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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Adventures in Bureaucracy
Tuesday. 8.14.12 11:04 am
Having been turned away in a most cold and unfriendly manner from the last french health services office that I visited, I was understandably wary as I attempted my second approach.

The man at the door of the last health services office had asked me my business, affirmed that I was in the right place, and given me a ticket. I sat in the waiting room for about 40 minutes. During this time a hassled woman appeared one number after her number was called. They turned her away, even though she explained that she had had to run out to make photocopies (there was no available photocopier in the building). I was finally called to a window, where I explained my situation to the a woman. She looked through my papers and fell eventually upon my birth certificate. She said that it was not acceptable. "NEXT!" I quickly showed her that an official translation of the certificate was stapled onto the back. Affronted, she gave a cursory glance to the translation.

"No," she said immediately, "This is not acceptable." I pointed out that it was an official translation, complete with a stamp. "No," she said, casting her eye around the page. "See here? Where it says, 'name'? It does not say 'first name' or 'last name'. How are we supposed to have any idea which name is which? She read out my family and Christian names like they were the most unintelligible words ever written on a piece of paper, despite the fact that they are fairly common names, even in France, and they are designated as first and last names on the other seven pieces of justification that I was required to give her. She said that it wasn't she who was rejecting it, she was just rejecting it because she knew that the people a level above her would reject it. "NEXT!"

I explained to her that I paid 60 euros for the translation to be done by an official, government-approved translator, and that it had been acceptable to the people who had made out my residency card, the most official and difficult-to-obtain document in French immigration, which itself had required perhaps twelve pieces of justification. She was unmoved. I asked if I could just write "first name" and "last name" on the translation to help her superiors identify which was which. She was affronted, even though in my tone and word choice I did everything possible to remain earnest and humble and conciliatory. She shuffled my papers together. "You don't even have the FORM," she said suddenly, and a form that I had never heard of materialized beneath her fingertips. "You came here without even filling out this form." Ah yes, now I was sloppy, me with my carefully prepared folder with exactly the right number of duplicates, staples, and supplementary forms.

"Besides," she added, "you are at the wrong office. When you finally get all of your appropriate paperwork together, you have to send it by registered mail to an address. NEXT!"

She didn't give me the address. It was probably the same one as the one on the outside of the building. I supposed that it was normal protocol to verify multiple times that I was in the right office and to carefully look through my paperwork only to announce that I was in the wrong office after all. I wanted to fight with her, but I was already visibly near tears, so I shoved all of my papers back into my bag and left the building. I felt keen sympathy for whoever in the queue of hopeful immigrants had to follow me to her desk. I second-guessed myself--- I like to think that when things don't work out it is because I misunderstood or mishandled the situation rather than because the other person was unreasonable.

But I remembered the advice of countless foreigners who had come before: if you are turned down by one agent of the french government, come back another day and try your luck with another.

This time I went to a health services office across town. The man at the door verified my intentions and gave me a number. Within five minutes I was talking to an agent at the counter, a friendly black girl. Not to generalize, but while french black people are culturally similar to french white people in almost every way, french black women tend to be about an order of magnitude lower on the "uppity bitch" scale. She looked through my paperwork and complimented me on how orderly it was and how many copies of things that I had. She made some copies using the copier in the back when it looked like I only had originals. She even added some of her own staples.
"That should do it," she said after about two minutes. I stood agape.
"This is unrelated," she continued, "But since you are American, can I ask you how hard it is to get a visa to work in America?"
I fumbled... one thing I've learned is that citizens of a country know almost nothing about their own immigration processes. I tried to remember the experiences of my friends. I explained what I knew, that it was hard to get a visa unless you already had a job lined up, that it was easier to get a student visa, but that the student visa was expensive and didn't always allow you (or your spouse) to work. She asked me if it was true that our health care was crazy expensive, and I fumbled through the answer to that, too. The short answer was yes.

She told me to have a nice day. I stumbled out of the building, in awe of how easy it was, in awe of what a heinous, arbitrary, mean-spirited harpy the other lady had been, in awe that those sorts of bureaucrats are so common in this government that foreigners passed down handbooks about them.

I, too, had encountered the mythical beast, the french bureaucrat. I, too, had survived.


5 Comments.


lesson learned:
once you go black, you never go back.
» undisputed on 2012-08-14 03:08:35

iunno
» undisputed on 2012-08-14 05:30:37

My boyfriend likes to stereotype French people as dicks. Sadly, the majority of this post does not go against that.
» randomjunk on 2012-08-14 06:28:57

That, happens here to citizens if you're not, well, of majority skin tone or race. I know how awesome it can feel.. I feel that way whenever I get off the phone with the Inland Revenue officer and they were super helpful
» Nuttz on 2012-08-15 10:55:35

Girl, I totally would have started crying right there in front of everyone if I'd had to deal with the first woman.

There's a woman who works on the same floor as me who I always thought was giving me the stink eye for no good reason when we ended up in the bathroom at the same time. One day, I heard her speaking with a co-worker and realized she's French and totally thought, "Ah, that explains it."
» Amelie on 2012-08-15 11:56:14

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