Bureaucracy.

in which I can't even

sigh

What a day.

Last week, Penny, guardian angel and admin assistant extraordinaire, was here one day for five hours. FIVE HOURS. We were not gabbing and horsing around—I am talking five straight hours of hard concentrated work, trying to get over one bureaucratic hurdle.

That hurdle is getting my carte vitale, the health insurance card. I have already sent in loads of papers to apply—the application went to the département office in Carcassonne, which would have been the correct place to send it except for this business with the hospital bill, which meant that the application needed to go to the Paris office instead.

Carcassonne forward the application to Paris? hahahahahahahaha no.

So, started all over again. Sent it in. Then got a couple of letters asking for more documents (some of which were in the application already sent). The rest of what was needed, which took five freaking hours to accomplish, I’m not even going to describe to you because I don’t want to think about it for even one more minute. It involved registering myself as an artist and getting a registration number and I’ll just leave it at that.

It’s funny—well, funny is maybe a stretch—that we are so used to the acronyms of our own countries but the acronyms of another feel aggressively mysterious and impossible to remember. We Americans know the FBI, CDC, DOJ without giving them a thought. But what I have on my plate now is IPSI, CPAM, URSSAF, ANTS, INSEE, and on and on. The French go wild with acronyms, they revel in them. I’m not terribly confident I will ever get them straight.

A big admission: if I had known how complicated and difficult and endless the bureaucratic tangle of immigration would be, I would not have moved to France. Not kidding.

BUT—and it’s a big but! I am not sorry I did. I’m very glad I did. But hooooo boy, dealing with the bureaucracy here is not for the faint of heart. And there would be absolutely no way to manage it without a Penny in your life. I have no idea how the French people themselves deal with it—it’s not really mostly a language problem, it’s knowing what has to be done and how to do it. It requires skills—and frankly, a temperament—that I do not possess nor have any hope of gaining. Not that I even want to.

Despite my endless whining, I don’t want to discourage anyone from making an overseas move. My situation is extra-complicated because I own a business in the US and write in France. If I were retired and just got Social Security, I don’t think I would be whining quite so loudly.

I’m off to the post office to mail this latest packet of pages; I expect to get more letters with more instructions, and the tale of the carte vitale is not over yet…

…and sure enough, just got a letter from the Carcassonne office looking for yet more documents that were not on any previous list. I guess I have two applications going at once in different places. Does this raise my chances of getting the card soon? And more crucially, having it count retroactively so that hospital bill gets paid by the generous and wonderful French state?

Book Report: Orwell’s 1984. Read it in high school, not since. I’m…speechless. It’s so prescient that I wonder if it’s not so much that Orwell saw clearly into the future as that the Evil Ones have used his novel as a handbook.

Cheese report: Beaufort. One of my faves. Related to gruyère, same sort of deep, nutty essence.