one big maybe

i find that i regularly end up suspended in places between yes and no, black and white. this, perhaps, is a testament to how life is really just one big maybe.

case in point: wednesday came and went with an alleviation of my visa frustrations when i finally succeeded in applying. yet, psych, the date it will be ready remains a mystery. the women at the visa office sent me on one more run-around mission on tuesday, asking for another fax of a document they already had, then finally calling in the afternoon to tell me i could apply at my convenience. my convenience was actually 2 months ago, but the next day would have to do. so up to LA it was again. this time it was laughably simple. a 2-hour drive, a 5-minute wait, a couple more banally probing questions from the visa goddess, who, upon seeing me for the umpteenth time quipped, "my, you are persistent, aren't you?". and that was that. she said she wasn't sure it would be ready by tuesday, though would try, seeing as "these things usually take at least 2 weeks". as if i hadn't been trying this entire summer. i'm going to make a phone call to them first thing tomorrow morning to see if it will be ready by tuesday. i know there are other consulates that issue visas within 3 business days, so i know it would be possible for LA to do so if it so deemed.

yet despite all the uncertainty, in a strange way i wouldn't have it any other way. it's fly-by-the-seat of my pants excitement with no entrance fee and no strings attached. not that clear-cut answers are unwelcome, but sometimes life needs a little bit of spice in the mix.

here's to hoping that 'yes' loses its crisis identity in this case.

the next epic tragedy?

lo and behold, the second, and third, visa appointments at the consulate have ended. you guessed it, unsuccessfully. the second, because they found that in the documents from the school where the stipend they're giving me is mentioned, it doesn't say per month, so it looks in writing like i don't have enough financial support for the duration of the visa (naturally it's a monthly stipend, but the documents just don't say it. fabulous). that revelation initiated a flurry of phone calls to the boston consulate, emails to the program, boston trying to get a hold of the visa office in LA to explain that the stipend really is monthly, and finally, in the school promising that they were going to fax some sort of verification to the consulate by monday, today, which was my third appointment. of course, by my 12:20 appointment time, there was no fax. surprising? not at all.

this means one of several things. i emailed the person at the school in italy, asking what happened with the fax, so option one is that the consulate gets the fax and i can try to apply again. problem being, though, my flight is a week from wednesday and there's almost zero chance of getting the visa by then. so, i could change my flight, costing me over 250 dollars, but even after changing it i wouldn't necessarily be sure of getting the visa by the changed date. at this point, the best option seems to be to leave without the visa and deal with the repercussions when in italy. even the program admitted the possibility of some of us having to go over there with no visas, and this has happened with other interns from the LA jurisdiction, so it's not the end of the world to go without. though after 90 days i either would have to border-hop or come all the way back to california to attempt, potentially unsuccessfully, to obtain the visa yet again. a mess? slightly.

so for now i'm awaiting a response from the school to see what they say about all this and what the next move should be. i definitely can't say i haven't tried, despite being completely unsucessful. and as long as i avoid riding a bus without a bus ticket (or getting caught riding, rather), causing public disturbances, and doing anything else that might require the display of a visa, or lack thereof, i should be, and am told such by other people who have gone without visas, totally fine in italy.

it is enlightening, though, to gauge the changes in my reactions every time something has gone awry in this awful, horrid process. the first response after the first attempt was to try to argue with the visa woman, get upset, and want to break things. the second time there was the temptation to just hunker down and crawl into a hole and forget this business. and this time around, i had almost zero response, as if i had finally reached a threshold of frustration. this time all i could do was laugh, unphased, as if finally coming to the realization that i am simply a tragic character in a very darkly-comical play. unbeknownst to me, obviously.

today was simply the climax in the plot, underscored by such events as missing bus stops, almost having one bus break down in the heat of LA, not eating all day, and finally digging into some corn flakes at 8:30 pm only to discover that a maggot has decided to take up swimming lessons in my bowl, along with who knows what other friends of his who had already been ingested. yet early today, realizing my own tragedy gave me a strange sense of overwhelming peace and connectedness with fellow bus-riders and the people i came into contact with. as if reaching new lows broke pride and walls, leaving only a sense of how my destiny, however different from the next person's, is still caught up in everyone else's.

it has not, granted, been my day, my week, or even my month. but, cliches aside, i am where i am supposed to be. at the moment i am a tired, frustrated, visa-less, maggot-eating, soon-to be "illegal" in italy. but i've since realized that that works just fine for me.

here's to hoping it's up from here.

vanquishing the bureaucratic minotaur

this visa business has long become the nightmare i feared, and was warned, it would be. after weeks of unanswered phone calls, emails, and faxes to the LA consulate, with an email response finally coming from the consulate of boston (contacted since LA wouldn't respond) saying the quotas had been opened for fall, i headed hopefully up to LA last thursday night, stayed over at auntie ann's, and marched into the consulate early friday morning, nervous as all get-out. i felt as if i were immediately cast into a little version of italy, and was given a half-hour before my appointment to observe how the consulate employees were all terse, fast-paced, and not willing to dilly-dally (or often even give people the opportunity to speak). my turn came, and my smile quickly turned to a sinking heart when the woman told me she knew nothing of the quota being opened, followed by her telling me all about how she's so busy, the only person there, etc etc. she was pretty awful and said some rude things in several instances, acting more like a carefully-trained government robot than a human being. but in the end she took one of my copies of my painstakingly and painfully-prepared application and pile of supporting documents saying she would look into it and see if she could find the notification from the ministry of foreign affairs, and told me she would get back to me by monday or tuesday so i could either mail the application or come back in (not so easy since i'm in san diego....at one point i said it was difficult to come back since i live so far away, to which she sarcastically responded, "well, do you live on this WORLD?" yikes.)

needless and unsurprisingly to say, monday, and tuesday, and an email to her, rolled by with no word from her. finally, praying with all my might that she would pick up the phone (like she hadn't done the last 100 times i've called the visa office over the past 2 months), lo and behold, "italian consulate of los angeles visa office" was the response. whew! she gave me the ok to either send off the application to her, or to make another appointment and come in. she did have one more nitpicky concern, that the 600 euro stipend the program is giving me wouldn't be sufficient proof of financial support. i was unsure after she said that, as i have seen figures ranging from requirements of 850 to 1000 dollars per month on different consulate websites and university study abroad websites, so i told her i would look into it. in the end my bank statement and a letter from the bank will be acceptable supplements, i hope.

so i made my 2nd appointment for september 3rd, the first date i could get in. i hope that between going up there in person, her seeing my pleading face, and stressing my september 17th leaving date, she'll somehow acquiesce to hurrying my visa processing along. if not, i'll just have to change my flight date by a week or so, and hope for the best. needless to say, this process has been more than a nightmare. in speaking with a guy from the visa office at the boston consulate, who talked my ear off for a good 10 minutes about the woes of working for the italian government and consulates and issues with visas, etc, one sees it's not simply a problem isolated to the west coast, and it's not really even their fault. it's a product of the system.

yet this whole ordeal has made learn how to deal better with difficult people (and learn to speak faaaar slower...speaking more slowly, one of my very weak points, makes people feel less nervous i have learned, even if my brain has to switch down 5 gears and put on the brakes just to do it). normally i would have overreacted and perhaps gotten into fighting matches with the two individuals at the respective visa offices when things got heated, or when they underhandedly insulted me, or when they made snide comments. but instead, in considering of the gravity of the situation (perhaps along with a bit of required fear of their positions) as well as having empathy for what i'm sure they suffer, judging from how much i've suffered, i learned to listen, offer my condolences, perhaps butter them up a bit with some adulation for their persistence, and feathers were smoothed over. naturally, they're still prickly monsters underneath, but that side stayed under wraps a bit more.

here's to hoping a visa is at the other end of this labyrinth.

firsts

this is my maiden voyage on blogger.  i've been blogging on xanga since 2002, but my xanga has long since transformed itself.  from inane posts in 2002 that highlighted what i had done, or not done, in a day as a young girl, to pithy and cryptic posts in 2008 that underscore the changes a person goes through in their adult life, that blog has become a place more for poetic and nostalgic writings than opinion and mundane pieces, an unspoken hush cast around its html that, for me at least, makes it a rather sacred place reserved only for what i need to express in a certain way.  this place, however, will be where anything and everything goes, a more "grownup" place, if you will.  because as much as it's hard to swallow at times, grownup-hood has more than ushered itself in, and that comes with as many responsibilities as it does privileges.

heaven forbid that means that life becomes boring.  all it signifies is that those self-same responsibilities that accompany all the good stuff mean that everything is more contrasted, stark, and meaningful.  i want to be able to look back on this time in my life, and, whether i laugh or cry at myself or not, see what this person thought, what she loved and hated, what she wanted to change and how she changed it.  how her passions developed and took action.  a way of keeping tabs, of watching the notches on the doorpost of life to see if it all measures up.  because measurements are simply a way of knowing, of tracking, so adjustments can be made.

so on this, my maiden voyage, being grown-up means a facelift, ie this blog.  here's to what's in store.