Passport

Moving is inherently a unique gauntlet. This is further perpetuated when the move is from one country to another. Not only are you faced with all of the bureaucratic and infrastructural tasks of ensuring that your transport from point A to point B will be executed effectively, but there are a whole host of of other dramas to be encountered such as the emotional stress of saying good bye to loved ones and the actual physical strain of tugging, pushing and pulling to move all of your worldly possessions. 

Of all these tasks, the most basic and yet the most important is keeping up to date with your passport. This nasty little bugger was the bane of my existence for a devilish two or three hours on the eve of my departure. To be honest, it is completely possible that the whole ordeal took less than half an hour, but in my mental state, it was eons. This is what I teach students in my philosophy class to refer to as ‘psychological time.’ 

After running around all day trying to accomplish the rest of the formal tasks on my ever growing list, I was exhausted. My parents and I had planned to work for a couple of hours cleaning up my old flat and playing a tormenting game of jigsaw to fit all of my accumulated crap in their basement and then to meet my grandparents and brother for a good bye dinner. Unfortunately we were never able to make it to dinner that evening as fate had a sick game to play on me. 

As is so often the case, I was the catalyst in the onslaught of my own torment. As my parents were working late and I couldn’t bear the thought of tackling the remainder of the apartment alone, I decided to go about my final pack job of items that had made the cut to come with me across the world. It was this task that led me to make an exceptionally disconcerting discovery. My first step in my final pack job was to make sure that I had all the absolutely essential items that I needed for my travels and life abroad. Things like, plane ticket, my computer, textbooks for the classes I will be teaching, money, credit cards and of course that Lord of all international travel, my passport........shit, my passport. 

Needless to say, it wasn’t in any of the ‘supposed to be’ places, which sent me into a frenzy. I knew that I had seen it recently, but recently for me meant within the last 3 months. Not good news, especially considering that I had spent the whole last week carefully packing away everything I own in the aforementioned jigsaw game. To make matters worst, I had no idea. Well, not exactly, I had lots of ideas, but none of them proved to be correct. To make matters worse, I was completely alone, which led to a feeling of utter desperation. At one point, I literally crawled in a ball on my bed and began to groan like a crazy person. 

After a long series of fruitless attempts to meditate on and channel my passport in order to learn of its whereabouts, I resorted to flat out desperate tearing through everything in sight. I wasn’t very efficient with this method either as I would constantly change my mind about where or what I wanted to search and basically ended up walking in aimless circles between my parents’ house and my flat. Fortunately, soon after this (though it still seemed forever in my mind) my parents returned home and joined in the effort. Whenever I had a spark of revelation, they would diligently finish sorting through whatever place I had designated while I abandoned it for further useless insight. 

None of my attempts to intuit my own brain for bits of information like, “Where would I think is a ‘safe’ place for things?” or “For what sort of things might I get my passport out?” I was not alone in these efforts. Everyone, it seemed was asking these questions not only of me, but of everyone who could possibly be involved. I had given several bags of clothing to some of my student and upon hearing my dilemma from a third party they began tearing through those items in hopes of discovering the rogue document. Everyone had their own theory. Dr. Mummert was convinced that Kali had eaten it upon learning that she would not be accompanying me to Istanbul. My father claimed, that he only hoped not to be the one to find it so as to avoid accusations of being the perpetrator. 

In the end, however it was my father proved to be the victor of the eve. As I was still running in circles, my parents set themselves to the task of simply opening every box that I had painstakingly packed throughout the last week, removing every item and replacing in in hopes of finding the blasted thing. IT WORKED! After who knows how long-remember, psychological time-my mom yelled, “Look at this.” They wouldn’t tell me if they found the damned thing, which was partially annoying, but I figure that had to be the only explanation as anything else would just be cruel torment and my mother is not cruel.

When I returned to the basement, my father was crouched over a box, whose electronic contents had been spread all around him. In the middle was my printer/copier/scanner. I had never effectively set up this wonder machine for most of its proclaimed functions. When I reached him, my father lifted the lid of the exclusive all in one office assistant to reveal my passport neatly lined up in the corner for some sort of documenting purpose. At this point, I remembered the fateful day when I scanned a copy of this Lord of documents for a job application. Not willing to stop there, I became greedy and determined to also make a paper copy. While the scanning function worked like a charm, I was never able to coax it to copy and my poor passport remained abandoned on the glass for several months until it was packed away and sealed in a box, who knew when to be resurrected again.

What did I learn from this whole debacle? 1)DON’T WAIT UNTIL THE NIGHT BEFORE YOU LEAVE TO FIND YOUR PASSPORT, especially if you’re ‘sure’ you know where it is. If you’re wrong, you’ll be left with nothing. 2) When you lose something important, GET HELP. Other people are so much calmer and pragmatic in a frantic search. And 3) There really is some sort of psychological deficiency in teachers, which predisposes them to laose things in a copy machine