The Actual Mechanics of Repatriation

Three months here already, geez!

All the actual administrative stuff involved in moving back to America actually turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be.

(To recap: I moved back to America accepting a decent-paying job in a small city in the Southwest, teaching Middle Easterners, mainly so that I could help my father, who has recently moved into an assisted living facility.)

Getting an apartment was a cakewalk. The first place I looked, a mid-range complex near my work, moved me in by the end of the week. After my experience amongst the hotel homeless, I was worried about potential problems with credit checks, references, leases, and deposits; but I moved into a furnished, $700-a-month place, utilities included, with just a three-month lease and a $200 deposit. I don't think they even bothered to call my employers. The apartment isn't exactly the Ritz-Carlton, but it's nice enough, quiet and roomy and gets a lot of sunlight.

It's one of the nicer places I've lived, though that's not saying much.

Phone? Also no problem. My unlocked Lenovo works just fine with the AT and T Pay-As-You-Go plan. I pay $45 a month for unlimited talk and text and 1 GB of data. No contracts for me.

Internet? Also easy enough. No contracts, no deposit. Just pay, plug, and play. $55 a month for that, also.

(I gather that catering to the transient and dubiously-documented is a growth industry.)

Of course I had to buy the first car I've owned since I was 24. (A 2013 Toyota Corolla.) My mother surprised me by gifting me the price of it, knowing that I would be paying most of my father's bills for the rest of the year. Unlike my father, she has managed her money well. "Think of it as money you're going to inherit eventually anyway," she said.

I sit under this tree near my apartment a lot and daydream about when my life was exotic

Getting car insurance was handled by my mother's insurance agent; getting the car registered here in the state I live now took a couple of trips to the DMV and maybe a half-hour of waiting. Relatively painless, if boring.

Now, health insurance?

The company that employs me had a seminar the other day to let us choose which insurance plan we wanted; most of us are TEFL lifers, and had no fucking idea what they were talking about. "Uh ... what's a premium? Who pays the deductible?"

I pay something like $80 a month for health insurance with a $3500 deductible. (Whatever the fuck that means.) That doesn't sound like the best deal in the world, but I can live with it.

So here I am! A tax-paying, documented, insured, 40-hour-a-week American citizen. I imagine they'll find me slumped over dead of heart failure in my Toyota Corolla, listening to NPR, any day now, so thanks for reading.



I don't have an excess of time to write, but in upcoming weeks, we should have at least some of the following:

Interview with a guy teaching English in Africa
Write-up on my trip to the Galopogas Islands
Preview of my next memoir, about my youth
The Accidental Pornographer, Part 5: Porno History X
Books About Drinking, Fucking, and Traveling: Bukowski, Thompson, Theroux and the 70s

AND NEXT WEEK: SOMETHING GROSS ABOUT SEX WITH A VIETNAMESE WHORE!