Year the 2nd: Part une

As it turned out, America [among other things]* is not a place where you come to make your marriage work. So I will be single in exactly 22 + the liQimQami days it would take the apartment owners to issue us an Eviction Notice. Single and homeless. Single, homeless, talentless, education-less, no, not-jobless but, then again, that has been as much a comfort as “having your health” would be when you are broke and feel there was nobody to love you. [Yes, it was a mutual decision. Napkins?!]

Alas, the news isn’t all bad. I have received my 10 year I-551 form, otherwise known as “permanent green card”. Got 2,500 dollars saved (2009’s tax-return, a gift from soon-ex-husband-to-be). And got nothing to tie my clipped-wings down to the city in California that doesn’t have a Walmart [or a school I can afford to go to – not that I have actively looked – or a taxi chain, a Chinese food delivery service, an Ethiopian restaurant, or Ethiopians for that matter. It’s a rare-bird of a town; quite, “yegeter Qebele” kind of town, full of amedam immigrants. The kind of town that doesn’t make the news until a  pedophile removes his GPS tracking device, crosses it’s rocky hills, rapes and kills two teenage kids, and buries them in a shallow grave. It’s “hidden” and spanish as it’s name.

Still, the apartments are as intact from earth-shaking them to pieces as only an american building contractor can; the waitresses at Ihop are as smiling as other waitresses at other Ihops around the country and the streets are as safe as Addis Ababa’s can never be, at the rate of about 2 people meeting their Creator through car accident every six months. And the ceremony, the two dozens or so police cars that block the street and surround your body when found dead in the street; the integrity of the human soul, the solemn look and the gracefullness of the “officers of the law”.. that definitely stands in stark-contrast to Addis where a body stays ill-clad, neglected and unseemly, until a kind old woman on her way to “gebeya” drops her [probably only] “netela” on it. In the day time, it’s streets are filled with an almost non-existent traffic, and a warm .. lazy.. air that seems unable to make up it’s mind whether to be as hot as Arizona’s or borrow a “cool” page from it’s coastal neighbor, Oceanside. At night, half naked adolescent black girls from cities far and wide walk it’s streets advertising, as well as looking, for men to shack up with. Middle-aged white guys with too much teen-porn under their belt to keep them sane and legal as well as undocumented-aliens with whom, Chris would emphatically assure you, no self-respecting girl would shack up with [makes you wonder where all these adorable little Hispanic kids come from, then, at the rate of 6 child per mother].