LIfe update

Hello friends,

The purpose of this entry is to tell you what we've actually been up to, rather than making snide commentary on the land of the Kiwi (which is terribly fun, I must admit).

David absolutely adores his job. He gets an obscene amount of vacation, the people he works with are awesome, he can't get sued, and the patients don't spit or swear at him. In addition, they are paying for his continuing medical education, which he has been doing in the form of wilderness medicine courses in all sorts of crazy places--the polar course in Norway, the desert course in Namibia, and the upcoming jungle course in Costa Rica.

For my part, I've recognized that while I still love the arts, I don't much enjoy administration. My former job here in Auckland only confirmed that, and I have left it in favor of starting classes again. In July I'll begin a year of preliminary coursework that will prepare me to apply for medical school here in Auckland. It is indeed quite a departure from what I have been doing, and I'm pretty much ecstatic. Now I just have to get accepted!

Meanwhile, I'm working part time for a youth choir, and by "youth" I mean 18-26 year olds. It's a bit strange, because the kids are pretty close in age to me (and some are my age), but I think the group mentality of a choir drags down the median age a bit, if you know what I mean. They are utterly charming, and when I attend rehearsals I feel a bit like I'm in "Hair."

My greatest recent accomplishment is preparing the choir's accounts for audit. I know that as someone with an MBA, I'm supposed to know something about accounting, but the courses I took were titled "managerial accounting." That is to say, I don't know how to do actual accounting, but I'm really good at bossing accountants around. So anyway, I taught myself basic accounting over the course of the past few months, and I'm quite proud of myself, and simaltaneously completely perplexed that anyone would make the decision to be an accountant.

David and I are also utilizing my time as a semi-unemployed person to do lots of camping. Last week we went camping in Abel Tasman, a gorgeous national park right on the Tasman Sea. We chose a camp site that is only accessible by kayak, and after setting up camp, we triumphantly exclaimed in our good fortune in being the only people at this amazing camp site right on the beach. Five minutes later, seven kayaks full of 17-year old girls pulled up. I'm sure that somewhere underneath the shrieking and squacking of teenage girls there must have been the sound of gently lapping waves, but we didn't get to find out.

More to come...

S

I can't marry my daughter's son's wife? But what if I really love her?

It's been an awful long time since I've written, in part because our lives have been busy, and mostly because everything has been changing so fast that I didn't know where to begin, but I'll update you on life events in a later post. Here and now, I decided I shouldn't hog all the amusement that goes along with applying for residency in New Zealand.

My favorite part of the application is entitled: Section K7, Minimum requirements for the recognition of partnerships. This is the part of the residency application where I prove that I didn't pay David $10K to get me into the country. Therefore, we have to submit documentation of our long-term, committed relationship. This doesn't mean you have to be married, but if you are, you have to provide a marriage certificate. In section K7, they note that New Zealand will not recognize your marriage if it is with any of the following: your grandmother, your grandfather's wife, your father's sister, your daughter, your son's son's wife, your step mom, your father, your daughter's husband, your husband's daughter's son, your husband's son, or your brother, among many others. I'm rather tempted to call the immigration hotline to ask obnoxious questions like, "I'm married to my son's son's wife, but my son's son died in a tragic curling accident last year, and when I met his wife at the funeral, we bonded over our mutual love of period banjo music. Is that okay?"

One of the things we have to do to prove our relationship is send Immigration NZ copies of correspondence between David and I. So I went through all the emails we've sent to each other in the past two years, and didn't even know where to begin. The first two or three messages we exchanged are written in English and would make sense to the outside world, but beyond that most of our emails are primarily pictures of platypuses and elephants (my two favorite animals), with an occasional NYT article thrown in. These emails would definitely not inspire confidence in our sanity to the level required for residency.

Besides proving that we are in a legit relationship, Immigration NZ also wants a detailed medical history, leading me to wonder why they need to know when my last menstrual cycle was. And do we really need to do a faeces culture? It seems to me that Immigration New Zealand wants to know a whole lot more about me than I want to know about myself.