My work permit was mailed out today. OMG I can’t believe it I just want to talk in hyped-up internet acronyms until my head explodes!!
Because I am so obsessed with finding out the answers to long, drawn-out questions (exam results, job interview outcomes etc), the idea of signing up to USCIS’s website for automatic email updates on my case was the perfect solution. You can get text updates, too, but since I lost my phone last summer I don’t really have the need for that. But now I can get a job, and a cell phone, and it’s all just in time for when our lease might end here! Oh, and as well as the fact that my parents can no longer help out financially (and they shouldn’t have had to, but I’m grateful).
Yesterday I was bemoaning my financial situation to my mother online. I was whinging about the (quite valid) fact that we were living in a fairly average area of town (with the neighbours making it abysmal on weekends, when loud music and obnoxiously noisy cars seemed to be a prerequisiste), and yet our rent here was the highest I’d ever had to pay in the entire (short) time I’d lived here. The reason for our high rent was that we have 3 cats, my husband has abysmal credit and I have none (and no way to look up my credit yet), and we needed somewhere furnished. Like, all we had was one table. So, you had to take what you could get, and our landlord, who is absolutely lovely, trusted us with his entire two-level furnished apartment, and even set up a TV and internet connection for us.
I was also complaining about the fact that I can’t afford to anything, well – fun, not even buying a six pack of beer. And while I can’t complain about that, really, it seems unfair that for months now I can’t even afford to go to a movie or to dinner with my husband, so I’ve made my occasional (try once a week or less) coffee my luxury. Something that most people wouldn’t think about, because even poor people have cellphones and cars and furniture.
The last major complaint I had was regarding the places I had to shop. I shop in the cheapest, most cramped, dirtiest, most disgusting supermarket known to man. I can’t believe I’m sitting here eating a (fake) Canadian bacon and pickle sandwich (oh, how transatlantic of me) with ingredients bought from such a cesspit. At least I saved money when I went there the other day, because I was planning to buy some mandarins (which they interchange with clementines whenever they get either of them in). Well, they had clementines – an entire display of them, about 20 boxes – but they were oddly untouched an hour before closing, unlike all the other produce. It was then that I saw that every single clementine in every single box was either green, brown, mouldy, soft or a bile-inducing mutant combination of all four.
Disgusting.
Yet, this is where I have to shop for food. And if they didn’t have such a decent vegetarian section (price rather than variety), I would just default on my rent payments and send my money disappearing into Whole Paycheck instead. My mother was perplexed, and asked me, “isn’t there somewhere like ASDA that is cheap but not bad quality?” My response: “HAHAHAHAHA”, and then: “This is America”. (For poor people). And I hate to admit it, but I can’t wait to be making money, and a decent produce section will hopefully come with this work permit. I’ve been waiting for all of this to finally come together, and it really has been quite a maddeningly, paint-drying-watchingly wait.
With this in mind, it seems to me official government documents are like men/buses/your restaurant order after you’ve gone to the loo – fixate on it enough after a long, dry spell and it’ll come along eventually. Maybe that isn’t the healthiest approach, but the wait (for this part of this process for this immigration status – lol) is finally over!
An Englishwoman in Salem 