Furious!

Hell hath no fury...like a pissed off woman! Imagine being woken up in the dead of night to take a transatlantic call from a person who declares he has "an urgent message." Along with a drunken dial from an undesired admirer, an insistent telemarketer, or a stalker, this is one of those calls you never want to get. And for the record, this happened to me night before last.

The caller is not my personal acquintance but my parents'. He resides in a Western European country (which shall remain unnamed) that prides itself on being modern and 'civilized'--don't they all? It just so happens that on my way home, there'll be a lengthy layover in the above country, so they offered to host me. I was thinking, why not? Save money on a hotel, kill time, maybe see a sight or two. Perhaps. Like many Western countries that are prime destinations for us citizens of the Third World, this country has stringent visa requirements. I am no stranger to compiling documents with personal information. I've done it countless times over the past 6 years. This time, I didn't get the desired results.

I heard back from the immigration/consulate a*holes who think that me spending less than one day breathing their freezing winter air surrounded by the snowy foggy landscape of their wonderfully modern 'civilized' country and seeing 1 or 2 of their amazing sights is like handing me a key to the pearly gates: impossible. After all, once I get to such a prime destination, why would I want to leave? It doesn't matter that I'm firmly entrenched in my current life and have the documents to prove it.

I am so sick and tired of filling forms, being assigned numbers, and subjecting all my personal affairs to scrutiny under a government microscope: from the hour of my birth, health status specifically what deadly viruses or 'African diseases' could be surging through my bloodstream, financial assets (or lack thereof), and what kind of education I received before I landed on these hallowed shores (gasp! including how I learned to speak English).

So, I let my would-be host know that I would be restricted to the airport while I was in the country politely thanking him for offering to host me. But no...he had to call me in the middle of the night to have me repeat the details of what happened, and to tell me what I needed to do. First of all, I was pissed because there was nothing urgent about this matter. I know what urgencies and emergencies are and use those words with extreme caution. Email is a brilliant form of communication that works! And if you have to make a phone call, can you call at a reasonable hour? Second, I hate being talked to like I'm a 10yr old girl who's never lived away from home. I detest it when someone who doesn't know my specific circumstances tells me what to do. Luckily, I was brought up to respect older people so I exercised a lot of restraint during this conversation and cut it short as quickly as I could. I was cussing when I got off the phone and about to make some calls across the ocean but decided it would be unwise. It was difficult getting back to sleep. I had a major cloud hanging over my trip and I wasn't even sure if I'd take it; until the issue was resolved just today. I'm just going to take every day as it comes.