SEVIS

So the first thing you should do is not get angry, or get angry but be very calm & smooth & reassuring & deep-voiced w/ the person on the phone -- this is assuming you are an international student who turned in everything that needed to be turned in for the new SEVIS I-20, w/o which the government assumes that you, the i.s., are a terrorist and will be kicked out of the country. You turned everything in four months ago. And two days ago you get a letter saying nothing's been turned in, and that you've got a day to turn everything in else you are s.o.l.

Stay calm. One thing you, mr. i.s., know, as a former worker-bee at a computer lab, is that angry people, even people who are righteously angry, specially people who are righteously angry, will not get help. Or not as much help as they could if they are calm & collected.

So yes: Stopped in, they were happy to see me even though they were closed, promised me that the new, hey-you're-not-a-terrorist I-20 would be waiting for me by Tuesday, all while the secretary said, "Hey, he doesn't have to do any of this. He did it like four months ago."

Which we all got a good laugh out of. Which, by the way, the thing to remember too is that the people you are dealing w/, when something is fucked, are not usually the people who fucked it up -- they are co-workers of whoever's responsible for the fuck-up. But even if they are, they don't think of themselves as the assholes who fucked it up, because few of us do -- no one's an asshole 100% of the time, it takes too much energy, and so they are right, in a way, to not think of themselves that way, because here they are helping you, the i.s., who had he not been cool and collected would have been thrown out of the country in the next few days. Which would have kind of sucked.

What Nabokov Read. Terrific idea & great website so far. Check it out.

Saturday Night's all right for Sharks

I spent the bulk of today cleaning the apartment. It isn't clean, but it is less dirty than before. Now I am watching a movie about sharks attacking people: Shark Attack 3. I have not seen 2 or 1. I may never get to them. I may never actually get to finish 3, for that matter, since there is also a rerun of South Park. But I did get to see the part about someone wanting to close the beach and someone else saying, No, you can' close it. Which I imagine is said in every movie involving sharks eating people on beaches.

There is a part of me that is determined to bore the living daylights out of the rest of me. I think that the part set on boring the other half is responsible for the shark movie. I do find myself so fascinated by this thing -- which is not only not good but not really awful either, so it's not exactly enjoyable on that level either. I suppose part of the fascination is knowing that all sorts of people are throwing money at a project involving sharks, not only once but three times. And this is probably because there is someone out there renting a movie, and his only criteria is whether or not there is a shark on the cover, or on the title, or every fifteen minutes on the screen. Not that I have been timing it.

There's the shark again.

Good night.