French citizenship law n°3: Thou shalt be athletic

I've finally managed to gather all the documents needed to apply for the French naturalization, after spending all the morning copying/printing ad nauseam (they require two copies of each paper) and feeling sorry for myself, for the trees of the world and for my lost time. The result is a folder thick enough to kill someone if by any chance someone will dare to get on my nerves these days - well, except the civil servants in charge with processing it, of course!...

Thick as a brick (5cm), it weighs about 1,5kg and I think we should organize a beauty contest to see who's the fairest of them all!... Oh, don't worry, I didn't yet lost my minds, I'm just still under the magic spell of the French bureaucracy... And it isn't over, unfortunately, I'm yet to fill in my citizenship request (twice!), then the request asking for the francization of my names, a few other different "Déclarations sur l'honneur" (affidavits) and finally a request asking back my original papers after the naturalization process comes to an end. So I'd like to make a public apology: sorry, L., we're not going anywhere tonight!...

One of my friends (proudly French by now) tries to comfort me: after getting the citizenship there will be a lot less of paperwork to be done, all this probably represents the swan song of the French administration... Oooh, *now* I see!... But in the end I'm still not completely convinced: the reason for this display of anti-ecological behavior should be that it takes so much time and paperwork for the different institutions to communicate information to the prefecture, that they estimated it faster if people did it by themselves. Which means that information isn't centralized in this country (contrary of its reputation), except maybe for the tax office (like everywhere, when you have a tax debt they can find information about you faster than a ray of light). Too bad they don't accept citizenship requests...