Of course Mexico has changed. It just hasn't gotten better.

Why do I say it so bluntly? Because at 51 years old, having spent most of my life in this country, and after living in Thailand, I'm back here for a stretch and the evidence is everywhere I look.

We traded one government (corrupt and totalitarian in democratic drag, as far as most of us were concerned) for one we believed would bring real change.

We knew that easing into an actual democracy would take time, but we thought we could get there. Today that "ideal" seems not just distant but visibly receding. Exhibit A:

My passport was set to expire on July 17th, and because I have a year-long visa to return to Thailand, I planned ahead and went to do something I've been doing my entire conscious life, since I've had a passport since I was a child: renew it.

I arrived at the Tlatelolco office with all my papers and my still-valid passport, and everything looked perfectly straightforward, just like the last time I'd renewed in Toluca (where I was living back then), which had been genuinely simple. That was ten years ago, but the law said it was time.

When I handed over my passport along with the voter registration card they use in this country (also now an official ID, I was informed on the spot), the woman at the window told me she couldn't issue me a new passport because my name as it appears on my voter card (two given names, matching my birth certificate) doesn't match the name on my passport.

When I got married 31 years ago and renewed my passport, I wrote only the name I actually use, dropping the second given name and adding my married surname, because that is supposedly who I became after a judge made us sign papers in 1977 that legally bound me to my current husband. The trouble is that, as the subdirector of the Tlatelolco office, a Mr. Carlos Sánchez, explained to me, things have changed.

I spent a long time arguing with this man that my own still-valid passport was conclusive proof of who I am, given that the government itself had been issuing it to me my whole life.

He countered that I needed to present an additional document alongside this "still-valid" passport to prove my identity, and that the most legally authoritative document in the country today is the voter card. Go figure. Because I simply cannot believe that in a country where (as has happened before) someone can obtain a forged or duplicate passport, you can't more or less do the same with nearly everything else.

To anyone living in a country slightly further along in its legal development, where the whole point is supposedly to make things easier for citizens so they don't waste productive time, this will sound absurd. But here we are in the 21st century, and this is how Mexico works, with no sign of improvement. My country seems to have remained suspended in the surrealism André Breton famously attributed to it.

The thing is, even though I've been living with this confusion that the Foreign Ministry itself created by accepting my "supposed error" 31 years ago, apparently it can no longer continue.

I perfectly understand that things have to evolve and that with more citizens, we need to be more precise about our names. What I cannot wrap my head around is that it's always the upstanding citizens, the ones who follow the law and pay their taxes, who end up paying for everyone else's mistakes.

Because those of us who are Mexican know perfectly well that when we make mistakes, we pay for them. But when politicians, public servants, and people in positions of government authority make mistakes, we pay for those too.

Mr. Carlos Sánchez's solution was for me to simply pick one name or the other. Does that seem reasonable when half my legal documents have been issued under one name and the other half under the other? It didn't sound very sensible to my husband or me.

Then it occurred to me that my U.S. visa carries the same name as my passport and could serve as identification. But the man told me I'd need the embassy to provide an apostilled copy of the visa.

So there I went, off to said embassy to request this document. They looked at me as if to say, "what?" and I explained my situation.

They seemed to understand it perfectly well, but told me they don't issue that kind of document for legal matters in Mexico because they'd only do so if the American government itself requested it. I understood completely, and in a brief, efficient conversation, the staff, who genuinely seemed to want to help, suggested I go to a notary and have a certified affidavit drawn up, with witnesses who have known me for twenty years, something that would serve me generally in the future whenever a question like this came up.

So after nearly a week, here I was making yet another appointment to go back, though this time I was determined not to speak with the subdirector again (a rather entertaining character who kept reaching for jokes whenever things got uncomfortable).

This time around, everything went the same way and I was seen by a different woman, friendlier and more polished, who told me the affidavit was useless and that my original birth certificate would be far better.

I told her I didn't want them putting my birth certificate name on the passport because it could create problems with my Thai visa or my U.S. visa, and would they please stop complicating my life and just find a way to resolve it.

Besides, my original birth certificate was sitting in a storage unit in Toluca, where it had been since we moved to Thailand nearly two years before.

She then passed me along to a more senior figure, a Mr. Rodrigo Aranda, introduced as the "director of the office." He was more cordial and showed what at least appeared to be some interest in helping me. He said that if I brought my birth certificate, he would do everything he could to minimize the changes to my new passport.

And so that very day, my husband and I drove to Toluca on an empty stomach, hoping to get back in time to submit my papers that same afternoon and not let Mr. Rodrigo Aranda's apparent goodwill go cold.

When we returned, there was yet another snag with the same woman who had seemed friendly that morning but whose patience, by late afternoon, had visibly run out. I asked to speak again with the director, who had "coincidentally" gone to lunch.

It turned out he couldn't accept my birth certificate because the photocopy I had made was on legal-size paper (since the original happened to be that size) and it needed to be on letter-size paper. At this point, I confess I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown worthy of an Almodóvar film, and the only impulse I felt was a very strong desire to invoke the family lineage of every single one of these officials.

Because while all this was happening to me, the same kinds of things were happening to other people around me, for different bureaucratic reasons but with the same result: they endured, and endured, and endured.

A patience I frankly do not have in the face of such staggering stupidity, incompetence, lack of judgment, and above all, lack of WILL.

It seems that this willingness to actually help simply does not exist in my country, and I think that is the saddest thing I keep confirming.

On top of all this stress, given that we need to leave the country on the 12th and already have reservations, I forgot to ask why they weren't giving me any receipt in exchange for surrendering my entire identity, since I was leaving them every form of ID I have in this country, including my passport, which is, of course, the document I use to identify myself everywhere in the world. Because as I told these people: "Once I'm outside Mexico, that very important 'identity' card goes straight into a drawer so I don't lose it, because in any other country in the world, the only thing it would be good for is sliding it into a hotel door slot instead of a key card." I cannot get my head around the fact that a passport issued by the Mexican government is not considered absolute proof of who I am and that it is legitimate.

Mr. Carlos Sánchez (the one who kept finding the whole thing funny) told me it was to prevent a repeat of what happened years ago with the brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who, as many of you will know, obtained a second passport under a different name to open a Swiss bank account with money stolen from the country.

When I mentioned this to director Rodrigo Aranda, I said: "Look, this makes no sense. Let's suppose that instead of being who I am, I were the sister of the current Mexican president, from the PAN party (the party of supposed change). I pick up my phone right now and call my brother or his personal secretary, who calls you and tells you not to keep me waiting because I'm the president's sister and of course I am who I say I am. Would any of this be an obstacle for me then?" He answered that of course it would not be an obstacle.

And that's assuming the president's sister, family, friends, and so on would even bother doing their paperwork like any ordinary citizen, like me.

How sad to confirm so many injustices all over again in this country, and sadder still to realize I'm not even surprised anymore, because I've been conditioned to expect things to work exactly this way.

But the following day, when it dawned on me that I might not be able to pick up my passport without a goodwill gesture from the authorities, since they hadn't given me any receipt for my documents, I called again. After about twenty minutes of being transferred from extension to extension (the number they'd given me for the director was wrong, and the man himself seemed to be actively hiding), I finally reached the most intelligent, sensible, and decent person who could possibly have picked up the phone.

This admirable public servant, a Mr. Alejandro Reyes, listened to me, assessed the situation, and resolved my problem over two more calls he himself made within the space of a few hours. He also promised to try to have my passport ready in under a week (the time they apparently need for such a complicated amendment), and explained to me exactly why the whole process takes so long.

Because running alongside this problem, which I'll find a way through somehow, there is a massive scandal unfolding over the gross mishandling of a police raid on a mid-range nightclub in Mexico City. Officers who were supposedly there to crack down on drugs and debauchery entered the venue and, through their own negligence, got twelve people killed, several of them minors. To top it all off, when the officers were tested back at the precinct, they showed no trace of drugs whatsoever. Those poor kids, and their poor families. Death is already a passage none of us wants to face, for ourselves or for the people we love, but when it happens in such a senseless and stupid way, it must be doubly devastating.

Sanuk (a Thai word for the pleasurable ease of just enjoying life, which, at this moment, feels very far away)