Echopraxia

Still in administrative limbo, which I'm going to use as my excuse for never updating this damn thing. Picture me floating in a fuzzy grey space, a waiting room of the soul, typing this at the rate of one keypress every two hours. There's something like four separate levels of bureaucracy to pass through before I can get to the "buy plane ticket" stage, which means I'm probably going to be buying that plane ticket the day before my contract starts. Before that, assuming my bona fides check out back on the other side of the Pacific, I'm going to have to present myself at the US consulate and do God knows what to convince them that I should be let into the country in time for the start of fall semester. Novelty Yankee Doodle costume? Recitation of anti-Communist limericks? There's a twenty-three-day waiting list (and a $130 fee) to get past the front desk, so I'll have time to come up with something.

Meanwhile, though, I'm stuck in Sydney, which might be one of the best places in the world in which to be stuck.

To pass the time, I've become obsessed with sites like this. I've learned that, when it comes to moving to the US, there's a very fine line between being a unskilled immigrant who's going to laze around and be a burden on the state, and being a skilled immigrant who's going to steal jobs from red-blooded Americans. The trick is to have just the right amount of skills.

UPDATE: However, the folks behind H1-B Visa Sucks! should certainly be apprehensive about competition from foreign website designers. I mean, damn.