25 January 2008

Some Things

This morning we got up early and went to the county Vital Records office, so as to register Eleanor as a real, live girl. A man named Clarence Lumpkin sat behind a desk, with a pane of glass separating him from me. "Good morning, can I help you?" he said. He was wearing corduroys and, with his modest afro and hornrims, looked like the the most inoffensive man Planet Earth has to offer.

This is the mailbox that, within the next 4 to 5 weeks, will begin filling up with responses from the writing programs to which I applied. Right now, however, it is a mute box, empty of anything cool or exciting. Unless student loan bills are your idea of exciting. No? Didn't think so.

So I wait. And we wait. And it's cold as hell here. "Yeah, Clarence, we need to talk to Miss Wright about filing a birth certificate for our daughter." He directed us down the hall, on the left. It was fine. It took thirty minutes. Thirty minutes to fill out forms and now a few days to hear back from the offices in Atlanta. Some things are complicated. Other things are not.

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