Well, it’s been another month and a half or so without a new post. The reason behind my lengthy absence is that I’ve been spending most of my time down at the bottom of an old, dry well at the back of a vacant lot down the alleyway behind my apartment. I’ve found that it’s the only place where I can get any kind of thinking done. . . .

Okay, not really. In truth, my month of March was a nonstop pleasure cruise of marital bliss; for you see, Judy came to visit! While I toiled away my days at work, Judy took walks around the neighborhood and enjoyed the fine early spring weather; she unpacked most of the remaining boxes that I had lazily left undisturbed since their arrival from Tokyo; she organized and decorated our apartment; and she even crocheted an entire blanket! Evenings and weekends were spent out exploring California, shopping for furniture and making plans for her greatly anticipated move down here. The time we were together was nothing short of magical, with every moment filled with laughter and smiles (*pukebarfretchcheesiness*). For one month, life was beautiful; but then, as abruptly as she had arrived, Judy was gone. The sun retreated back behind the dark clouds, the garden became overrun with weeds and an endless torrent of melancholy metaphors spewed forth from betwixt my buttocks.

I miss my wife.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing her again for quite some time. Mere days after Judy left, I received a notice from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services informing me that our petition for a K-3 visa had been denied “due to abandonment.” Apparently, a request for further evidence had supposedly been sent to me in November, but I never received it. Curiously, the USCIS website never indicated that a request for evidence had been sent out (I had been checking on the status of the case on a nearly daily basis since October), so I had no way of knowing that a request had been sent and thus I didn’t respond to the request that I didn’t receive and didn’t know had been sent until I received a notice stating that my failure to respond had resulted in the petition being denied. Phone calls to the USCIS proved fruitless and a desperate appeal for assistance to my local congressman’s office appears likely to reach an equally unsuccessful conclusion. Fortunately, our I-130 petition is still pending and has been progressing slowly-but-steadily, so I have some remaining hope of someday being able to get settled with my wife and move forward with our lives together in this country.

Although this situation has been maddeningly frustrating, at the same time, I can’t seem to help but feel that my own relatively petty troubles are hardly comparable to the no-doubt far worse pain and misery being experienced by others elsewhere at this very moment. While I’m getting my panties in a bunch over the evidently limitless incompetence of the US government bureaucracy, people in Iraq are being blown up, people in the US are being gunned down and countless others all over the globe are suffering from whatever other unimaginable acts of violence, cruelty and injustice we humans seem to take great pleasure in inflicting upon one another.

So it goes.