Lonely days are gone, I'm a going home

[austin_dern]

I've got my new passport. My old one finally expired in March, after a half-decade of really properly intense use and then another half-decade of more typical use. Most of those uses were for getting on planes of various kinds, actually, although there was one time I used it in place of my driver's license because I ran out of gas. (Typical story for me.) The last use of my old passport was a somewhat ostentatious use of it as my proof of identity for picking up the package containing my new MacBook Pro.

The new passport --- which should get its first use next week as I fly out to bunny_hugger --- is nice and shiny and has that new-government-issued-document smell, of course. And it's got a considerably improved picture. My old wasn't bad, really, but early 2001 was a time when I weighed a lot more and had even less awareness of or enthusiasm for dressing like a grown-up. And I had a harder time getting to my barber's, since he was at the other end of a five-hour drive home instead of just east to the shore, so I was a bit shaggier. In the new picture I even look awake without looking like I've just been slapped by a fish; the fancy new digital cameras let me try my facial expression several times to reach that ideal.

But they didn't mail my old one back. I got my pre-2001 passport back, with a hole stamped to mark it as expired and no longer proof of anything except for what an expired passport is good for, back in 2001, but that was in a time much less concerned with weird spastic actions that vaguely resemble security. That takes away all those stamps from Singapore's Ministry of Manpower, both temporary and one- or two-year employment passes. I still have my green card from them (it is, literally, a green card), and it's not like those old stamps were valid for anything except a touch of my personal history. It hurts losing it; I hope the new passport gets as interesting a history.

Trivia: In 1870 a Harvard medical school student could fail four out of nine courses and still receive an MD. Source: The Great Influenza: The Story Of The Deadliest Pandemic In History, John M Barry.

Currently Reading: The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, Candice Millard.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

mine's still valid, but hasn't seen any real use except for my one cruise in 2008, the reason I got the passport in the first place. I tuck it along when flying or traveling to Anthrocon, and the latter's more to set a good example for ID. "Well, my passport's in my suitcase back in my room.." I can say with only thin traces of smugness.

Those stamps are indeed personal history, and I was glad for the ones I have gotten. I'll have to make sure they're photographed or scanned when I need a renewal.

--Chi

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I suspect part of what makes the passport so appealing to me is I have a nice little pouch from Liberty Travel with lovely pocket holders for passport and, well, ticket and boarding pass back in the days we had tickets and boarding passes. (I got it in 2002.) It's not quite so perfect for printed-out e-boarding passes, but that and the passport pocket make this so professional-slick-looking package I can't resist.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

They are supposed to mail the old one back!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There is an update on this to come! Have faith.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

You didn't receive the old one back? Aw!

(Why are old passports invalid as ID, anyway? Your birthdate is unlikely to change by very much, at least in my personal experience. It might well be different for others - I'll admit I've never pried into that aspect of others' lives)

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

All forms of ID that have an expiration date are no longer valid past that expiration date. Driver's licenses, Passports, etc. In part because people's appearances do change over long periods of time and because it is harder to match them, in part because someone else might use the old ID fraudulently.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

When I renewed mine a couple of years ago it had a note with it that the old one was being returned separately. Of course, I was getting a Passport Card as well, because I wanted to :D.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I thought seriously about getting the passport card --- I thought about it when I was in Singapore too --- but I couldn't find a case where I'd be likely to use it when my passport proper wouldn't be at least as convenient. I think if I lived nearer the Canadian border it'd be more practical for me, but as it is, not much application. </p

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

Having never traveled internationally except for Canada (and in that case not since c.1998, long before the U.S.-Canada border became paranoid) I obtained my first passport in early 2005 should I choose to attend the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. I didn't. When I later decided, with somewhat greater interest, to attend the 2007 Worldcon in Yokohama, it was absent from my Important Government Documents Box, eliciting several months of agonized indecision about whether fee-plus "expedited processing" of a replacement would be necessary, worthwhile or sufficient. (It was, on all three points.)

Passport #2 hasn't seen use since.

Earlier this year I finally located Passport #1, curse the blasted thing. It had been hiding, for the previous five years, in the leather(ette) folio comprising part of my job interview wardrobe. Apparently I had used it as new-employee ID sometime in 2006 -- after which the folio sat, unneeded and undisturbed, on that particular secluded shelf. Me-2011 can only surmise that me-2006 had chosen the passport as an alternative to my (our) Social Security card, on the grounds of novelty and "it's bigger, hence less likely to go missing."

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That sort of thing is pretty near what happened with my driver's license a few years back, which is when I found I could use my passport to prove myself to the police officer. My old license turned out to be in John Steele Gordon's A Thread Across The Ocean for some reason.