three full grown monks started pulling the ropes to chime it. It actually rings. After a while, your tail bone just feels like it has liquefied. It turns the texture of Jell-O. You won’t know whether it is sweating, or crying, or bleeding, or all of the above. And you won’t want to know.

Today, as I am being tenderly introduced to a string of muscles that I didn’t even know were allowed in a healthy body, I realize that snowboarding is not unlike trying to change your visa status. The more you try to gain some level of control on the process, the more you get slapped around.

I went to the downtown Department of Homeland Security last October, for information and advice on how to change my status from a B2 (tourist) to a J2 (dependent status, meaning you are married to a J1 visa holder – that would be my sweetheart). I made an appointment; I surfed the web for forms, and printed them all; I made copies of all the things I thought would be important to include – my marriage certificate, my passport. All I needed was the answer to my main question: is this application complete and if not, what else do I need make it so?

The short and corpulent lady behind the desk doesn’t get it. ‘How can I help you?’ she starts. I say, ‘I want to apply for a status change from B2 to J2, and I was wondering exactly what forms I need to fill out to do that.’
- ‘What do you mean?’
- ‘I mean, I am a B2 visa holder now, but I got married to a J1 visa holder, and that means I am eligible for a J2 dependent status. I want to change my status. How do I do that?’

The quadrangle lady looks at my visa. ‘But your visa has not expired yet!’
- ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I do not want to extend my current visa; I want to change my status. The sooner I change my status, the sooner I can start applying for a social security number and find a job.’
- ‘But it is only October now,’ the lady replies. ‘Your visa will not expire until January 2010.’
- ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I do not want to extend my current visa; I want to change my status.’
- ‘To what?’ the lady says.
- ‘A J2.’
- ‘Why would you want a J2? Your B2 hasn’t even expired yet!’ the lady says.

This could take a while. Unfortunately, the lady does not have a while. With ninety-nine more schmucks standing in line behind me, and a coffee break coming up, she decides she really doesn’t need this shit right now. ‘What forms did you bring?’ she sighs. I show her the forms I found online: I printed everything that said anything about changing statuses. ‘Fill out this one. If you have any further questions: everything you need to know is in the form.’ Her chubby fingers snatch up one of the forms spread out before me. She squeezes the pages so violently I can almost hear them sigh. When she lets go, I see dimples where her knuckles should be. ‘And make sure you pay the fee, if you want your application to be processed.’ She draws a clumsy circle around an amount on one of the crippled pages.

- ‘Are you sure this is the right form?’ I try again. ‘I just plucked it off the internet because it mentions J1 visa applications. It doesn’t mention J2 anywhere. Is this is the form I need?’
- ‘Read the form, everything is in there. I am glad I have answered all your questions. Have a nice day. Next!’ she wraps it up. And before I know it, I’m back on the street with no clue what to do.

So I fill out the form the lady pointed out, add all the documents the form tells me to include, write an accompanying letter, pay the $ 300 fee and send it all to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) somewhere in Vermont.

October turns to November; December comes and goes. With January, a blue letter arrives. It is a notice from the USCIS somewhere in Vermont, stating that the evidence submitted with my form is insufficient. Apparently, I have neglected to enclose a rather essential form, the Certificate that states that I am actually eligible for the so coveted Exchange Visitor Status, to be filled out by the J1 visa holder. Why is this the first time I hear of the existence of such a form?

Today it’s February 22 2010, the day after my first snowboarding experience. I smell like a giant breath mint from the royal coat of tiger balm I rubbed on every sore spot. It’s been well over a month and a half since I mailed USCIS the missing certificate of eligibility, and well over three and a half months since I first put my application in motion. I have been given the runaround by visa managers on the perpetual verge of a nervous breakdown; I have been put on endless hold; whenever I was put through to a government official I couldn’t water board them into sharing any information – USCIS won’t even tell me if my application is complete. ‘It has not been 60 days since we have received you certificate, ma’am. Your application is being processed in Vermont,’ they keep repeating until I thank them for their time, and hang up. I give up. I surrender. I am learning. I’ll wait.

They make it look so easy on TV: in Coming To America, Eddy Murphy is legally working before his royal penis even has a chance to get dirty again. You never hear anybody on The Godfather complain about being put on hold by Immigration Services. I bet the Corleones never had to teeth-clench their way through fifteen minutes of canned symphonic rock. Maybe Marlon Brando made Immigrations an offer they couldn’t refuse. Maybe Al Pacino convinced them never to take sides against the family again – ever. Either way, it’s welcome to America – make yourselves at home.

Ah, good old pre-9/11 USA. Where underprivileged Czechoslovakian girls could grow up to be Secretary of State, and an Austrian Oak could morph into a Californian Governator. I don’t think Arnold Schwarzenegger or Madeleine Albright had to grind their way through the same sluggish procedure as I do. Somehow I doubt if they ever spent days turning into weeks turning into months of waiting around. I’m pretty sure Albert Einstein, Irving Berlin, or Ang Lee, or Martina Navratilova, for that matter, were never taken for a ride by Immigration Services. I guess it helps when you can demonstrate an actual talent of sorts. For certain, they never had to deal with any xenophobic discouragement policy of Homeland Security – that institute is very post-9/11.

Maybe living in America was simpler back then; maybe people were just smarter than I am. Maybe they were naturals, who intuitively knew how to fly down the slopes of the Grand Slalom of Immigration Services. As in snowboarding, learning how to be in control of the system is probably a skill that can be acquired. Maybe everybody gets smacked around the first couple of tries. Maybe you forget about all the beatings the second you’ve made it all the way down the mountainside. I don’t know. All I know is that, until I master any skill, I had better get used to being taken for a ride.

Brain Damage

Brain Damage – Pink Floyd

Winter in America is cold. And yes, I just keep growing older. For the second year now, I have been bracing myself for seasonal impact much in the way a toddler plays hide and seek: I sit tight, cover my eyes, and think the cold won’t ever find me. Of course it always does. Winter in America is cold. I know the tune. And yes, I wish I could have known enough of winter in America to leave winter in America alone. But how could I have known it was so different from any Dutch winter I have skated through so far? How was I to know that winter in America relates to my kind of winter much in the way the actual act of giving birth relates to what most mothers tell you about it, after the fact?

Mothers rarely mention the pain – of delivering a child, I mean. Sure, they’ll tell you it hurts, or even that it really hurts, but then they gloss over it saying they forgot all about that the second they held their newborn baby in their arms. Cheeks glowing in soft focus, light beads of sweat on otherwise fresh temples. No blood anywhere or mucus. Nobody tells you giving birth can hurt so bad that when the doctor needs to carve your most private flesh in order to help the baby come out, he cuts you in the middle of a contraction, you know, because when you’re in the middle of a contraction the pain is so nasty you won’t even notice someone is ripping your vagina to pieces. Nobody tells you that you pee and crap all over the place in the process, something you and your sphincter probably won’t even take in because you’re too busy not fainting while hanging onto your shredded sanity. What I’m trying to say is, people never really tell you anything worthwhile about things that matter.

So here I am, caught in mid-winter New York City, with no information to go on that is even remotely reliable. Rockefeller Ice Rink and Macy’s Holiday Windows be damned! New York winters aren’t fun and cozy. They’re just plain nasty. It’s not all that cold in the city, really. I spent Christmas in Canada last year – that was cold. New York temperatures don’t even come close to minus 40; your hair doesn’t freeze from just looking out the window.
No, New York winter is wicked in a different way. For one, the incessant wind is so vile it cuts off your breath – which is the only reason you don’t actually hear people moan when they are forced to go outside. But I expected all that. I cast aside accounts the likes of Come on it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together as rather implausible a long time ago (even if it is Ella Fitzgerald singing it). I warmed, instead, to tales that at least heed a warning, like Oh the weather outside is frightful (thank you Dean Martin, for telling it like it is). Still, I was quite underprepared for the grimmer upshot of New York winter.

It started with me showing all my usual signs of wintry weather: the glowing cheeks, the numbness in my toes, the stinging in my fingers, the tingling in my ears – nothing new there. I am one of those people who are prone to flushing cheeks, cold noses, icy fingers and arctic toes, even in the summertime. In winter my body tends to act like a tree: it tries to shed my outer extremities. They’ll sprout back up in spring! What makes New York winters unbearable is this new and unexpected feature I’ve acquired. When temperatures drop in New York City, I become electric. And I mean real static. You know how your hair gets electric when you rub balloons off your sweater and then hold them next to your head? I have that. Only, I don’t just get electric when I rub balloons off my sweater, but all the time. And not only am I electrically charged (with all the nuisance of shirts sticking to my hair, my body sticking to my dresses and scarves sticking to hair, body, shirts and dresses alike); every time I touch anything, the static releases – electrocuting me.

I am subject to these micro scale electrocutions where ever I go. I get up from the couch and touch the oven – I zap myself. I walk to the bathroom and turn on the light – I get zapped again. I put on my shoes and open the cabinet door – a jolt. I turn on the kitchen tap – zap. My sweetheart gets up from the couch and kisses me – I zap my lips. I get up from the couch to kiss my sweetheart – I zap my lips again (how does that work?!). A fingerful of cheesecake – it's electrifying. I touch the shower curtain as I’m taking a shower – I'm shocked. I open a window – I scare the pigeons off our balcony as I catch a jolt. I take down the bed sheets – not only do I zap myself, but the crackle and hiss of the pillow cases I’m holding is so ominous that I daren’t go near the laundry bag, let alone touch the doorknob. I can’t wear my headphones when I put on my coat or when I put laundry in the machine – I’ll zap myself in the ears. I plug in my phone – zap. I pick my nose – you get the idea.

At first, I thought it was kind of funny. Being static made me different. I felt special, you know, like I had some kind of superpower – albeit on infinitesimal scale. I could be Electro Girl, or Zappo The Amazing, savior of little things in need of little saving. I envisioned myself recharging AAA batteries in times of need, saving innocents whose lives depended on those very 1.5 volts; I could be an anthill heroine.

That, of course, was three months ago. By now, it is getting tiresome. I suffer from minor scale electrocution about 25 times a day. I tried to avoid touching things. I tried not touching anything metal without wearing gloves; I tried touching the wooden part of the door before touching the knob. I have learned to operate the elevator button with a padded elbow. I tried to keep my shoes on; I tried to keep my shoes off. Sometimes these things work. Mostly they don’t. I tell myself, those 1.5 volts won’t kill me. I tell myself it’s not so bad. But really, it is. It’s very bad. It’s water boarding for beginners. Constant micro-electrocution (and, worse: the constant threat of micro-electrocution) can break a girl. The worst part is nothing to do with pain – all I really experience is a mild discomfort varying from a dull twinge to a sharp little pang, depending on what I touch.

What makes it horrible is that the jolts seem to somehow reset my mind. It’s uncanny. I’ll jump up from the couch with a thought I want to write down (this can vary from a great idea for a story to a possible solution for tensions in the Middle East). As I touch my desk to sit down and start writing, I zap myself, and instantly forget what I was thinking. Not what I was doing – I remember I was getting up to write down a thought – but I forget the thought.
To salvage my possible gem, I sit back down on the couch and try to retrace my train of thought. Sometimes it works: I get a second chance to vocalize my initial idea. I jump up from the couch with this version 2.0 of the thought I wanted to write down (this time it varies from a hunch for the next phrase in a story to a possible solution for tensions in my middle back). I touch my keyboard to write it down – and I zap myself, instantly forgetting what I was thinking – again. It’s like running around in a malicious circle, a hamster wheel from hell.
I’m being micromanaged by a minuscule Nurse Ratched in the amoeba version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
It’s like being not quite knocked down by an invisible, painless atomic force – a butterfly, flapping its wings in Tokyo maybe. A tiny moth inside my head, tearing itty-bitty holes into the once solid fabric of my brain. Slowly evaporating it. I am being tortured in the My First Sony version of Room 101. That might not put me in a doubleplus ungood situation, but for the going 2010 free Western world standards I still feel bereft of some basic right or comfort. It can’t always have been like this. Can it?

The dry heat in our apartment must have something to do with it. My sweetheart and I tried to find ways to control our apartment’s temperature. As it turns out, we cannot turn down the heat. We cannot turn off the heat. There is no thermostat. Somewhere in the basement of our building, someone pushes the Heat On button in October, and the Heat Off button in April. We can break (not disconnect: it involves physically smashing the pipes) the heating in our apartment, but that means no more heat in any of the apartments lined up above ours – we live on the 12th floor of a 28 story building – and probably a fountain of boiling water hissing its way from the exposed pipes to our exposed faces. We are currently filling up used tin cans with water and put them inside the heaters to humidify the room. Not only is that seriously poor; it also doesn’t work. There is simply too much dry heat going on, and there is simply no way to be in command of that heat. Apart from opening the windows, there is nothing you can do.

Opening a window in winter means the city grid’s cutthroat wind will blast any coherent thought straight to eternal springtime. In addition to the blistering cold you also let in police cars and fire trucks whoop-whooping their days and nights away on the streets below, plus the black incinerator fumes from the building across the street. We are forced to keep the windows closed, and the overly heated air consequently dehydrates the place, and us, to the point where we get dry eyes, itchy skin, nosebleeds, and, in my case, become static.

So here we are, in the epicenter of the Free World, not even free to regulate our own rented heat; we are forced to share the same temperature with all the other tenants in our building. Our supers assure us there is nothing they can do. They don’t make the rules for heat. They cannot favor some tenants over others. We are not even paying extra money for all that extra heat. How can we complain? We are all equal. We shall all have the same heat. That’s the way it works. If I think I need a different level of room temperature, I will be electrocuted until I no longer know of any different kind of heat than the heat I have now.
I might, in a remote corner of my subconscious, have some recollection of a place and a time where people were free to choose their own heat level, but that recollection is obviously false and must be evaporated.

And so, here I am on this crisp clear February afternoon awaiting the winter’s biggest snow storm yet in this winter wonderland of liberal democracy. Here I lie in wait, in a country whose angry antigovernment TEA partiers are so afraid to lose their freedom that they would rather be chained to hyperbolic patriotism than succumb to an administration resembling anything remotely reminiscent of anything socialist (for any degree of socialism equals fascism and will inevitably lead, if not to straight up genocide, then at least to health care death squads kicking down our parents’ and grandparents’ doors at night). To them, my ongoing winter static and subsequent evaporation is just another Liberal Democrat’s Death by Electrocution – 1.5 volts at a time. Zap!