Lately, things have been really busy, and so once again I find myself playing massive catch-up. One might think that I'd just say "Okay, plan to update on the nth of every month and be done with the matter" but I never learn, or else I can't remember to do it, or I put it off, or something.

My paperwork is now in the capable hands of Dr. Kunaporn in Thailand, the surgeon with whom I very much hope to have my surgery. I'm officially scheduled for 2002-03-15 to go under the knife, but there are a few details left to determine. It turns out that there're two groups of surgery for what I want done, one for "adequate penile length" and one for "inadequate penile length", and that the cost difference is USD2500. Further, this isn't a pick-and-choose decision; it's actually important how much tissue I have left post-hormonal interference, so I'm going to have to take pictures of myself to send to Dr. Kunaporn so that he can determine if I can get away with the USD7000 option or if I need the USD9500 option. That I won't know for
a while yet.

Also, I've gotten news on my passport application. According to the person with whom I spoke on the phone at the national office, the Houston regional office lost my paperwork and asked me for my birth certificate as a stalling technique. I told her that the birth certificate would take twelve weeks to arrive, which it would according
to the website for Santa Clara county, California. She asked me what I could tell her about my situation since she wasn't sure what to do. I dropped the whole story on her, and she got mad. Not at me, but at the people in Houston, because there's a lot of paperwork I submitted that I can't replace, including my old passport, which was still valid!

If I had taken that old passport with my court orders and the note from Dr. Kunaporn saying why I was leaving the country, I probably would've had no trouble at all. That's the most annoying thing about this whole process. In trying to spare the hassle of invalid paperwork at the airport, I've gotten my critical documents lost.

Well, maybe not lost. The clerk said, after much checking, that the file had been marked with some code that meant, ultimately, that someone had pulled my file and set it aside somwhere on somebody's desk without marking why it had been pulled. There's only one reason that comes to my mind, but if I say it I'll be accused of only having one topic of conversation again.

Someone at the Houston passport agency is supposed to call me today or tomorrow. I hope whomever it is has a very good explanation for what's happened.