A Visitor

This is Flat Stanley.
Stanley is an Illegal Immigrant.

He arrived on Tuesday in an envelope from England, along with twenty or so letters from children, pleading that Stanley be admitted to the US and allowed to experience what life is like here.
I know what it is like to be faced with the prospect of dealing with the US Citizenship and Immigration Service, so, reluctantly, I agreed to take him around the city.
Dodging the authorities where we could, we took a walk around Lower Manhattan. We got pretzels, half-walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, checked out the Woolworth Building, and had a quick chat with a TV crew on Wall Street covering the Presidential visit. (Click on the photo above for the Flickr set of our activities so far)

So Stanley's been given a good time, but if you google him, and I did, you'll see that over the years, little Stanley's pulled this trick hundreds of times.

I feel betrayed. Part of me wants to turn him over to la Emigra and have done with him, but another part of me wants to best everything he's seen before. Which will be tough. He's met Bush, Clinton and Schwarzenegger, travelled all over the world (and who wouldn't, when your airfare is the cost of a stamp?) and under the aliases of Asep, Mark and Ujang he's toured all the continents INCLUDING Antarctica, seen the Taj Mahal, flown IN A U2 SPYPLANE, been an extra on the West Wing, and this is just so ridiculous I'm not even going to describe it, but just link to it in envy.

Maybe this diminutive, two-dimensional character is more interesting than I am.
He has yellow ears! And his fingers are coming unstuck! And he's more interesting than me!

But after a career as a professional freeloader and taking advantage of all those kind people, I think it's time Stanley started pulling his weight, no matter how small that might be.

Which is why I'm using him as a bookmark.