I’ve worked with my immigration lawyer for 12 years now, and no one knows more about me than Ken. He may not know what makes my heart beat faster (too much red wine and coffee, Ken), but he has the facts.

He has an original copy of my Leaving Cert results, and he knows the exact and dismal grade I got in my Organizational Behavior mid-term 15 years ago. He has letters from every company I’ve worked for, and unlike my parents, he knows what I did there, too—in fact, he helped me get work permits for most of them. He has maintained a trail of my addresses matched only by my Amazon account. Copies of my fingerprints, birth certificate, social security card, marriage license, divorce decree, and passport live in his files. He has written proof that I’m not tubercular, am HIV negative, and have been vaccinated according to today’s medical fashions.

If I were a private eye, hired by the children of a lovestruck billionaire to find dirt on me, I’d break into Ken’s files first.

His official client is my boss, Susan, who is my sponsor. She’s the one who paid him to make the case to the United States Immigration and Citizenship Service (USCIS) that my job is specialized enough to justify hiring a Green Card holder, and then to show that I’m qualified to be that very special alien.

The Green Card process is straightforward if you’re trying to hire a foreign scientist to build rockets. It may take a few years, but it’s not hard to prove that, in order, a) this job requires certain skills, b) no qualified Americans are available to do it at the prevailing wage right now and c) this talented foreigner is qualified to take the position based on her PhD in rocket science and her five years’ experience building rockets in Tanzania or Switzerland.

The path is twistier if, as in Susan’s case, you’re trying to hang onto an Irish BA graduate for a job that involves anything from making a diorama of the contents of a high-school locker to writing speeches for coffee moguls to coming up with a list of names of emerging stars who should be invited to Davos. (“Preferably females from the developing world…,” is always the whisper added to those requests.)

These are the requirements for a job like mine: curiosity, apophenia, empathy, and common sense, plus fair-to-middling writing skills and an ability to improvise.

The USCIS doesn’t count chronic apophenia as a qualification for becoming a resident alien in the United States. Nor do they take into consideration your card-counting ability, or your yellow hair. All that matters is your educational attainment in a relevant field and the work experience you racked up before you started the job in question—again, as long as you can show that it’s directly relevant. My Spanish degree looks muy bonito on my resume, but since I don’t have Spanish-speaking clients, it’s of no use to my Green Card application. Nor are the 18 months I spent failing to become a banker, way back when.

Over the past four years, Ken did the hard labor of proving that my job warranted special qualifications, and that no qualified natives had presented themselves when Susan advertised the position. What remained was to prove that I was worth a Green Card—that my degree, my paltry marketing diploma, and my lurching career were enough. Though I had no faith in my resume, I believed Ken would fix all my faults and lacks, so I was surprised to get a letter this past February. I shouldn’t have been.

“Request for Evidence,” it was titled. “The documentation submitted is not sufficient to warrant favorable consideration of your petition.”

It came from the USCIS processing center in Lincoln, Nebraska. I’ve been to Lincoln once. Tim drove me through it on a cross-country trip during the Christmas holidays of 2007. We bawled the Bruce Springsteen song over the roar of the old Honda. The muffler had dropped off in Detroit, and though Tim lay in the snow at an Iowa truckstop in order to tie it back on with yellow baling twine, all we got was a few miles of clunking and scraping before the renewed roar of internal combustion. A blizzard chased us across the plains. Every so often we’d pass a yard with a Clinton sign or, more rarely, an Obama sign. Whenever we stopped for coffee at a McDonald’s, our ears rang, and then froze. At the Wal-Mart on the Nebraska border, the cashier asked if we wanted a cooked chicken for two dollars. They would have to throw the chickens out at closing time, and the staff weren’t allowed to take them home. We ate it in a motel room, watching coverage of the Iowa caucus.

After twelve years living on the coasts, it was my first real visit to America. It was wonderful.

When I got that letter from the USCIS, I thought about the person who wrote it. February 2nd, 2009 it was dated: I pictured her pulling on a bulky jacket, cold to the touch from hanging in the hallway overnight, and stepping outside to shovel the driveway so she could get to work. On the car radio, she would hear more still about the unemployment rate, consumer confidence, and the banking crisis—enough misery to make her look for a music station. Then a stop for an Egg McMuffin, maybe, and the pleasure of that first sip of office coffee, and a chat about The Bachelor with the woman at the next desk. After that she would turn to the next file in her tray: a fat packet, 18 months old, with neatly tabbed sections for application forms, college transcripts, complicated descriptions of dotcom-era jobs in New York City, paystubs and tax records, and a covering letter in lawyer language setting forth why this Dervala Afria Hanley should get to get to stay in the United States.

She wants to live in San Francisco, this woman with the unpronounceable names. She has a fancy-sounding job—a Marketing Strategist, whatever that is—and she earns twice as much as a USCIS caseworker in Lincoln, Nebraska. Per the regulations, she doesn’t smile in the passport photos, and there’s a haughty look on her face, as if she shouldn’t have to sit through this. Born in Zambia, the application says, and then a string of jobs in London, New York and San Francisco. Divorced.

“Job losses in January reached record highs in every state…”

Must be nice to live in California in January.

When I think of a USCIS caseworker sitting at her desk in Lincoln, Nebraska this past February, assessing my application, I am amazed at her generosity in asking for more evidence instead of turning me down flat.

Ken and I scrambled for a few weeks, collecting more letters and transcripts. We had to ask my colleagues to dig out five years of corporate tax returns and other evidence that the company was real and could pay a worker. Then he mailed off another fat packet, and I waited.

Driving to work last Monday I thought about when I would have to start planning for failure. My H1-B work permit expires a year from now, and without a Green Card, I’d have to leave the US once again. My home country seems to be in its worst state since the Famine, if the local radio podcasts are to be believed, and the rest of Europe is hardly better. It seemed a most miserable prospect, and yet, even in the privacy of my motorcycle helmet, I couldn’t make the case that I have more right to my job than the thousands who are being laid off every day. I began to wonder what new adventures would be pushed on me. I was getting ready to improvise again.

And then another of Ken’s measured notes arrived in my email inbox, pleased to inform Susan that Dervala’s I-140 immigrant petition had been accepted, and that once a Green Card number became available my full application should be approved.

It’s a thrill. I’m not a lawyer, or even a dealmaker, so I blurted out to everyone in Twitter or text message radius that I’d been approved for a Green Card. That’s not quite true yet, but it’s truthy enough for me to take big breaths of relief, to cry at little and then laugh, to start wondering about all kinds of things that have always been above my station. And to feel a small girl’s pride in doing it all by myself, without needing a man’s accomplishments to stand behind.

Thanks, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. I love you.

On Saturday night, I made a pact with my friend Alana that we would post on our blogs at least once a week. I don’t remember whether I suggested this plan or just agreed to it, but my motives were self-serving. I love Alana’s stories, and I want her to write more for me. As for my own writing—well, it’s become clear that I need a push to do anything in life beyond lying around, eating bon-bons and buying shoes on eBay.

It didn’t take us long to start debating how little we could get away with. Four lines would count, but a tweet would not. A photo would be acceptable if it had a meaty caption. We moved the deadline from “by Monday” to “Tuesday…any time.” We asked Dr. Boroditsky to harass us if we failed to produce, and she agreed.

We didn’t name an end date to the experiment, and frankly, it’s shaping up to be a bit like my mother’s so-called Slimming Club. For years her friends have met every few weeks to report on their dieting progress, over a glass of wine or three. If they haven’t reached their target, they pay a fine. And when the group raises enough money—once or twice a year—they all go away to a hotel for a weekend and promote themselves to gin-and-tonics. My dad and I were once baffled by this incentive scheme, but it fits right in to this era of twisted bonuses.

Short Pig (photo by Dan Jurafsky)

Long Pig

“In a pig dilemma. On the one hand, intelligent, sentient creatures. On the other hand, they’re made of bacon.”—Twitter from @rionam.

Lera and Scott roasted a pig for New Year’s Eve. He joined us at the table with a piggy smirk, plump and burnished like a Marbella ex-pat. Roasted birds never look like living chickens or turkeys—they come out of the oven not just faceless and smooth but also upside down, so that those aren’t really legs we’re dislocating. But our guest of honor sat up stoic as a sphinx while Lera, in a spectacular yellow silk dress, carved away his backside. On our plates: pale-pink, juicy pork. On his bed of banana leaves: a young pig with bare hip bones and a chayote in his mouth.

Our piggy reminded me of the spit-roasted guinea pigs with which Ecuadoreans celebrate Easter. In the wealthy parts of Quito the supermarkets sell them wrapped in plastic on polystyrene trays. They crouch on tiny rodent feet, bald and buck-toothed and looking very cold. Cuy, they’re called, a horribly onomatopaeic name for a guinea pig. Kwee! Kwee! I ate one finicky bite at a market stall once, and it tasted like Kentucky Fried Rat.

There was champagne, berries and cherries, and a suckling pig: the right winter feast for our dying empire. (Even Whole Foods doesn’t stock lark’s tongues these days.) I was mournful as the corks popped and popped again. A few months ago I gave up drinking, and what I miss most is champagne. Clarity is a gift, but not at parties, where you want your mind to be as soft as candlelight instead of bitching at you about having to talk to strangers. At midnight I borrowed a few sips of champagne from a handsome artist, but it was warm and flat: a glass half empty, and not enough to get me to fake an interest in following him to see The Titz play at 2AM.

It’s weird to come home from a New Year’s Eve party so undrunk that you floss and meditate—consciousness altered in reverse. In San Francisco, unlike Ireland, no one seems thrown by mineral water in their presence, and my friends aren’t big drinkers anyhow. Nothing outward changes. Even still, learning how to get around without a wine glass makes for a social experience that’s sharper, foreign, and exposed. It takes me back to our school parties at 12 or 13, when we had to figure out how to make things happen before cans of Ritz pushed one moment into the next.

I like Lera’s parties because she collects autotelic people. Scientists, artists, filmmakers, activists, and the odd entrepreneur roam her kitchen. They steer their own lives and look inside to measure how they’re doing, tracking discoveries, not bonuses.  In their company I’m sheepish about my corporate job—about taking, rather than making, assignments, and about the dullness of business thinking and its stumpy language. Their glamour reminds me to be queasy about my part in trying keep this maimed and frightened beast of consumer culture limping along, when it should go to the glue factory like Boxer before it.

So this year I looked to the artists with more interest than usual, trying to figure out what they think about what’s going on in the world. Art is a luxury, so economically they’re even more screwed than the rest of us. But they’re used to living unpadded lives, and compared to us worker bees, the ones I know seem to be relaxed and inspired by the shifts.

Artists scare me, to tell the truth. I’ve worked with designers my whole career and I have a good and pragmatic eye for what they do. Not so with visual arts. Without words or faces, I’m lost, and it’s hard to find the entrances where the questions go in. I’m the one who’s googling the artist’s statement or squinting at the gallery captions. When I come up against an artwork that hasn’t been wrapped in a story, it’s like having to taste something new with my eyes closed. There’s a scramble to classify: What is it? What is it? And it’s mixed with a bit of panic that this thing could bite back.

Here in San Francisco, machine art is big. It’s the spawn of punk rock and the garage engineering of Silicon Valley—both of which have been around for a while, so that you find middle-aged men dismissing “wannabes,” “Boring Man,” and “straights” (the heirs of squares). With undisguised pity, they ask strangers why we have day jobs. It’s kind of funny.  (Not that they’re all above the baubles of our time: “I’m anti-materialism,” said the artist who sat pig-left of me at dinner, “but my phone broke, so I got an iPhone.” He waved it around, excited about the Ocarina program that turns it into an eerie but lovely instrument. It wouldn’t be a San Francisco party without the iPhone app moment.)

Rather than asking about their work, I come at it through the side-door of biography, quizzing them on how they live and what they care about. We don’t even have the dole here in the U.S., so people who survive as full-time artists need hustle and discipline as much or more than they need talent. In a paycheck world, they have to create their own structure.

If you have a pencil and a junk mail envelope, you can write a poem on a bus. All this applicationless engineering, however—street sculptures, big fire, flying machines and head-slapping robots—that takes space. And materials, tools, and fuel. And permit-wrangling. And many hands.

So the tribe of artists becomes the patron. They share couches, burritos, and beer in Vienna, the Mission, and Brooklyn. They trade studio space, scavenged materials, and crew labor. In place of the family that couldn’t figure you out, they offer warmth and love. They throw fund-raising parties to pay the medical bills when you blow your jaw off building a confetti cannon. They see you through addictions, weddings, and creative droughts. You turn to your tribe for inspiration, encouragement, collaboration, and brutal assessments of your work. You promote their shows, and they show up at yours.

The scarcity of money binds artists together like rice farmers. As one writes: “We teeter on a financial apocalypse, what do I care? I have always lived on that edge, I am fine with eating rice ‘n’ beans, and thrilled to eat a piece of salmon.”

I asked that guy whom he was trying to reach with his work. “Everyone,” he said. (Privately, I translated this as “Everyone who already has tattoos.”) “It’s about getting people to wake up, using fear and anxiety to push them to change their lives.” And he told the story of asking the composer John Cage how he knew that whatever he was doing was working. “If just one person thinks about it afterwards, I’ve succeeded,” Cage said.

Their safety and comfort comes from the tribe, and it gives them the freedom to provoke the rest of us to look at how much we give up for our security superstitions and physical comfort. I’ll go on the Coney Island Cyclone, in the belief that someone must have carried out a safety inspection, but I’m terrified at the idea of cuddling a fire-spewing robot that could go rogue. I suppose that’s the point—to make me see how much I want everything in my life to be “up to code.”

Not much has truly changed this year. So far, most of us still live in the same homes and work at the same jobs, surrounded by the same people. But the mental contraptions we’ve devised to pad ourselves from pain and deliver pleasure have broken down.

My pal Tucker Nichols once put on an art show called “Together We Can Prevent Earthquakes.” I never got to see it, but that sly title sums up our illusions. We haven’t let go of our babyhood fantasy that we are omnipotent and all our needs will be met. We’ve believed—lord help us—that we are in control, or at least that some three-letter force who cares about us is in control, whether it’s God, the law, the FDA, the SEC, or the DHS.

We’ve been following hollow safety rituals: shuffling barefoot at the airport, swallowing for years the anti-anxiety drugs that were tested for six weeks, driving SUVs because it feels safer to sit up high. We trusted the bond-rating agencies who were paid by the issuers. We turned our lives over to corporations, and in return we expected a comfortable ambient temperature wherever we go, and enough material comforts to keep death away.

And right now, that all seems to be working about as well as any other propitiation rites. We now know that “they” weren’t taking care of us, and that our sense of safety, comfort, and control was just a collective feeling with no basis in fact. That collective feeling has shifted to fear and anxiety—the way we live just isn’t working.

Like it or not, we’re getting a do-over. We have to figure out once again what we value, how we are going to survive, and how we want act as a community. And though I’m concerned for those who have already been badly affected, and anxious about my own future, I also feel a great sense of possibility. We’re going to come out better for this suffering, and may even look back at the last decade of numb materialism as our most miserable days. And even though I don’t like being mocked as “straight” and “corporate,” I think we straight, corporate types can learn plenty from the tribes our artists have made for themselves. They know a thing or two about living through fear and insecurity.

Douglas Rushkoff is working on a new book. Get Back in the Box is one of the few books on innovation that made sense to me, so I’m looking forward to this one. Rushkoff, like the fantastic Ronald Wright, knows his history, so he can explain not just where we are but how we got here.

Something has gone terribly wrong.

Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to live in a world where the market has insinuated itself into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials entreat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy.

Born in the Renaissance, necessitated by the Industrial Age, powered by workers, paid for by consumers and eventually sold back to us as shareholders, today’s faceless fascism – what Mussolini called “corporatism” – is a closed system that conquers not through exclusion but total inclusion. Everything, even dissidence, is assimilated. And in the process, life itself is reduced in its complexity, unpredictability, and intrinsic value.

Instead of depending on a parental dictator or nationalist ideology, the system of control to which we have succumbed depends on a society cultivated to see the corporation as central to its welfare, value, and very identity.

By request, and late as usual, here’s the stuff I liked the best in 2008:

My favorites of the 60-odd books I read, in no particular order:

What is America?, Ronald Wright.
This is my one must-read, along with his Brief History of Progress.

How to Be an Adult, David Richo.
Some of us are late bloomers.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
See above.

The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry.
Set in my dad’s home county of Roscommon, where nothing is ever set.

A Wise Heart, Jack Kornfield.
Buddhism properly synthesized with psychology.

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan.
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat.
I went back to novels in 2008, after stepping out on fiction for several years.

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill.
Took me right back to New York, 2001/2002, when we were waiting for more stuff to happen.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz.
Oh, Oscar…

Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
He’s high on my list of White Man Pundits.

Lush Life, Richard Price.
All the L.E.S. is here.

Break, Burn, Blow, Camille Paglia.
Essays on 40+ amazing poems—even George Herbert is in here.

The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp.
Dammit, hard work is the only way.

I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, Hafiz.
Hafiz makes me laugh.

The Orgy, Muriel Rukeyser.
Great American poet goes to Ireland’s Puck Fair in 1957.

Luck & the Irish, Roy Foster.
See today’s New York Times piece on turning luck.

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama.
I read this long before I believed he’d make it.

And my soundtrack for the year:

I Am Shelby Lynne, Shelby Lynne

Just a Little Lovin’, Shelby Lynne

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles

Shaft, Isaac Hayes

Little Honey, Lucinda Williams

Washington Square Serenade, Steve Earle

Pocket Symphony, Air

Rockferry, Duffy

His Best 1947 to 1956, Muddy Waters

Volume One, She & Him

The Man Comes Around, Johnny Cash

Nouvelle Vague, Nouvelle Vague

The Essential Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton

Dear Science, TV on the Radio

A bunch of Glen Campbell and the Rolling Stones.