You are mother fuckers, one and all.

I don’t care that you love your daughter and would never hurt her, that you own six cats and would never hurt them, that hey, I have this cat here you can have to replace yours, that I’m going through hard times right now, that I’m really sorry, I didn’t notice hitting anything and why are you shouting at me. It doesn’t give you fucking leeway to do 50 through a 15 mph area and run down my cat.

We loved Scooter. He was one of the most absolutely friendly and playful cats I’ve ever had a joy to know in my life - it was nearly a daily thing that we would see him at a neighbour’s house and playing with their children.

Mariah rescued both him and another of his litter from death’s door and bottle fed them back to health. Caira loved him. He was her play pal, you know. He never bit her or clawed her - a true rarity for our eclectic selection of cats - and she loved nothing more than to just hug him.

Everyone else here loved Scooter too. You’d never get him to admit it, but even Mariah’s dad loved the cat, and he’s a curmudgeon in the finest sense of the tradition.

So thank you. You ran down my daughter’s cat in front of her. Watching Scooter bleed out and die on the pavement, and knowing I couldn’t help him, was one of the absolute worst moments of my life.

Thank you, you son of a bitch.

Scooter

It started yesterday with stomach cramps, moving on to diarrhea and worse cramps by today. It wasn’t the proudest moment of my life, but it all wound up with me having to sneak into the ladies bathroom in Bewley’s cafe on O’Connell Street at 8 o’clock this morning as the men’s were closed for cleaning.

The second trip to the embassy went about as well as the last. It mostly consisted of shouting at the head of the immigrant visa department. She rejected the affidavits from Mariah and her family because they used the I-864 form, instead of the I-134. One is an “affidavit of support” and the other is an “affidavit of support for a visa applicant.” Confused? The two forms are near enough to identical to make no difference, both are approved by the Department of Homeland Security, and indeed there is no specific prescribed form in the papers I have from the embassy. But no, they won’t accept the standard I-864, and the administrator refused to expand on why this is so until I had threatened to lodge a formal complaint with her superior - Mariah and I have paid hundreds of dollars on this application, and I expect some sort of show from them.

Moving backward, it all started when she rejected the police certificate because they put my date of birth in as “11981.” To mine self, it’s incredibly petty and beureaucratic, amplified by the fact they refused to help me until I threatened to tattle to their bosses.

So yeah, another fucking setback. The only good thing that came out of this was I forced them to return my passport - the immigrant visa section tried (unintentionally, I think) to put me in a bind where I had to get documents that required my passport, but they had my passport. Half the time I want to climb into a plane and just go, I miss you both every day and it’s never going to get any easier.

It’s not much of a consolation, but at least the boardies side of things went a little better. First off, a huge thanks to DarrenG for putting me up on Saturday night, and for the long-term loan of the Sigma 70-300mm lens. I had an interesting time, I learned a few new things to do, both with my camera and Photoshop, and it was interesting to see everyone’s photos of the same subject.

Really and fucking truly, it was a waste of a day:

The clerk refused the medical because the doctor didn’t tick a box to specify that I didn’t need a given vaccine.

They requested from me a form that I was specifically informed on the paperwork that I didn’t need, forcing me to out and wandering Ballsbridge in search of a net cafe to download it (to the lady in Jury’s: You are a lifesaver, if I knew your name I’d name my nextborn after you).

They requested paperwork from Mariah that I had already provided from her family. Again, she wasn’t supposed to need these papers.

First, I’m angry because of the manifest lack of help from the staff. To help someone is to take responsibility for one’s actions, right? If nothing else, it was a lesson for me in the danger’s on an entrenched bureaucracy. There was a lovely family I met there who were living in a very remote part of Galway. The father was Irish and the mother French, and both of them were naturalized US citizens. Because of this their son didn’t automatically gain US citizenship (as I understand it) or a US passport, as he was born in France, and both the French and Irish American embassies had kept the family running in circles as no one at either embassy was willing to take responsibility for their actions and take the five minutes to help them.

Second, I’m sad at the siege mentality on display at the embassy. I only spoke to one American the whole time I was there and she was (seemingly) a second-level clerk. The security guards were private contractors and all of the administrative staff I met were Irish. We were kept in a portacabin that was a safe distance from the embassy, after being searched, all our electronics quarantined and escorted by a guard at all times.

I’m sure that little four year old girl the guard roared at was actually a ninja who kept coils of shigawire in her hair.

I’m going to call the embassy in a few minutes to arrange a new interview.

/rant

I don’t want to leave Mariah and Caira. Really don’t want to, but I don’t have much choice in the matter as I have to go back home to finish the paperwork for my visa. Bleh.

So I spent two months in the US and I have to say it has its upsides and its downsides and for lack of anything better to do (departures is boring) I may as well list them:

Television: 300 channels, nothing to watch. Everything good is cut to shreds by their strange censorship criteria - horrible, graphic violence is perfect acceptable. The word “hell” is bleeped out and no show of human flesh is allowed. Go watch This Film Is Not Yet Rated. for an idea on America’s weird notions of “good taste.”