it's midnight in bishkek and I don't feel all that here, or anywhere. I worked on my big israeli meltdown paper for a minute or two before remembering that it's 1PM in the midwest, meaning I could finally call and own up responsibility for a fund that was set up for me at birth by my aunt and uncle. I get on skype and am led through the investment banks phone tree, and am greeted with the clearest voice I've ever heard on a phone. with stories of automation swirling through my head, I hear a name on the other end: Kristin, with a vaguely spanish last name and an implacable accent. it is midnight, everyone in the apartment is asleep besides me and shrek, for all purposes, I am alone in this world, and treat kristin like a machine, an obstacle indifferent to the very important intricacies of being on the other side of the planet trying to establish a trail of addresses and identification relics that are inaccessible to me now, and demand an operator. "give me a real person please," I ask.

"I can assure you, I'm real," her response is in that classic cadence of a person necessarily shutting out anything that could be seized upon by any emotionally delicate americans.

immediately I feel immense guilt for this assumption, but she patiently walks me through the online forms that I was oblivious to. I am guilty, so guilty, in assuming the inhumanity of a person who is required to not be of personness so much as a smile.at school, the woman who works the cafe on the 4th floor takes naps when nobody is asking for her. things run out here: sometimes the pear water supplies don't last until the end of the week, the only pair of knockoff FILAs in size 38 are black from wear on the presentation shoe. service is a side effect. do you think the soyuz engineers were gruff with the cosmonauts? maybe they ran out of bandwidth and made gagarin wait in infinite minutes.

"I'm sorry for calling you a robot" is what comes out of me to fill the silence of the night.

"it's ok, I probably sound like one after doing this all day long."

her 1pm is my midnight in kyrgyzstan, she doesn't know what that is, like everyone else in america, because she doesn't need to, I am so deeply detached as to be in a spaceship pringles can hurtling through orbit around the american tertiary service economy, winding my way through services that solicit services in an ouroboros. the filing is done, together me and her have reached the confirmation page. I now have multiple times a kyrgyz yearly income in my possession, not enough to cover a year of school even at the bargain basement prices of CUNY.

"thank you so much, what was your name again?"

"it's kristin."

"thank you so much kristin, you have a good day."