Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta money. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando las entradas con la etiqueta money. Mostrar todas las entradas

lunes, 7 de octubre de 2024

Perception again

 


I'm looking at this blue towel while I think about these words. The towel is nothing but a squared shape, so I'm having squared thoughts: an open door, a closed window, a laptop shut, a cell phone on, a TV, a remote control, a cushion,  a carpet, the room of the apartment,  my desk, the sticky notes pack, everything with four sides, with four angles. What if we flip it all and ourselves with it? What if the depth lies only in our minds? Well, if not, angles definitely change depending on where you stand. That could explain why the tantrums when others just observe and remain quiet.

 

Drawers. Some of them don’t get open for a while. Sometimes they work better for memories than pictures themselves.  You find that thing you thought it was cool to have, but you never really used it, you just put it there. Now that you’re looking at it you remember what happened when you were buying it, what you were told, you didn’t believe it, but now it’s true, so you put the thing back in the drawer, and you keep the memory for some time in your head, and acknowledge that had to happen, that it’s better this way, that you in fact never got the chance to choose, that you were more like a witness and no photo told you that before. Now you have to stop looking at the towel, get dressed and go to work, and set your mind on what you need to do, and please stop using social media like you do…

 

How is the shape of the void? Is it a circle with a hole? How about Israel depth? Perhaps the depth is built with our issues, all those issues we’ve been collecting and treasure like remembering them was something worth to do. How much have we learned from them. I see myself falling apart in silence and there’s nothing there to bring up for making anything better. Even good memories lose their power to cheer you up when the present is so hope-consuming. So we just have this void to visit and contemplate, like a lake, waiting for anything to pop, to splash.  A leaf fallen from a tree and taken by the wind to flow you, with you; while the silence greets all those memories the same wind brought you when touching your face. I just need more money,  and perhaps more time with myself.

 

Shades, I can see the lamp on their reflex. The house is dark and the lamp is on, even at daytime. The sound of a hairdryer,  the sound of a Sunday evening that awaits the routine to start again. High temperature in the body. The month is about to end, and I woke up with this feeling of frustration that we pay to be fined. I was fined with two hundred dollars by a company named LMS Parking. They are in charge of giving us (we, the residents of this complex) this type of service where my car has to be registered,  so I won’t be fined, and my car wouldn’t be locked. I want to understand why, as residents,  we are not being called, and told first, as a courtesy: dear resident,  based on our records, your car is not registered,  we kindly ask you to do it so. Instead, the administration just send a general email stating, pretty much, that if the car is not registered,  it will be locked, and you will be fined. Just like that. It felt rude, like they don’t care, like it is what it is. Another day comes by.

 

Costumer care, sometimes an empty definition. If it’s in person, you have to wait on a large line and spend a time you don’t have just make a point that, perhaps,  it won’t be considered. So you call, and the waiting is even worse. Then you have the reviews,  so you let go your frustration to no one, and then you get an empty answer like: so sorry to hear that. It is happening in every level, in every field. The illusion of not being alone tend to get a serious strike when you actually have to use social media for a real personal matter. In other words, if your problem is not part of a trend, then it won’t get any attention, so you better find a trendy concern to make opinions, or else you better remain quiet and take your frustration on any other thing that has nothing to do with your problem. This is our world now: Parking services. They don’t serve me at least. 

miércoles, 7 de febrero de 2018

the perception is nostalgia




There’s this article in which I could read some about time’s perception. It wasn’t too deep but what I usually remember from it is that we, –the almost forty in 2018- when saying something about the nineties, tend to think it was about ten years ago. I hadn’t bought a DVD player yet. I remember that a friend lent me two VHS tapes with the bands he could record from a special broadcasting of Woodstock 99. I remember Limp Bizkit: the nookie. Few years later Korn came to Venezuela, Papa Roach performed at that show too. I was amazing, affordable, young and nearly ten years ago (in my head at least). Moments and memories are always playing tricks, I can´t precise when I stopped playing VHS tapes and replaced them with DVDs, for instance. I remember those Coca-Cola concerts (Experiencia Roja, they were called) as not so distant events. My wife gave me as a present my first smartphone in 2013 (I’m not so into what’s on but that’s not the point here) and nowadays I’m finding hard to see the daily routine without it, even though I’ve been using it only for five years: it’s seems like forever but it’s not. I’ve spent more time with mobiles of the other kind. So this tricky is this perception issue…

Money, on the other hand, got tricky too. During the first months of 2008 the Government ordered the first trick with money; from then on, three units would be suppressed this way: what´s valued one hundred fifty thousand bolívares changed into one hundred fifty; three zeros out. It was called (bolívar fuerte) to make a difference from the former one and this was, for real, ten years ago. It obviously created a new perception. Four years later there was no distinguishing of one currency from another; there were both bolívar and also by that now, the former bills were all out of circulation (they got out the same 2008 and this is tricky too: nowadays there’s a strong shortage of bills) We simply got used to say that a car costs forty thousand instead of forty millions, and if it’s putted that way it did not sound so bad until you talked about salaries…

Venezuelans have been dealing with ‘Control Cambiario’ (this sort of ban from free market and that’s a euphemism, because it is brutal) for over fifteen years. Fifteen years of managing multiple exchange rates. This got crazy on 2015 (the first time someone had to pay one hundred bolívares just for a dollar) but it didn’t stop there, by October 2017 one dollar was fifty thousand bolívares, one hundred thousand by November, two hundred thousand last January, just for a dollar. That makes most of us handle salaries not higher that ten dollars per month… and this situation brought us a refreshed trick: due to the astonishing devaluation, people are suppressing, again, three zeros, this time on their own; a nice but not so fancy meal costs five hundred in a restaurant, but it’s not five hundred, it’s five hundred thousand and most of the people just make over a million in thirty days, so, if you want to have a meal, just a meal out, you know it will be almost half of a salary for some, and simply impossible for many…

The government made time and money a matter of perception in Venezuela. The most frequent tale people say to each other is what you could do with certain amount of money and that’s certainly less and less every day on… the perception is nostalgia.