Team BLG was supposed to fly out of the country yesterday morning. There was a slight problem with Mango’s use of American passport while born in the Philippines. Essentially, he “overstayed” on a US passport without a visa.
Exit Clearance
We rushed to the Bureau of Immigration. They said we needed to get Mango an Exit Clearance. This document will exempt him from penalty for every month of life he stayed here in the Philippines since birth.
Many helped us secure this document for Mango. Our siblings gave us legal advice. Dexter’s partner walked us through the processes when he applied for his son’s documents. A family friend helped us navigate the application process.
An observation
The (government’s) system is inefficient, and therefore exploitable.
There were a lot of people there. They are foreign nationals (re-)applying for their visas in the Philippines. Not all of them speak English.
Corruption and extortion most likely happens in an agency that processes people who are not familiar with the bureaucratic complexities of the Philippine government.
As long as the system is inefficient, there will be a space to negotiate speeding up the process. A price will be named. The system is bad and gives birth to corruption.
In the U.S. if your visa expires they will deport you and pay for the plane ticket. Here in the Philippines: overstay and incur penalties, then stay a little bit longer until you are cleared to leave.
Some links
With our flight re-scheduled, I get a little more time to rest, to write (I am currently at 8,300 words for NaNoWriMo), and to read.
- I once channeled Sylvia Plath on my online dating profile. I’m marrying a man I didn’t plan to meet there. I guess I’m more fortunate than whoever impersonated Emily Dickinson.
- For Anne Sexton, haters gonna hate, but they want to sleep with her too.
- “Where I come from, a person’s strength is directly proportional to how much suffering they can endure and still do what is expected of them.” On women in literature and life who carry violence in their bodies.
- You should be scared of girls.
- Is it worth writing a novel in the age of inattention?
- “A style is not a category or season. It is not a box or bracelet or coat. It’s not a dance or strut. Style is a perplexity. A becoming.” The best clapback against the humiliation of being mistaken for the help.
- “Cautiously Akhmatova summoned her closest friends, no more than a dozen women, and read the poem to them over and over until they knew it by heart. Perhaps this was how Sappho had taught her poems to groups of female friends more than two thousand years ago. But Sappho had not lived in fear of writing down her lines.”
The aim is not to complete NaNoWriMo
but to figure out what I want to write. I am making peace that I am not the person I was before. Life has changed me a lot in the last two years. It is not unthinkable that I am called to write different things now.
So I’m writing. Word after word. Even if it doesn’t make sense. Even if it’s not a story yet. Even if I am merely setting the stage for the courtship ritual with the Muse again.
“I have not exhausted you yet,
we still have a few poems”
(Muse, Manic Pixie Depressive Gremlin)