Got mail from my immigration lawyer on Tuesday morning. Spent the rest of Tuesday and all day Wednesday filling out forms, making photocopies, having our pictures taken, being inspected by an immigration doctor to make sure we weren’t leprous, psychotic, sexually deviant, syphilitic or tubercular and getting vaccinations against measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, pertussis, diptheria and some others I forget.

Today after Jeremy left for the UK I went to pick up our signed, sealed medical certificates. Our immigration doctor’s offices are in the heart of Chinatown. We had awesome Vietnamese for breakfast there the other morning, so today for lunch I just wandered into the dim sum place next door and pointed at things that looked good. I probably ate pig snouts and snake rectums, but it tasted wonderful and came to about $4.

All documented up, I walked three blocks from sunny, noisy, scented Chinatown through the hellish Stockton Street tunnel to my lawyer’s hushed office above Tiffany’s overlooking Union Square. I don’t write much about the immigration experience here because it’s an exercise in ritual humiliation that routinely makes me cry. I just wanted to emphasize that contrast: from the cramped grey examining rooms where Cantonese grandmas applying for family based petitions must in fact have to worry about testing positive for TB, to the godlike abodes of the calm collected professionals who will organize this bewildering mass of information for you, provided you can pay the substantial fee.

I have a theory. Nothing in America is not about class.

For those of you who are keeping track, we’ll be filing more-or-less concurrently for our I-140 and I-485, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be permanent residents in let’s see seven nines are umpty-ought, carry three and divide by the number you first thought of, what does that come to, right, maybe never.

It doesn’t do to invest too much in the process.

Reason it all had to be done in such a rush is that J, as noted above, has gone to England for ten days. I’m being very calm about this. It’s not the end of the world. I know that. It’s just a very high cliff, with the world’s ocean falling off in an unceasing torrent and far, far, far below, a glimpse of giant turtle.

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