Advance review copies of This Thing Called the Future went out today and my publisher sent me a link to a YouTube video of Urban Dance Squad singing “Prayer for my Demo” at a 1990 concert….
Here it is: Urban Dance Squad-\”Prayer for my Demo\”
Monthly Archive for January, 2011
Last night, I was at a party with two sets of new parents who had babies the same age as ours. It was amazing how, in just four months, the six of us have acquired an entirely new set of vocabulary—vocabulary that, frankly, held no interest for me four months ago. When my best friend first mentioned the bumbo chair, I kept confusing that with the boppy pillow my sister-in-law was sending us. Hey, they both had strange names that started with a “b” and they were both contraptions for babies. How different could they be?
“Matthew rolled over yesterday!” Peter announced almost as soon as he saw us.
I felt a momentary pang of jealousy. Why wasn’t my baby rolling over already?
“Hannah is sleeping through the night and we just moved her to her own crib in her own room,” Josh said.
“Wow,” I marveled. “How often does she get up during the night?”
“Once, around 4 a.m.,” Josh said.
“Lucky,” I said, feeling another momentary pang. I’m still nursing 3 or 4 times a night.
“So I’ve discovered that Matthew’s last pooh of the night is around 10 or 10:30 at night,” Becky started telling me. “And his first pooh of the day is around 4 o’clock in the morning.”
We both looked at Joseph, single, no kids, and listening to our conversation with a tiny little smile on his face.
“You’re talking about pooh at a party,” my husband Chris said.
“Sorry,” we apologized.
I used to talk books and history and politics and religion at parties. Now I’ve become that boring old parent who has nothing more interesting to talk about than how frequent and when our babies poop, how often and when they sleep, and whether their excessive slobber indicates they are on their way to teething early.
Wow. Parenthood really does change you.
This past month plus, I’ve been learning a lot about just how difficult it is for a young mixed-race woman from South Africa to get a visitor’s visa to the United States.
A year ago, I had a great idea. I’d use my miles on Delta to bring a young friend from Cape Town to the U.S. She’d see the world, enhance her understanding of life, and go home better educated and ready to tackle a career in public relations (which is her major at university). She comes from a mixed-race family (known as “colored” in South Africa) that struggles financially so this would be completely beyond her means if it wasn’t for the fact that I bought her a plane ticket and some friends in Masssachusetts agreed to help out financially while she is in the U.S.
She got all her paperwork together. We got letters of financial support, bank statements, etc. We got her a plane ticket. We turned in an application and she was called in for an interview at the Cape Town Consulate. And then she was denied. In fact, the official didn’t even ask her a single question. She was told she had “insufficient ties” to South Africa, meaning, “We think you’re going to try to immigrate to the U.S. so we won’t give you a visitor’s visa.”
We were all knocked off our socks, given the fact that my friend is going to university, has a boyfriend, and is part of a large extended family in Cape Town, and literally knows a handful of people in the U.S. Why in the world would she overstay her visa? Why in the world would she try to immigrate? And maybe she could have conveyed her ties to South Africa if the official had asked her any questions or offered her a proper interview or looked at any of the supporting documentation we put together. (When my friend tried to show the supporting documentation, the official refused to look at it). Outraged, we started calling our congressional representatives, trying to figure out what had happened and what we could do next.
Not a lot, it turns out. The process can be arbitrary. A lot of people get denied. According to politicians we spoke to, the U.S. has been denying so many student visas lately that other governments have turned the tables and started denying student visas to American students. Quid pro quo, I guess.
We can try again and hope for better luck next time. Maybe this time, the official won’t assume my friend is a flight risk and give her a visa. Maybe this time, the same thing will happen. We’re trying again, fingers crossed.
I do understand the problem. I understand it from both sides. According to my congressman’s office, there are 12 million people who have overstayed their visitor’s visas in the U.S. That’s a lot of people we’ve absorbed. The constiuent services representative who helped me said that in the week before my friend’s visa was denied, she had three people come in to her office, all who had overstayed their visas and all who now demanded that she help them become citizens.
A couple years ago, I was contacted by a South African who was fighting extradition from the U.S. She asked me to write a letter on her behalf. She had overstayed her visa, though she had her reasons. Certain members of her family belong to a rabidly white supremicist group known as the White Wolves. She had fled South Africa after family members had viciously attacked her on a public highway, disembowled her, and left her for dead. All this, because she adopted some black children in post-apartheid South Africa. Married to an American citizen now, she was hoping for amnesty in the U.S. She went through a trial and was denied amnesty. A year ago, her daughter told me she was now living in the Dominican Republic.
I can see why she wanted amnesty. I can also see why the U.S. is suspicious of amnesty cases. I can see why they are suspicious of my friend in Cape Town, who really does just want to come for a visit. I hope this time she’s approved. I’d really like to show her the United States of America, in all its tarnished glory.
Chris and I are among the new Blue Shield of Californa victims, some of whom have seen their premiums increase by 59% in the last 3 months. Our premiums have gone from $540 to $860 in 3 months. Correct me, math whizzes, but I believe that’s an increase of more than 30%. Way to go, Blue Shield. Way to go, government health insurance reform!
I’m going to be promoting my new novel, This Thing Called the Future, at the American Library Association’s mid-winter conference at the San Diego Convention Center this coming Saturday and Sunday (January 8 and 9). Anybody in town for the conference should feel free to drop by the Cinco Puntos Booth, near Consortium’s big booth, to say hi and to get a sampler of some of the book’s chapters.
Though I generally worry about the state of humankind and where we’re headed, I suppose having a baby qualifies me as having a hopeful outlook on life. While I don’t put a lot of stock in the grand liberal narrative of the Upward Progress of Humankind, apparently I don’t put a lot of stock in doomsday, apocalyptic scenarios either (even if I do tend to write books that verge on the dystopian.) So… I do have hope that earth will still be here for my children and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren. And I have to say that this season, traveling with a baby made me even more hopeful. I was consistently the recipient of kindness by total strangers. People love babies! And they love women who have babies. People kept ogling me and the baby. More strangers spoke to me than ever before in an airport. They held my bags. They carried my stuff. They asked if they could hold the baby while I ate. They didn’t seem to mind too badly when he was fussy and upset on the airplane–they just smiled indulgently.
I have traveled for years and years, an average of one trip every three weeks. I’ve never felt so hopeful about America and humans generally speaking as this past trip. It’s a nice feeling.
