#Us Green Card Lottery

[credasmigrations]

The US Green Card Lottery is launched by the government to welcome immigrants from all parts of the world for diversification. Once you win the lottery, you can start a new and happening life in the US.

[usadvlottery]

Explore the journey to US Lawful Permanent Residency with 'USA Green Card: The Ultimate Guide.' This comprehensive resource unveils the intricacies of eligibility, application processes, and essential steps to secure your permanent residency status in the United States.

[npzlawyersforimmigration]

વિઝા બુલેટિન વિષે વ્યાપક સમજ

ભૂમિકા ભજવે છે. અહીં વિઝા બુલેટિન અને તેના મહત્વને લગતા કેટલાક વારંવાર પૂછાતા પ્રશ્નોના જવાબો પ્રસ્તુત છે.

https://tinyurl.com/5wds4w72

[visaandimmigrations01]

Latest US Immigration News Highlights Potential Spike in 2024 Green Card Fees.

[hannahssimblr]

The kitchen smells like baking that evening. Gitte made brownies for us. We’re having them now, with coffee around the table, despite eating very little but sweets all day already. Marzipan, everywhere. Lying out on the counter, irresistible each time I pass the plate, and so sweet my teeth are singing. 

It was her idea to play board games, a tradition, she said, though the moment we sit down and take the Matador board out of its box, I’m aware of the tension between Astrid and Mia. Simmering all day. Them, snapping at one another, often in English as though it is specifically for my benefit. Like, listen to this, Jude, I’m calling your girlfriend lazy. Are you going to take her side? Jude, I would like you to know my sister is rude, and doesn’t understand the basic rules of socialisation. 

“Excuse the board,” Mia says, smoothing her hands over it. “It has been through a lot over the years.” She says this, her eyes rolling up to meet mine, as though I should know precisely what she means. It’s an old board, discoloured, and what used to be green, has faded and yellowed under hands. The paper retreats from corners and centre crease, and it is buckling, too, like abandoned in a damp room for years. 

It’s Monopoly, basically. Playing the Danish version, with its distinct money and street names, reveals similar rules. The five of us rolling dice and circling the board. It’s an immensely dull affair, really. I’ve always thought so. And goes on for so many eventually tedious hours that normally I abandon it before the end. We never were a board game family, anyway. Tried to be, once, before we accepted it was all pretend. Scrabble was the game of choice, naturally, for Christopher and Colette who loved any opportunity to show off their towering vocabularies, casually tossing down words like “xiphoid” and sitting there, all smug, while I countered with the word “bum”, not only lowering the tone, but breaking the rule against crude words that was created specifically for me. 

My lack of initiative to win at board games extends to this, Matador, now, as I sit more interested in Gitte’s brownies, they have nuts in them, than the single house piece I have placed at the beginning of the board. “Uh oh, you got me again,” I say, mouthful of chocolate, having landed on Pernille’s house. I fork over rent payment from my dwindling savings. 

“I’ll take you for everything you’re worth, boy!” 

I make a big deal of paying her, acting as though it is hard to part with while she snatches it from me with relish and sorts it into her growing piles. All of this, the playacting, the lightheartedness, we have curated specifically to distract from the deteriorating dynamic between her younger sisters, both glowering over the board. Foolishly hoping if we act like it is not happening, it will go away on its own.

“Aha! Hotel, please!” Mia claps and extends her hand for a piece, which she places proudly, lined up neatly on her red plot, while Astrid rolls her eyes. “Yes, good for you. It’s just a piece of plastic, though, so I wouldn’t be so excited.”

“A piece of plastic that will cost you five-hundred kroner to land on.”

“Oh, wow, I am shocked. It is so much.”

“Well, in this game it is, Astrid. You pretend inflation has not happened.”

On Astrid’s turn, she rolls a chance card. I hold my breath. “Oh, God,” she groans. “Pay one-hundred kroner to the bank. Again?” She huffs and hands her money to Gitte. “Why must I always pull the punishing cards? I never get the one telling me I have won the lottery.”

“Those hardly come up,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll get one next time. You’ve just been unlucky in this game.” On my next turn, I pull a chance card and win the lottery. I try to hide it in my hand, saying, “Ah, I have to pay a fine.”

“No,” Gitte says, peering over my shoulder. “You have misunderstood. This card means you have won money.”

I look at Astrid, her mouth a line, a red flush creeping up her neck. “Okay,” I say, “Yeah, it’s a language thing. Thanks Gitte. I… Hey, an idea. Can I give this money to Astrid, do you think? Her pile is looking pretty low over there, and I really don’t care. I’m not a materialistic guy.”

Mia snorts. “No, of course you can’t. That is cheating.”

Astrid looks like she might kill me if I don’t hand over my fake kroner. 

“It could be like a loan kind of thing, do you think? Or a charity donation? Surely that’s in the rule book somewhere.”

Mia knows as well as I do that this is ridiculous. She heaves a sigh from the effort of having to point it out. “Plainly, Jude, you can’t give your money to her. She has to earn it.” 

Everyone agrees but Astrid, sulking across the table. Gitte whispers with a squeeze of my arm: “That was kind of you.” 

Well, I feel like a criminal. 

As the game goes on, the performance of everyone else falls into irrelevancy. It is about Mia and Astrid, the growing friction between them, and the increasing divergence of their performance. Mia thrives. More houses. More luck, more money, while Astrid’s savings dwindle down, eventually to her final six-hundred kroner. 

Watching it, it hardly seems fair. Like chance has favoured Mia, while deciding to inflict cosmic punishment upon Astrid, whose face is doing something to my stomach. Making it tie in knots, like it is my fault for not fixing this disaster. Tension is an entity. The rest of us go on pretending the game is fun. Trying our best to joke around Mia’s arrogance, Astrid’s frustration. 

And then a crescendo. Astrid pulls her final chance card. Go to Rødovrevej. The site of Mia’s hotel. 

“Ah, not so little money now, is it?” Mia gloats, the debt collector. She sticks her hand out, wiggling her fingers, singing, “five-hundred kroner, please!”

Astrid is red. She looks madly at all our piles, eyes on a tour of comparison. She’ll be losing after this. Faring worse than even me, the one that isn’t trying, which carries its own unique flavour of humiliation. Then she sits snap upright. “I’m bored, anyway. I don’t want to play this stupid game.”

“Oh! Typical!” Mia cries with something like delight. “It took longer than I thought, but I knew you would do this.” Her attention snaps to me. “Jude, do you know why the board looks like this?”

“Mia!”

“Because every time we play this game, Astrid loses, and then she throws the board off the table, and ruins it for everyone.”

Gitte’s hands are on her forehead. “No,” she groans. “Let’s not fight today.”

“Jude, she did it about three years ago. We don’t play this game anymore because of her. She doesn’t know how to lose.”

Pernille escapes the table, her chair scraping on the floorboards. Footsteps up the stairs while Astrid snaps back. “Because of the way you play! You love to gloat and make that stupid face like you are better than everyone else. You are a sore winner!”

Mia’s voice is droll, sitting back as though discussing the events from this morning’s newspaper. “You don’t like to see anybody doing better than you. You cannot take it.”

“Astrid, Mia…” Gitte protests, but they ignore her. Astrid trembles, her voice climbing with every word. “You love to play these games, and push my buttons so I get angry, and then you can be so smug about how you are so measured and calm. You don’t think everyone can see how you speak to me? Everything you say is intended specifically to annoy me.”

“Well then, you think very much of yourself.”

“It is you that thinks that.”

Mia’s eyebrows shoot up. “Me?”

“Yes. You think you’re so great and so cultured and fancy now that you have your degree, and you come home and flaunt it around and expect everyone to be impressed.”

“You think I think I am above people?”

“Yes!”

“You think I think that? We are talking about me?”

Gitte, then. “God, save me.”

“Who else? Yes, you, Mia. You have thought you were the better sibling your whole life.”

“What?” Mia, now, glancing around the room as though to check she has not transported to a parallel reality. “What you are trying to say is insane. Do you have any awareness of yourself? If there is anyone in the family selfish, stuck up and completely self-obsessed, it’s you.”

Astrid’s eyes flash with rage. “Shut up!”

“You shut up! What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with you? Excuse me. You’re the one who has acted completely weird your whole life. The one who nobody wanted to be friends with.”

“Okay, okay,” that’s me, now, hands up, attempting to diffuse. “I think that’s probably enough of that.”

Astrid looks at me, a blink, stunned, as though she had completely forgotten I was there. Her expression is strange, and then, after a few seconds of dead silence, she gets up, and she leaves the room. Mia goes moments later, though not to finish the fight in the hallway, as I feared, but to the office and begins playing the piano.

I sit with Gitte, the pieces of the board game scattered around the table like debris in the aftermath of a hurricane. Her head is still in her hands, bony shoulders rising and falling. 

“Are you alright?”

“Oh, yes. They do this sometimes, go.” she waves me away. “Go and be with Astrid. She will want your company.”

“Right,” I say, and leave the kitchen to follow my girlfriend upstairs.

Beginning // Prev // Next

[niennanir]

It is Two Days to Christmas and I am in Walmart.

I hate Walmart. I'm not getting into cultural or economic ground here, it's an actual physical problem for me to be in a Walmart. I'm not just hyper observant, I'm hyper perceptive and Walmart assails the senses in a way that borders on the debilitating. The is too much stuff, piled to the ceilings on rows that are engineered in a way that cuts off sight lines, there are too many colors, too many people, and the smells, they're overwhelming and conflicting. The lights are too bright. The lights are too loud. The HVAC and the coolers in frozen foods are also too loud and I can hear all of them in dissonance.

I will avoid Walmart if I can. The longest I've managed to stay out is four years. My schedule used to take me to parts of town where I had more options but my schedule changed this year and now the easiest option is to go the four miles to Walmart rather than the fifteen to somewhere less offensive to my own personal brand of crazy.

It is too days to Christmas and Walmart is three times worse than it is any other time of the year.

I only need a half a dozen things and I zip from aisle to aisle as fast as I can, skirting around shoppers who look dazed beneath the yellow green glow of the humming florescent lights. I slither past a man trying to figure out where he left his wife and rapidly start scanning at the nearest self checkout. I can feel my anxiety ramping up but it's fine, I can get out of here in a few minutes, out into the fresh air and the warm Florida sun. It's fine.

I reach into my bag for my phone, my hand closes around it as I remember that I can't use my phone at Walmart. I use Apple Pay for nearly all my groceries. The less I fumble with my wallet in a crowded store the better. But I can't use it here. I let go of my phone and dig down for my wallet.

My wallet isn't there.

I open my bag wider and stare into its depths. There is an iPhone, a tiny drawing pad with a stub of a pencil. A grape chapstick. My car keys. My sunglasses. And no wallet.

I jiggle my bag ineffectually, hoping for a Christmas miracle that will summon my wallet from the back pocket of my favorite pair of jeans. My favorite pair of jeans is hanging on the back of the bathroom door. I wore them last night to look at lights, and I put my wallet in my back pocket after I bought hot chocolate.

I could walk out of course. I want to. But there are so many people in line waiting, trying to get home to their other tasks. I flag down the nearest self checkout monitor.

"You're going to have to clear my transaction." I say "I left my wallet at home"

"Oh dear, are you sure?" she replies. "I can save the transaction and you can go get your wallet and come back, then at least you won't have to collect everything again."

"It's eight miles there and back in heavy traffic," I say with a sigh. "It would take a miracle to get back here before the frozen vegetables thawed."

"Ma'am, did you forget your wallet?"

I turn at the sound of the man's voice. He's a little older than me, an everyman type. Polo shirt shorts and docks, the standard Florida grocery shopping uniform.

"I did," I say with a sigh.

"I do that all the time," he said sympathetically. I'm about to reply that unfortunately that doesn't make me feel better.

"Would you let me buy your groceries for you?"

I freeze.

It's rare that I don't know what to say. I always have a quip or a comeback. But in that moment all I can think of is the eight mile drive, the whine of the lottery ticket machine the way the fourth florescent light from my left is flickering, the fact that I should have been back to work ten minutes ago.

It's only $35 dollars. I have $35. What I don't have is another trip to Walmart in me today.

"Hey!" the self checkout monitor says cheerfully. "You got your Christmas miracle from Santa!"

"Thank you," I say to the man. I can feel my throat closing up as he reaches over and runs his card.

"I do this all the time," he says, shaking his head. "This is the only place I can't use my phone."

"That's how I got in trouble," I admit.

He nods, knowingly. "You have a Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas to you too!"

By the time I've gathered my bags he's disappeared in the crowd.

I couldn't pick him out of a lineup right now if my life depended on it. I notice everything, but he was so unassuming there wasn't a lot to notice. Just a guy, in Walmart, two days to Christmas.

Making the world a little better $35 at a time.

[amywritesthings]

gingerbread sweet. / a reiner holiday ficlet

pairing: reiner braun x f!reader ( attack on titan / shingeki no kyojin ) word count: 1.1k summary: It's the Titan frat's annual gingerbread house competition. Your boyfriend, Reiner Braun, is determined to win. You, however, are determined to distract.

tags: modern au - university, holiday fluff, gingerbread houses, all the marleyans are in a frat bc i said so, devoted boyfriend!reiner, light sexual tension credit: dividers by @saradika

welcome to the eleventh day of the twelve days of amymas !!

“Does the door look crooked to you?”

"The what?"

"The door. Look at it."

There’s nothing more amusing than watching your hulk of a boyfriend crouch over a tiny gingerbread house.

Reiner Braun squints as he presses a gumdrop to the front — circular windows make it modern, or so he claims — then pauses.

Distracted by a very minor detail, you can already feel his anxiety running his brain a mile a minute: a lopsided door may deduct a few points from Marcel's arbitrary points system from this very arbitrary holiday competition.

Because he's absolutely fucking determined to win.

Granted, the bragging rights are his, but the grand prize will not be — Reiner, of course, rarely rides this hard for something he wants.

No, he’s too willing to put everyone else's wants and needs above his own.

So the grand prize of the Titan fraternity annual gingerbread house competition is going to go to you, hell or high water.

He’s going to win you that goddamn spa day gift card that Marcel has been dangling as a sweet little incentive no matter how long it takes him to mold this gingerbread house into his image.

"I think it looks straight."

The tip of his pink tongue pokes out a little from his pressed lips as he leans in closer. "...I trust your eye more than mine."

The blonde sits up to fish for the green icing piping bag. He's gentle with the way he eases the icing along the edges of the tiny confectionary door.

(An icing wreath, like this couldn't be anymore adorable.)

“Reiner?” you coo.

“Yeah, babe.”

Flat. He’s in the zone.

“You know you don’t have to slave over this thing, right?”

You scoot your chair closer to his, dropping your temple to his large tricep.

“I can buy my own spa day card.”

“False,” he corrects. “I’ll buy you the spa day card myself, but if I gotta cheat Porco out of winning for the third year in a row. Pieck’s gone at least five times on our dime.”

"When were the other two times?" you ask, not correlating the math.

"Well, our freshman year," Reiner begins, using the green icing to make little bushes at the foundation of the house, "we did a Valentine's day relay race that ended up with Bert in urgent care with a broken nose. Then, the one-and-only pool party chicken fight tournament — Pieck and Porco fought dirty."

"Is that why it was the one and only?"

"Yeah. Bert got another bloody nose, but that time from Annie going a little too hard."

He snorts.

"We had to save him from becoming the next Owen Wilson, so — no more chicken tournaments."

Titan frat is… well, excessively competitive, you've learned in your year or so of dating Reiner.

(Blame Porco and the new pledge, Eren Yeager, for only exasperating in this year with the month-long holiday challenges.)

You shrug a shoulder. “I could help.”

“And mess up your pretty nails?” Reiner shakes his head, glancing briefly through his peripheral vision. He smirks. “Ain’t no way.”

Right.

Reiner’s also very giving, during this season — in more ways than one.

First it was the fully-paid-for manicure yesterday.

Then it was the reservation for a Christmas Eve dinner to your favorite spot in the inner city.

Now he’s trying to win Marcel's approval in this ridiculous decorating contest in your name, and you feel… well, loved.

(There's no disputing that you've won the boyfriend lottery.)

Which, of course, means you have only one thing you can do in this situation.

He’s too wound up.

Distracted.

So you reach down to the pile of icing supplies strewn about, picking the small red accented tube.

You swipe some on the tip of your finger, mindful not to get it under your nails.

Reiner doesn’t even see it happening.

He’s too busy playing fixer-upper on the front side of the house, his too-big hands delicately toying with the too-small decorations he’s pasting on the cookie.

You wait a few seconds, letting him place the door where he wishes, before swiping the icing over the side of his neck.

Reiner tenses, turning to see what the hell just hit his neck, but he’s too late—

You’re already leaning in, sliding the tip of your tongue along his skin.

The man gasps, dropping his own piping bag to the supply assortment below.

“What are you—”

“Decorating,” you murmur nonsensically, grinning from ear to ear as his attention disappears completely from the gingerbread house to you.

“The guys are in the other room,” he rasps, eyes wide.

The pledges, he means — banished to the enclosed patio as they work on their own poorly-designed houses.

Through the last year while dating Reiner,  you’ve learned very quickly how sensitive he is.

Sometimes all it takes is a look to get him hard.

Your ego has never recovered, and it’s not deflating now.

Except his eyes soften and a gentle chuckle exits his throat when his golden eyes search your face.

“Wait, you got—”

“What?”

His hand gently cradles your jaw. 

“Hold still, baby.”

His thumb raises to swipe at your nose, where his smile only grows.

You stay still, obedient to his command, unable to stop looking at him.

God, he’s gorgeous.

He’s so fucking gor—

Something touches your lips, and you belatedly realize Reiner’s taken it upon himself to push the red icing along the seam of your lips, parting them easily.

You can taste the sugary sweetness on the tip of your tongue.

“Shit, sorry." When your brows knit in confusion, Reiner explains himself. "Seems like I missed a spot.”

Oh.

Oh.

His pupils dilate as his gaze drops to your lips, as if he’s ready to devour your whole.

Your entire body turns into flames.

“Just one spot?” you murmur, and a wicked smirk crawls to his mouth.

That same thumb drops to glide the remaining icing over your chin.

“I fear it's a couple of spots, but don't worry. I'll get you cleaned up.” He tilts his chin. “I take care of my girl, remember?”

(As if you could ever forget.)

His words get your blood pumping. Pledges and wandering eyes be damned.

“What about the gingerbread house?” you murmur, entranced by the way he continues absently swiping icing over your jaw, chin, and cheeks.

(Marking a trail his lips will devour.)

“We can bring the icing upstairs,” Reiner suggests with an innocent shrug. You know it’s anything but. “I’ll finish that damn house eventually, but I have something sweeter to tend to.”

Before you can say another word, the blonde stands from his chair and gently takes your hand into his.

You easily stand with him, unable to stop giggling as he tugs you eagerly upstairs.

He’s determined to win, yes, but to him —

He’s already won.

He has you, after all.

.

[use-ur-inside-voice]

Past Lives: How can a movie be so beautiful yet painful?

I watched Past Lives this past Tuesday, and I have some thoughts. I won’t necessarily speak to the movie itself, but instead to how this movie made me feel. After I left the theater, I felt this wave of sadness rush to me. I couldn’t shake the feeling of sadness as I thought about Nora and how her story is so similar to the stories of other immigrants. I know that a lot of people have been taken with the romance in this movie, but I think we all need to step back and refocus for a bit. This is a movie about immigrants, and how immigration can impact everything and everyone. As I was saying, I couldn’t shake this feeling of sadness after leaving the theater. I could only think about my mother, and how her life would be different if she didn’t immigrate to the U.S.

Would she still be a nurse? Would she have followed her passions of being an English teacher or a lawyer? Would she have more kids? Would my sisters and I know our mother tongue fluently instead of constantly asking, “What does that mean?” Would I be close with my grandmother whom I never see or understand? Would I feel the pressures of having to be extremely successful in order to feel like my life was worth it? That my parents’ pilgrimage to the U.S. was worth it? That their sacrifice was worth it? How would being the eldest daughter be if not for my immigrant parents making me feel like I need to be the saving grace of the family? Would be mother be happy? Would we be happy? 

Every so often, my parents pull out their old photo albums and show me who they once were. Photos of large smiles on faces I don’t recognize. Photos of friends, aunts and uncles at parties that I have never met. Seeing my parents light up at the photos and hearing them go on and on about what life was like when they were in their home country. The community they once had, the lives they lived, the happiness they experienced. I could see the longing for those memories in their eyes, full of glee and sadness at the same time. 

My parents, especially my mother, speaks in the future tense. “Once I go back home...,” “I’m going to walk on the beach...” “I can’t wait to see my sisters again...” “I hope I can see my mom one more time...” It pains me to think that the life that my mother lives is not one that she longed for. It’s not a life she wanted. She longs for something I can not give her. And so I’m left with the thought of what would life look life if my parents never won a green card in the green card lottery? Would my mother be happy? 

Past Lives is a beautiful yet painful reminder that the life of an immigrant can be upended in seconds, whether for better or worse. It is more than just a love story, in fact, the romance between the two main characters acts as a vehicle to show us the real meaning behind the movie. Who were we? Who are we? And who will we become? It is sometimes too painful to think about what could’ve been, but something I learned from Past Lives is that it is also beautiful to reminisce on the past, embrace the present, and look forward to the future. I hope someday my mother can go back to her home country and live out the rest of her days, and I hope once she does that I never have to ask, “Would my mother be happy?”

[blurglesmurfklaine]

“Woah, you win the lottery or something?”

Jack doesn’t know why he asks the guy in front of him at the checkout line that, but he does. Half the time, he couldn’t give an explanation to why he says the things he does. He took one look at the huge pile of merchandise on the conveyor belt, overheard the cashier calculate the total, and couldn’t help himself.

“Nope,” the customer says casually, swiping his card through the machine. “Just having a mental breakdown.” He turns towards Jack, lips pursed in an awkward smile, and throws up a peace sign.

Jack blinks. “Oh,” he says stupidly. He scrubs a hand behind his neck. “Uh, sorry.”

“Don’t be,” the stranger replies as he bags his various items—ranging from a throw pillow with the word I’m Pretty Sure I Seized The Wrong Day embroidered on it, to a coffee mug that says Live, Laugh, Lubricant. “You’re not the dumbass roommate who got us evicted with an illegal gambling ring.”

Jack opens his mouth to reply, but isn’t sure he’d know what to say anything.

The young man lifts up the pillow, frowning at the vomit green fringes sewn onto the obnoxiously turquoise fabric. “This is the ugliest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Why on earth did I buy it?”

“I have a theory,” Jack says.

The guy starts laughing, loud and obnoxious and it should be the most off putting thing in the world, but Jack is utterly enthralled.

This might be the most peculiar person Jack’s ever met, which is an incredibly high bar. Jack desires him carnally.

“You’re funny,” the guy says, cracking a real, genuine smile this time, and Jack feels his insides become putty in this stranger’s hands. “I’m Davey.”

“Jack.” He grins, extending a hand that Davey takes in a shake. “We should hang out sometime.”

[mariacallous]

In the 2020s, love triangles are all the rage—at least in American literature. The last five years have seen a proliferation of novels about non-traditional triads. Raven Leilani arguably ignited the trend with Luster, followed by Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, and Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss, among others. Each novel featured a female protagonist armed with a sardonic voice, and each used a love triangle to probe social issues related to sex, power, race, gender, and class.

Mostly, these novels have been about American lust. But a new addition to the list, The Lady Waiting by Polish novelist and filmmaker Magdalena Zyzak, offers an international spin on the genre. This mischievously delightful caper centers on the love triangle between a wealthy American couple and their Polish assistant, who conspire to steal a Vermeer.

Although Zyzak, like her predecessors, is interested in the dynamics of sex and power, she throws a new element into the mix: globalization. The Lady Waiting is, beneath the sex, a story of the global economy, where workers from countries on the periphery do most of the labor for a tiny slice of the pie, while investors from the core economies feast.

The Lady Waiting is the second novel by Zyzak, who was born in Poland but has lived in the United States since she was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. Zyzak writes in caffeinated English: On the spectrum of foreign-born writers who switched to English, she is far closer to Vladimir Nabokov than Joseph Conrad—she never passes up a chance at puns, chiasmus, or word play.

The novel opens when a 23-year-old Polish immigrant, Viva, spots a posh woman in a green cocktail dress standing on an island of Los Angeles’s 101 freeway. Viva stops to offer a ride to the woman, who turns out to be a rich Polish-American named Bobby. Soon, Bobby and her husband, Sleeper, a retired U.S. film director, offer Viva a job. They want her to be their live-in help. “Sleeper says our household needs a wife,” Bobby explains.

Viva has been in the United States for a year and is floundering, going unhired because of her faltering English and her failure to absorb American social norms. (When an interviewer asks what her greatest weakness is, Viva answers, “manipulating”; she doesn’t get the job.) Viva never wanted to come to the country in the first place. But a boyfriend convinced her to enter the green card lottery; when she won, everyone told her she’d be crazy not to cash in the ticket. In Poland, she has a “teaching degree, though nothing to teach”; in America, the only job she can get is as a home aid for an older woman who soon dies.

Viva’s reasons for being in the United States crystallize when she meets Bobby, who strikes her as the kind of woman you see on Los Angeles billboards. Bobby is rich and comfortable being rich. She charms Viva at an expensive lunch in Beverly Hills. The waiter brings out rosé and sharing plates, and Bobby says, in characteristically gleeful free association, “People hate rosé but I love it … Doesn’t give you as much of a headache, as long as it’s a quickie, not an affair. Never date a socialist unless he’s the champagne kind. Oh, hey, socialism! We’re going to share all the plates!”

Viva is intoxicated not just by Bobby’s money but also her command of English. When Viva speaks, she is hobbled by her adopted tongue; in Viva’s narration, though, her internal monologue sounds kind of like Bobby’s dialogue. Explaining her origins, Viva narrates: “The man who had impregnated my mother in a rapeseed field—not a metaphor, a major Polish crop—had ridden a motorcycle.”

After lunch, Bobby takes Viva to an expensive boutique, where she steals a $9,000 dress for her. Viva is distraught—she could lose her green card if she’s an accomplice to a crime.

“Why did you steal it?” Viva asks.

“Because I could afford it,” Bobby says with a shrug.

The dress turns out to be a harbinger. Bobby convinces Viva to steal—or fake-steal, in a move that she claims is “neutral legally”—a Vermeer that went missing from a museum nine years earlier, from her ex-husband, a Russian mobster. The fictional Vermeer, “The Lady Waiting,” is a small portrait of a woman seated in front of a window, gazing at her hands. The ex-husband recently acquired it as repayment for a debt, and he’s looking to return it to a German museum that’s offering a 10 million euro reward.

Her ex is outsourcing the job because it would be difficult for a Russian on the Magnitsky list to claim the reward. If they succeed, the Russian ex will get the majority of the 10 million, paying out a million each to his German lawyer as well as the Americans—Bobby and Sleeper. In a mirroring of globalization, Viva, the laborer brought in to do the actual work and assume the actual risk, will get only 1 percent. But 100,000 euros is a life-changing amount for Viva. It might buy her a ticket on the elusive route from immigrant to expat.

As for the love triangle, Viva sleeps first with Bobby, who excites her in context if not action. (“It was not the technique but the situation—that she was my boss—that aroused me.”) Sleeper excites her in a much more straightforward way: “It was remarkable that other men had never made me come, because the whole thing had taken less than two minutes.” It’s Bobby who pushes her to Sleeper—each of them knows of Viva’s involvement with the other—and every time Viva sleeps with Sleeper, it seems to bring him closer to Bobby. She begins to fall for Sleeper, but also for Bobby, in a confusing way: “Sometimes I like you so much I want to be you,” she tells the latter.

Sleeper and Bobby are idle rich. They live like “nineteenth-century aristocrats,” working little and drinking often, in constant pursuit of drollness. Viva is paid $1,000 a week for an unwritten and varying set of tasks that includes making breakfast, bringing ice to cocktail hour in the hot tub, breaking in Bobby’s shoes, and, implicitly, sex. She is alternately ignored, fawned over, spoiled, and humiliated. “Was their behavior an abuse of power if that power was the very thing that turned me on?” she wonders.

Through Bobby, she gets a taste of American opulence. When she tries on Bobby’s expensive boots, she feels a “desire to own them that was akin to lust or hunger.”

“Poor girls from Poland, Russia, Ukraine in my generation had little to no inoculation against luxury products, communism having wiped out most hereditary wealth,” Viva says. “We’d kill for a pair of designer shoes.” When Viva later climaxes with Sleeper, she fantasizes that she is Bobby, surrounded by designer shoes.

The plot to retrieve the painting goes smoothly, but—spoilers ahead—after Viva brings it back, it is stolen from Bobby’s closet. Viva, Bobby, and Sleeper travel to Venice to hunt down the Vermeer, all the while being tailed by a Russian mafia thug. Abroad, their affair turns more overt, and Viva begins sleeping with the couple together. At one point, she catches Bobby watching her have sex with Sleeper. Viva later tells Bobby that she wants to be the one spectating. Bobby replies, “do you really think I care to know what’s in your bird brain? This is my fantasy. Mine, not yours.”

This is when Viva begins to realize, if she hadn’t already, that she is on the lowest rung of this ladder, and if she wants money, power, or choice, she’ll have to break out of the system. She tracks the now thrice-stolen Vermeer to a mining town in Poland, where she buys it from an old lady storing it in her car for a little more than $1,000. The woman lives in a communist housing bloc where, “in an apathetic nod to individualism, each cube was painted a different, faded underwear color: gray-white, dull red, brown-pink, lint blue.” When Viva talks to the woman, she notices in her mouth “a gap from a missing canine, a tiny black door to the mean world I’d escaped, a world where you’re reduced, one indignation at a time, by cheap dentists, expensive priests, needy parents, treacherous children.”

Viva’s emigration isn’t easy for the Americans in the novel to understand. She didn’t leave Poland to pursue a dream: “Where I’m from, fantasies tend to be about revenge, not aspiration.” Nor is she, as a friend of Bobby’s assumes, fleeing “some hellhole where men raped sheep and women gave birth in ditches.” Poland, which acceded to the European Union in 2004, is something of a development success story, and it’s often seen by its neighbors to the east as a land of prosperity and opportunity. But opportunity is relative.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, a Nigerian émigré says of the white people in his adopted country:

they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice.

Viva ambivalently left the “shabby comfort” of home for opportunity. But once she’s walked in the shoes of her U.S. employers’ blend of boundless optimism and reckless shortsightedness, she can’t go back. She swipes the painting, cuts off contact with Bobby and Sleeper, travels to Berlin, gets her own German lawyer, and claims the reward. The consequence of her actions quickly becomes clear when she sees that Interpol has declared Bobby and Sleeper missing, last seen in Russia.

In the real world, it would likely be the worker who bore the consequence of a scheme gone sideways. But Zyzak’s world is more just than ours, in a sense, while still adhering to the hierarchy. Here it’s the wealthy American investors who must answer for their actions and Viva who claims their spot as the aspirational rich.

Toward the end of the story, Viva’s German lawyer recommends that she give up her green card and settle in a tax haven such as the Cayman Islands to keep more of her reward money.

“I think I want to keep my green card,” she says.

“May I ask why?” the lawyer asks.

“Because,” Viva says, “I won it in the lottery.”

Viva may be a millionaire now. But more importantly, she’s an American.

[credasmigrations]

United States Announces Green Card Lottery Dates

To check the status of a US Diversity Visa, visit the Diversity Visa Program website, use the Entrant Status Check, and enter your confirmation number, last name, and year of birth. This service typically opens in May following the application period. It provides the current status of your application. If selected, further instructions are given for the immigration process. It's crucial to monitor your status regularly.

[usadvlottery]

Make well-informed decisions about your U.S. immigration journey by exploring the diverse visa categories available. This guide breaks down the essential details, guiding you through the intricacies of each visa type to ensure a successful and informed application process.

[npzlawyersforimmigration]

Birthright Citizenship and Business Immigration: What Employers and Visa Holders Need to Know

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http://www.visaserve.com

[visaandimmigrations01]

Stay informed about US immigration, especially the U.S. Green Card. Expect policy changes in 2024, including updates to the U.S. Green Card Lottery 2025. Our platform delivers the Latest US Immigration News, keeping you ahead of regulatory shifts. Whether seeking residency or tracking immigration trends, rely on our insights for your Green Card journey.

[myblogforbooks123]

I understand there's been a lot of discourse lately regarding whether you should read classic books, but there's been little to no recommendations for beginners. Not to toot my own horn, but I thought I could help solve this problem. Due to length, I'm going to avoid including my take on the discourse. Below is a list of recommendations. Content warnings are available on StoryGraph.

Recommendations

So, you want to read a classic book but have no idea where to start. I'll start with a list of how to get books for cheap, then I'll recommend some short stories, before finally recommending full books.

Cheap books:

I'd recommend getting a library card first and foremost. This will allow you to not only take home books for free, but to download apps (Libby, Hoopla) that will loan out free ebooks.

If, like me, your local library is inaccessible (nearly all of mine are closed for renovations currently), you can use Thriftbooks.com, Barnes and Noble, Bookoutlet.com, or any other bookseller.

Mass market paperbacks are designed to be cheap, and sellers like Dover Thrift or Signet Classics are incredibly accessible. Puffin Classics are also cheap.

Most classic children's books are cheap. Anne of Green Gables, Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Wind in the Willows, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Hobbit, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Secret Garden, Winnie the Pooh, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time, The Call of the Wild, many of these can be easily found and are cheap. Don't stick in this section forever though; these are children's books for a reason. This is a good starting point to get into the habit of reading, but move onto adult books as you go.

Short Stories:

Those Who Walk Away From Omelas: a perfect town has a secret. This author has also written tons of other works!

Harrison Bergeron: through the use of physical handicaps, everyone is finally equal. I love this author as well! (And before you get the wrong idea, he isn't a bigot. He's been fighting for Black, disabled, transgender, and LGBTQ rights long before it was socially acceptable.)

The Lottery: everyone in town partakes in a mysterious lottery.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: AI takes over the world and holds five people captive.

The Necklace: a vain woman requires that she wear the highest-quality jewelry to a gathering, and pays a high price for it. If you like plot twists, you have to read this.

The Tell-Tale Heart: a man kills another man, and tries to convince both you and himself that he is sane.

Barbie-Q: a short story about growing up Mexican in poverty, and the beauty standards American society forces on us.

Tell Them Not to Kill Me!: an old man tries to avoid being killed.

Young Goodman Brown: it's been years since I read it, but a Puritan comes across devil worship in the woods.

Books:

Many of these will be novellas, which are shorter books.

I'd also recommend reading the full works of the short story authors you like.

The Stranger: a man who seemingly has no emotions kills someone.

Metamorphosis: Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to find he has turned into a giant bug.

Animal Farm: animals seek to establish a utopia in which everyone is equal.

The Pearl: a poor man finds a pearl that can change his family's life forever. (Warning: this one is particularly graphic.)

The Death of Ivan Ilych: a man who lived a superficial life dies.

A Christmas Carol: Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy old man, is sent to the past and future to learn from his mistakes.

Siddhartha: an Indian Brahmin leaves everything to look for meaning.

The Giver: a young boy is tasked with holding all of his society's memories.

The Outsiders: a boy and his friend who live in poverty, and who are at constant war with their rich classmates, go too far one night.

Slaughterhouse Five: prisoners of war during World War II are treated like cattle and survive the bombing of Dresden.

Hamlet: a man has to reconcile with his father's death, and his mother's remarriage to his uncle. (If Shakespeare is difficult for you, read the No Fear Shakespeare edition. You can find it for cheap.)

Feel free to read anything apart from this list, and to recommend other works. These are just works I've read and liked.

[the---hermit]

Some floofy friends and one of my current reads. I am in fact using a playing card as a bookmark.

22|04|2023

What better way to enjoy my few days off uni than going on a hike with llamas and alpacas. Today I was paired with a llama named Gandalf (absolutely best name ever), he was super floofy, a bit of a rascal but we got along, and I even got to hug him twice because he was very much up for cuddles.

Productivity and self care:

llama and alpaca hike

hugged a llama for the first time (life dream come true I was about to cry when the owner told me i could go for it)

new bedding! (when I got it I was hoping for another style that was of a darker shade of green with very subdle squares but it was way too expensive so I had to compromise)

wrote the first draft of a book review

practiced Irish on duolingo

📖: The Lottery and Other Storues by Shirley Jackson

🎵: The Way You Miss Me by All Time Low