One of us! One of us!

Know what is not fun? Being labled as diseased. I can see why lepers hate that so much, what with the jeering and the name calling and all. It's a nasty business.

J and I just crossed the Straits of Johor, between Singapore and Malaysia, over the new Tuas Causeway on a bus. You leave downtown Singapore and then traverse through this strange part of city in the West, full of shops that sell tranmissions for oil dereks, gigantic flywheels, transformers, and other industrial errata that doesn't really fit in with the trim-ladies-walking-around-shopping-for-Hermes-bags part of the city we had been staying in. Ending a sentance with a preposition? Love to. For those of us who grace the Potomac with our presence, it's Singapore's PG County: used cars and grumpy men until the sun sets. I digress.

We got stamped out of Singapore with adrimable efficiency and then drove acorss the Straits, duly presenting perfectly filled out paperwork to a Malaysian official. Now, I've travelled a fair bit, and, as much as I do not like carrying a US passport (too much explaining about how you are not a huge asshole intent on killing your hosts' top officials and then taking their natural resources), the great advantage is that normally just waving it around in the air gets you thorough immigration. Holding that thin blue folio usually allows you to skip the visas, skip proving you have enough money to not die in a ditch in this new country, skip providing finger prints and police reports and dental records or whatever else is asked of people who have less privledged passports. Even paperwork has a pecking order.

But this time, all the immigration officials could see were invisible Swine Flu viruses crawling around on the pages. Because clearly Americans use their passports to clean their noses when ill. Love that paper cut feeling from the stiff card stock. We were shunted off into a separate line, everyone eyeing us, just waiting for one of us to drop dead or explode, spreading the disease all around Malaysia. This must be what the Chinese feel like, as it seems like everywhere they go people are looking at them suspiciously, as if thinking “I know you sleep with a chicken under your pillow- what fresh death are you bringing today?”. Actually, we were the only non-Chinese in the health inspection line.

But luckily, due to the diligance of the Malaysian Immigration service, we were deemed “NOT WALKING DEATH” by having a fourteen year old take our temperature with a peice of tape and a coat hanger. Maybe incubation period doesn't translate well, but still, it's nice that someone is paying attention. I'm glad to know that my temperature is a healthy 38.6 C.