Thursday, November 27, 2014

Where do you live now?

Singapore. Do you want a street address? Yes I do happen to be studying here now, and for that purpose I'm staying at this other address about an hour from here. How long will I be here? Five years (four and a half more, I guess.) What are my plans after graduation? I intend to find a job in my home country. Which is? See above. I know that's not entirely true and you probably have an inkling that that's not entirely true, and I know that you know and you probably know that I know and here I think the chain of mutual knowledge might break down. But we will mention none of this. Because you're only a CBP officer, and that's as far as you need to know, and the subtleties of what a home country is and what it means to inhabit a place are entirely irrelevant to the purely bureaucratic concern of border control, and there are twenty people behind me in the line waiting to clear the border so why don't we end this conversation right here and let's all go back to our merry business. Next!

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