Lifeblood

_”So God is dead, like Nietzsche said.

Supersition is all we have left.”_

That’s a lyric from the song 1985, which opens the Manic Street Preachers’ most recent album, Lifeblood. That lyric, more than any other I’ve been exposed to in recent months, seems to characterise the age in which we’re living. All we need now is for all the religious fundamentalists to actually realise that God is dead.

I’m blogging when I should be writing appraisals of my colleagues. These will be used to determine the size of their performance bonus. Everyone has to write a bunch of such appraisals of their colleagues; it’s one of the seemingly democratic aspects of the job.

Here we are in 2005. I can’t believe it’s upon us. So much will be happening in our lives this year. For one thing, the McKenna-Macdonald clan will see a 50% expansion of its ranks in May, when Sarah squeezes the person inside her out and into an uncertain world.

We bought our first baby clothes yesterday at Lullaby Lane in San Bruno. It was a surprisingly significant event to me from an emotional perspective. Our wardrobe now contains Franbert clothing dangling from coat-hangers. It makes him/her seem a lot more real. If anything were to happen to the baby now, the impact on me would be so much greater, or so it seems. Those items of clothing belong to the baby now; it’s just that the baby is currently still wearing Sarah and doesn’t need any clothes.

Why’s it so hard to find baby clothing in decent colours? I don’t buy into the whole gender/colour association bollocks. It’s sartorial fascism for infants and I want no part of it. Inculcation of idiotic and oppressive social norms starts right here, while the infant is still in the womb. What nonsense!

So, if it’s a girl, she’s going to have to wear some blue. If it’s a boy, he gets away without having to wear pink, because pink is vile on anyone. Of course, you might claim it’s my own social conditioning that makes me say that, but I’d just ignore you.

It turns out that my employer offers six weeks of paternity leave. That means I’ll stop working when the baby’s born and won’t return to work until the beginning of July. What a deal.

What then? The second half of the year will be tumultuous, but I can’t say much more than that at the present time. Certain people still have the power to foul up our plans if they become aware of them. You just can’t trust anyone these days, so we’re forced to play our cards close to our chest. Ominous, huh? Sorry, but it has to stay that way for now.

There’s a lot of crap to deal with this year. I have to go to the Dutch Consulate later this week to hand in a passport renewal application. Hopefully, that occasion will pass uneventfully and I’ll have a new passport within a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll be unable to travel for a few weeks, but I had no plans to, anyway. It just makes me nervous to be without a passport.

I’ve also been busy getting friends to write and notarise affidavits attesting to the genuine nature of our marriage. (Incidentally, anyone who’s seen us argue knows the marriage must be real.) These will be submitted in evidence when I submit my application to have the provisional status removed from my green card (a.k.a. permanent residence permit). I have to file that application within the next few weeks or I’ll be subject to removal proceedings from the US after 20th March. While I’d like nothing more than to get the fuck out of here, it has to be on my own terms and March is a tad too soon, given our plans.

Before Christmas, I had to write a will and retain the services of an estate planner. I didn’t even know what an estate planner was until a few months ago. Basically, it’s a death consultant. He’s basically there to ensure we’re not robbed blind by the US government if we both snuff it in a plane crash. If we move abroad, US law no longer applies, so we’ll have to get all of this done again at some point in the future.

We now have a couple of accountants, too: one in San Francisco and another in Amsterdam. It’s become too hard to figure out the tax consequences of our actions, so now we have to pay others to do it.

Life wasn’t always this complicated, was it?