The Honest Truth

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/92141/The_last_word_Im_no_decider

Shit. I’m running late. Should I take the bus? I don’t know when it comes or where it will drop me off. It’s too late to walk. Should’ve got up earlier. Ah, my bike. Yes, I’ll take my bike.

I grab by bike from the hallway and awkwardly thurst it through the doors. I have to make it to the US consulate for 9a.m. After five months of collecting papers, I’m finally applying for dual citizenship.

I’m feeling pretty smug about the whole thing. Friends who want to work in the States admire me. Some have proposed marriage.  I’m also a little nervous.  My roommate brought up the possibility of an American history quiz.

I take the elevator to the 9th floor and ring the buzzer beside the door.  A guy answers the intercom and I tell him I have an appointment.

He asks me if I have an affidavit. Check. I whip out my envelopes, all organized and labelled and start giving him documents. “Do you have your passort application?” I furiously leaf through the papers. Shit. I knew I’d forget something. I look at him apologetically and he hands me another sheet. I sit down to fill it out and suddenly whatever IQ I had starts to shrivel up. I start asking the man at the desk, who has a moustache, bald head and wears an official looking uniform, the stupidest questions. I leaf through the documents, confused. “Where do I sign,” I say, even though the line is clearly marked. “What day is it today?” I ask,  and he points to the calendar above his desk that has the date circled in red.

Finally, after he scratches out my social security number which I’ve mistaken for a social insurance number  and given me a map of where to purchase an envelope, which I forgot to bring even though it’s underlined and bolded on the form, I sit down and wait to be called.

I’m reading my book, going over how scatterbrained and stupid I was when a father and daughter walk in. She’s applying for dual citizenship. The girl seems organized, and her father standing beside her gives her a sense of validity I don’t have. I feel like a mess and look over at my coat strewn on the chair beside me with my mittens attached to strings sticking out. Why do I have to take up so much space? It takes them less than half the time it took me to get through the metal detector and into the waiting room.

We sit on the plastic blue chairs waiting for the lady from behind the plastic twall o call our names. I bury my face in the book and listen to their chit chat.  I’m called up to hand in my forms, and minutes later, called back up again. “I remember you Miss Chapin,” says a woman with a Hispanic accent. I do recognize her, from the time I came in to ask questions a month ago. “I told you, you need to give a Halifax address.” It’s true, but in my lessened IQ state I mistook mailing address for place I was born. Whoops. She’s not impressed and swiftly takes the white out stick to correct my mistakes.

I want to tell her being a student or recent graduate that makes filling out these forms really hard. Our lives are transient.  I move every year, and when I’m not moving, I’m thinking about moving. When somebody asks me my postal code it’s hard to distinguish that house on South Park from the one on South St. The easiest thing is to put down my parents address, the only thing constant in my life.

I sit back down and wait for an “officer” to “ask me a “few questions.” I feel the need for community, so I put my book down and start shooting quick glances at the father and daughter, to let them know I’m ready to engage. By this point another man is sitting there, but the family seems easier to penetrate.

“You getting your passport?” I say to the girl.

“Yes,” she says, smiling sympathetically to show she understands my struggle. I ask if she’s under 18–which makes the process a lot easier. She says no, and our bond tightens. Her dad is a jovial seaman with a worn face. He starts going on about how it’s easier to get passed the border of Nicaragua than into the US consulate. We laugh and I dramatically talk about the hassle of applying for this passport.

The other guy,  chips in with some wisecrack about all the red tape around this process. Misery loves company. We become an instant community of people frusterated with bureaucracy just trying to get our fucking passports to the land of the free.

“Miss Chapin,” says a new, sterner woman from behind the glass.

I put my book down and walk up. This is the real deal.

She tells me all my documents in order, except for the fact that my fathers passport is from 1972. “Does he have a more current one?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling blood rush to my head. Since I got here, the man at the desk and the first woman behind the plastic wall had both asked if I had a more recent passport.  Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t my dad think of that?

She says she can’t process my case until she gets proof he was a US citizen when I was born. Otherwise, there’s no way to prove he still wanted to be a US citizen when he became Canadian. Flashbacks keep coming up about conversations with my father. “I don’t know if I’m still a citizen,” he saying, nonchalantly. At the time, it didn’t matter. He had all the documents. Now I want to strangle him and say “You don’t KNOW if you’re a FUCKING citizen?” AHHHHHH.

Instead I stand infront of the plastic wall and try to act cool. I know the community is behind me rolling their eyes at the bureaucracy.

She says she’ll  leave the case open and I have 90 days to send in a more recent passport. I tell her there’s another problem: I won’t be in Halifax in 90 days. “Well why did you apply here then? You could’ve waited till you were back in ottawa and done it with your father.” I was so mad.

“When I went to Ottawa they said come here,” I stumbled to explain. “This was the only time I could get an appointment. I thought this would take to weeks.” I thought it would be easy. I wasn’t mad at her. I was mad at myself. Really, why didn’t I think of that? It would’ve made much more sense to just do this all in Ottawa when my dad was with me. Why hadn’t he thought of this? Why hadn’t he checked some of this himself? Why hadn’t he got me fucking citizenship when I was 18 and didn’t need these documents.

After finding out if I transferred my case to Ottawa I wouldn’t get my $100 deposit back I felt good I had charged it to his credit card.

I shoved the documents back in the envelope, defeated. I turned around and the guy by himself said to me “More hoops to jump through eh?” Then the father and daughter made some comment designed to make me feel better about the absurdity of the system.  I rattled off some shit about how whenever I call they tell me I need something different and you can never really be prepared.

Truth was,  I felt no hard feelings towards the woman behind the glass.  I was mad at myself for looking over such an obvious thing. Mad at my dad for not seeing it either and not being there when I applied to explain himself.

People are constantly irritated by the government’s bureaucracy.  Those stupid forms they make you fill out that seemed designed to trip you out. But are they really that complicated? Maybe they’re intimated because they make us feel insecure about our own lives. I still don’t know the postal code of my current apartment. I’m moving a month, and never took the time to learn it. I find reading directions irritating, and often skip over them missing key info. I rush too much, and often forget something that means I spend time re-doing things or re-tracing my steps. These are things I’m insecure about, and with the formality of the US consulate, they were all brought out.

Maybe I should get better at paying attention, at keeping my wallet organized and reading instructions.  I laugh at people I know who are cautious and keep everything in place. It seems anal, but when it comes to government forms, I’m sure they plough through with ease.

When I left the US consulate I was crying, not laughing. Crying because my father and I had failed to check such an obvious question and I was called out on it.  Crying because though there’s a lot to hate about the government, this one wasn’t there fault. Sometimes, hating bureaucracy is an excuse for our own laziness.