worrying should be an olympic sport

here’s what i know about me:

i can create stress. i can wake up late at night on a friday night, when i have to deliver a wedding cake in the morning, and realize that my foreign-citizen-resident-permit is going to expire on monday. which i knew. but i had forgotten that monday was going to be another random bank holiday. it’s weird to live in one place and follow the holidays of another place. i really never know what’s going on here.

so on friday night, before delivering the cake – at 3 a.m. mind you – i wake up at night, sit in front of the computer, and verify that monday (yesterday) is a holiday. and i do some quick research on ‘expired cards’.

here’s the part you can relate to:

i found one random personal blogger, not a person with any experience with this, but she was just writing about residence cards in general. and she said “if you let your card expire, they deport you.”

yeah. imagine reading that at 3 a.m. and i believed her.  because if it’s on the internet it must be true …

I am acquainted with worrying. I am a master worrier. I didn’t want to wake up Mr. B and ruin his sleep too, so i just waited. told him in the morning.  He said “it’ll be fine.” and i’m like “holy you are not taking this seriously.”

we mock-planned what we’d do if deported. we delivered a wedding cake in 25C temperatures commuting there for over an hour and the icing didn’t melt. and then once it was done, i bought my phone (thanks to the tiny gift button and JP’s generosity).

and then i set about worrying full-time about the card. i mean, the wedding is done.  now it’s time to worry about something else.

this morning, tuesday, day after the holiday, we go to the appropriate office. we wait in line in the cold outside for 2 hrs. we get inside and there’s a nice man who gives us our extension cards, and then says have a nice day. he says nothing about the expiry. not one word. we were braced for a yelling. we were braced for someone giving us shit for not knowing the local vacations after living here 6 years. we were braced for a fine (which is how they would have handled it at home). we were braced (unhappily) for deportation.

and we got nothing. not one single word.

i hate it when my husband is right.

we had a very delicious huge lovely lunch treat in a random restaurant that turned out to be super excellent. He went to work, i went to sleep. finally. slept an hour then watched videos ON MY PHONE in bed.

now. i still have a chaotic fridge with bits of leftover catering food.  and i do have a very full inbox (sorry!) that i’m working my way through.  i’ve been a crappy sober penpal for at least a week. this wedding thing? this residence card thing? yeah. this stuff has to stop now. i might have a natural tendency to resist being bored, but i’m going to do some ‘bored’ right now. it’s 9:00 pm here. i’m about to have leftovers, watch a documentary for the second time (have you seen “Dear Zachary”?), and then i’m going to take my phone to bed.

i’ll get caught up on my emails over the next few days. then i’m taking the weekend to go to the beach. can’t wait. le sigh.

ps. dear universe. i got it. message received. you scared with me with the residence card thing. i will stop the procrastinating. i will evolve right now. i get it. enough already. message received. i’ll do what i need to do now so that i can have the results that i want later (sound like sobriety much?). today is my day 1 of anti-procrastination. i’m going to do 100 days of taking care of me even if i resist. and i’m going to reduce adrenaline to some freakishly low, as yet unheard of level.

and you?