Lessons in Boredom

The sign of a great author is ability to use dull things to bring about profound ideas.
Welcome to just boring shit.

So, I'm having a crappy week. Most of it is not really my crap; I have a friend whose dad just died, so I'm worried about her and her family. I have another friend who is leaving her husband and I'm worried about her. 

Wait, your week is crappy?
It sounds like these other people are having more problems.
Especially the dead guy.
Or is that a problem?

There's a couple of other random crappy things happening too, including waking up this morning with an epic headache and food poisoning to top it all off, AND, to be really petty, the fact that the only way I can watch Bollywood movies in Jamaica (other than maybe asking my India-located friends to pouch them to me...?) is with Spanish subtitles. I know enough Spanish to understand them, but it breaks my fucking brain if I try for more than 15 minutes. 

Oh fuck the girl with the dead father--
Bollywood movies with Spanish subtitles?
Fuck this gay earth.

What's really ruining my week is that E's school situation is going downhill again. We had to have a teleconference with his teacher and the principal yesterday, and that didn't go well. The teacher's perception is that Elliot gets up from his seat during work time and beats up on kids for no reason. I told her that I didn't find that creditable at all, but apparently she believes it. 

These fucking parents, man.
Yeah you're right. I'm clearly wrong when I'm watching your shitty kid hit another kid. Clearly I'm in the wrong here.
"I don't raise my kid but that's your problem."

When I talk to Elliot, he says that there are four kids in his class who tease him, calling him a girl and a lady-boy and all sorts of other bad names and that they take his stuff and untie his shoes and kick and punch him in the back and head and arm when the teacher isn't looking, and that they tease and tease and tease him until he loses his temper and hits them and then they tell the teacher and he gets in trouble. He, of course, doesn't tell the teacher --and I can't really blame him, given the experience he had in Minneapolis with telling the teacher and having her join the bullies on their side. (Fucking bitch. I'd still rather cheerfully ring her neck.)  

I had a kid once say "HEH U MAD BRO?" and do the troll face. I promptly informed him no, I wasn't, and more importantly he didn't want to see what happens when I get angry.
He shut up.
It's all in the tone of voice because at that age they're complete chickenshits.
What happens when I get fucking angry in school?
I don't know I make it patently clear they don't have that power over me.
Once you've properly demonstrated that and, more importantly, are around enough to note all these little dipshit bully things you can get control over the class.
I mean shit if I can get partial control over an 11th grade class that had kids with arrest records for a week then I imagine any elementary school punk should be easy.
So I'm trying to get a grip on this woman's life. Apparently she lives in Jamaica and does some sort of mission work?
But not like cool mission work, like the Amarr are rearming the Amarr-Minmatar border and need you to support the war effort and will pay you in illegal cybernetics but some sort of--
I don't even know. Social work?
So, Jamaica has a VAT --
That'd be a Value Added Tax.
AKA "how can we fleece our flock even more?"

 a value added tax -- which is like an American sales tax on steroids. It's 16.9% and they add it to every dang thing you buy. However, as Diplomats we're tax-exempt because no one wants their own country's diplomats to have to figure out taxes in 187 different foreign countries, so the proverbial they got together and decided to exempt everyone everywhere in order to save diplomacy and a lot of time and also civilization as we know it. (No, not really. But it's in the Vienna Convention, I think)

Why does America need diplomats to Jamaica, really?
What is in Jamaica of strategic or economic value?
 I guess you want to keep tabs on your neighbors but goddamn it's Jamaica.
Even the Taliban wouldn't bother--
well, maybe.
But I seriously doubt this woman would stop anything Taliban.
Have you read her blog?
There's my argument against her value as a diplomat.

ANYWAY. Being tax-exempt just means that while we pay the VAT when we buy things we can claim it back from the Government of Jamaica in a process that sounds a lot like that line about Vogons and orders from the Hitchhiker's Guide. (To whit: it involves paperwork that must be ...signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.) Really it's not actually that bad, and you'd expect them to want a process when they're giving a bunch of foreigners money from the public fisc. But it is kind of a pain in the arse and occasions much whining around Embassy compounds here in Kingston. (It's like the ex-pat icebreaker of choice, so really the Government of Jamaica is just being helping us all get along, right?) 

So let me see if I understand this properly.
The government of Jamaica trusts you enough to have you file claims on a value added tax that is upwards of 20%?
What's stopping me from buying 20 cars from an accomplice and having you pay 16.9% on 50,000 dollars 20 times?
These cars don't exist but we're both claiming they are.
I doubt sincerely the government of Jamaica is organized enough to stop me.
I'm suddenly reminded of the story where Piso, a diplomat from Rome was bitching about the weighty gold crown Germanicus, Caligula's father, received during a visit to Syria.
Germanicus was also some sort of diplomat.

Back on the Non-Immigrant Visa line this week (we rotate. There is a highly complex and very, very awesome rotation schedule that is too tedious to explain here. We keep track of it with magnets, I'm kind of in love) which seems to lead me to post more. Maybe because I have more interesting conversations with people? Today I had a 20 minute chat about pig sperm where both myself and the applicant were yelling at one another because my mic was broken. I'm still not entirely sure that the pig-sperm lady wasn't lying to me about why she wanted to go to the US, but if she legitimately knew that much about pig sperm and wasn't actually planning on traveling to buy some of it to breed her pigs with, chica kinda deserves a visa anyway for lying convincingly to me about it at high volume in public with a straight face. 

That's the fucking standard we're working with to let people into the US?
You seem to know a lot about pig spunk or can at least lie convincingly enough about the subject for me to let you in?
And there's an institution that America pays for to allow this to continue?
There's this game called Papers, Please where you work at a border crossing for a communist country and I suck at it because my gut reaction is to deny every single application that I'm given.
Also the game gets increasingly complex and you have to like look for forged visas and it's way more involved than you'd ever want but whatever my point is the default stance for letting people in to America should be "no and fuck off and you're lucky I didn't turn the space marine armed with a flamethrower on you."
Oh that's comforting.
I'm playing EVE Online and this guy paid my character in a datacore.
This is the same psycho bitch that manufactures nukes. Are you sure you want to just hand sensitive test technology data over to her?
She'll probably make something with it, you know.
I wonder what I do with these anyhow.
I kinda wanted to get into research but I only got as far as acquiring datacores.
No idea what the cores do.

Four day weekend in a heavily Christian country over a major religious holiday basically means a four day weekend in which we do nothing and don't go anywhere. I'm half kicking myself for poor planning, since this would have been a great time to get up to the north side of the island and play on the beach and I'm all "Ugh, why did we not make a hotel reservation? Why?". Then I remember that it's Spring Break for the college students so while we'd get to spend 5 days at the beach, we'd be doing it with Homo Collegicus Barficus, which is not my favorite animal to spend a vacation with. So then I'm all "Ugh, we could have found a villa somewhere in Port Antonio or Black River..." and am at least sensible enough to kick myself because really? For a first trip outside of Kingston?

This is what she's complaining about.
Not booking a villa for a four day vacation.
I'm reading a book right now called Caligular: Corruption of Power by Anthony A. Barrett.
It's a lighthearted romp about the character of one of history's greatest tyrants and one of the rhetorical questions it answers early on is "why didn't the Romans see this coming?"
and the only response is "why would they?"
I feel like living in 2013 and hearing what politicians do the Anthony A. Barrett of the year 4013 will be saying the exact same shit about the American Empire.
"Really? The Americans paid third class menials a king's ransom to do nonsensical paperwork in some second world, meaningless backwater? And they wonder why they had 0 dollars?"

We're starting to be able to feed ourselves better and more consistently with the food that is available here. This was a big, big challenge for a while because I'm a midwestern girl at heart and my food-related tastes run to braises, grilling and big chunks of meat. Jamaica, broadly, does not do big chunks of meat -- a 2-3 pound grocery store pork roast is, I kid you not, $37. Beef is significantly more expensive than that.

Yeah, welcome to the world, American.
Shit works different in the rest of the world.

(But, according to my visa applicants, a full-grown live pig is only $50 and we have a freezer. I'm hoping we can work something out here, but I can't really be like "I'm sorry, Ma'am, but according to U.S. Immigration Law you don't qualify for a tourist visa today. But hey, give me your number 'cause I'd like to buy one of your pigs." While that is not actually malfeasance as long as I pay full price for the theoretical pig, it sure does look like it from 5 feet or so and therefore is very, very much Not Okay. Sadly, I don't meet many pig farmers socially, so I'm not sure what to do yet.)

Holy shit between that kinda thing and the VAT I'd be walking off with a king's ransom x 7.
No honor among thieves, etc.

Nathan and I are also having a fight about whether we should hire a 'helper' while we're here. (Jamaicans DO NOT call anyone your "Maid" or "Nanny", because that's insulting and demeaning. It's "helper", as in the person who helps you clean or helps you with your children/elders. I quite like that, actually.) Nathan's point of view is that he sees cleaning and keeping the house as his contribution and worries that he'll feel useless if someone else is doing it (It's a valid worry -- I know it's something that's happened to male spouses before) and he really wants to become less of a slob and learn how to clean things up and he won't if there's a helper.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS, HUH?
This woman is seriously debating hiring a fucking maid
she works as a clerk in a fucking embassy.

Why the fuck does she make enough money to even entertain the possibility of doing that?
And that jeeze-louise, we're in a position where we CAN hire someone to clean the floors and the bathrooms and run dishes and stuff, let's take full advantage of that because they'll probably send us somewhere like Brussels next, where we can't afford a pot to piss in, much less household help.

We both have totally valid positions. However, Nathan is winning if only because I go to work all day and haven't got the time to make calls and interview and hire someone so if he won't do it, it isn't getting done. Which means I have to go downstairs and scrub my kitchens once I'm done with this, instead of staying in bed and enjoying my replacement Kindle with an eye to deciding if I really should have bought the Paperwhite instead. (Current odds run 60/40 for.)

I seriously hope
in 2000 years someone finds this.
I mean this entry of my blog. I hope in 2000 years somehow somewhere someone finds this and says "ah, see, there were Americans who knew!"
I'm left with that thought from 1984: why bother writing anything down for posterity?
Either the future will be largely the same as this in which case I'm wasting my breath or it'll be entirely different and no one will be able to relate to this.

 My job, in it's infinite federal wisdom, actually gives me two days off in order to unpack my things. (Note to any future Foreign Service folks out there: you actually get two days of admin time when your HHE arrives in order to have delivery happen and unpack. No one will tell you about this, until you're sitting around on the bus and someone asks why you're here today if you got your HHE yesterday and you're like "Bwaaaah? What do you mean I could have had two days off?" Which has the upside of making your boss look very, very sheepish and avoid your eyes for the rest of the ride. Poor dude. Given our current workload If I were in his position, I wouldn't have told me either.) 

It has been a very long time since I hated someone this much just from reading their blog.

Anyway, once Nathan found out that admin days were a possibility he basically threatened to walk out and join the French Foreign Legion if I didn't take them. So I did. Because although Nathan is a wonderful, wonderful person, he doesn't speak French and would make a shitty legionnaire. 

Considering the French Foreign Legion is routinely considered some of the most hardcore special forces on earth I don't think anyone you'd marry would be good for it.
Also the French FOREIGN Legion, you might be surprised to learn, doesn't require you to know French. It'll teach you French.

 Before this, there was always a big 'next' in my life. Getting through college, getting in to Law School, joining the Foreign Service, and then finally the long hard slog to get to post and actually DO my job.

Now I'm here. I've arrived. I am livin' the dream, as they say. And it's honestly -- apart from the day to day job-ness of it -- really, really awesome. The people I work with are great, Jamaica and the Jamaican people are awesome, it's everything I thought it would be at least most of the time. 

Well she did go to law school, so.
You know.
Fuck it.