Today I walked into the pharmacy and said I needed a refill for my prescription meds. They asked my name and birthdate and then the pharmacist five minutes later handed me a bottle and a paper receipt and waved me off. I still marvel at this every single time.

I didn't even call ahead. I just walked in. They just had everything on file. No money exchanged. Just a quick handover through the plexiglass barrier and away I went.

It's weird to know that for many people in the world this is normal and at the same time this kind of thing has been an unattainable utopian dream for most of my life.

Lilly and I tell our conservative family members this and they always kinda shrug it off and assume we're exaggerating because there is no way this could be true. It's an incredibly weird feeling to feel discounted because your everyday stories sound too good to be true.

The longer we live outside of the States, the more I realize that nothing works in the States. Lilly and I often misunderstood or overestimate the time it will take to do simple bureaucratic things because we approached everything in Canada with the assumption that it was broken.

We are slowly starting to adjust but a lot of that weird fear is still there and we will freak out about little things. Our family doctor will be slightly late on a prescription and we brace ourselves for some month-long bitter slog instead of a one hour inconvenience.

I tweeted this before but once my family doctor she ordered a battery of tests "just in case" and my first thought was "Oh God I can't afford this, this will bankrupt me" and immediately started trying to ration out which tests were absolutely necessary and which I could skip.

My doctor could tell something was up from the look on my face and asked me what was wrong so I said, "look, I can't afford that many tests, which ones do I absolutely need to take" and she just kind of stared at me.

Reader, they were all free.

More and more this kind of becomes the new, gratefully received normal and falls to the background but every month I have to visit the pharmacy and once a month I feel a weird flood of gratitude for some of the most normal Canadian things.

There is also, in some strange way, an ever deepening sorrow for a lot of my friends and family back in the States. I wish they could experience this. The States is so messed up.

Just as our family struggle to understand our new life here, our Canadian friends struggle to understand our descriptions of how utterly broken civil society is in the States. It's inconceivable to them. They also think we're exaggerating; stories too horrible to be true.

Everyday life in the States is a literally unbelievable horror for many of our Canadian friends.

I think about that a lot now.