Hello Ecuadorian internets.
So. We arrived yesterday at 5pm - 11pm British time - feeling understandably dazed (having been up since 4am in London). The flight was a couple of hours to Madrid and then 10 and a bit hours to Quito. The most exciting part of the trip over was having to run through the terminal in Madrid in order to catch our connecting flight. For some malevolent reason they had moved it forward by 20 minutes. It was fun, though. I felt like I was in Home Alone 2, which is all you can ask for from an airport visit, really.
Today, after a zonked out nine hours sleep, we have wandered round the Old Town. It´s all so very beautiful; the graveyard we visited today was a particular highlight - almost a town in itself, filled with glorious ostentatious monuments vying for the recognition of their inhabitants.
Quito is surrounded by mountains that emerge sporadically from their dense fog shrouds. It´s the wet season right now and the mornings are hot and sunny before the angry clouds close in around mid-afternoon. Andy burnt his arms a little earlier, but right now, a proper biblical thunder-and-lightning rainstorm is attempting to negotiate a violent path through the hostel´s roof. It´s really rather good. Might wreck the barbecue we´re signed in for later, however.
I´ll attempt to put some photos up soon. The plan for the next few days is a proper exploration of Quito before heading up to Cotopaxi volcano to ride horses and walk on glaciers and ride a mountain bike down some craters.
Can´t complain, can´t complain.
Oh, and we bumped into some bear tracker guys at our hostel (http://www.secretgardenquito.com/), down for their Saturday off. Apparently the ex-president of some international bear association - who has caught over 1600 bears and tagged them so they can be conserved - will be staying at the lodge at the same time as us in March. So that´s nice.
Saturday, 23 February 2008
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
I am the key to the lock in your house
That's it.
I'm done.
No more Daily Mails. No more lottery. No more scratchcards. No more wincing as someone buys Psychic News and rips into it as if - well, as if their life depended on it. No more staring in bemused fascination at Chat magazine, who have felt it necessary, with characteristic helpfulness, to furnish the headline "Rapist gave me HIV" with the explanatory legend "Tragic!". Just in case you thought it was a humour piece.
No more smiling at sweet little children only to then accidentally jump-cut the smile to their conspicuously unsweet mothers; paper-skinned, perma-snarled, terrifyingly young creatures from very bad dreams, with faces that one can obtain oneself by adhering to the following steps.
1. Buy Cosmopolitan.
2. Cut out a model's face from an advert in Cosmopolitan.
3. Colour in the model's face with old watercolours and dying pencils.
4. Smash the model's face into your own repeatedly in a desperate attempt at emulation.
If exclamation marks were something I indulged in, I would fill up the whole of the internets with them at this point.
And so it ends.
Observation the last: The Human Creature Is A Shameless Voyeur
We all - or the vast majority of us, anyway - have that rather worrying tendency to crane our necks at car crashes as we dribble past them on the motorway, hoping/not hoping to catch sight of a body. It's not an attractive instinct, but it is understandable; a kind of fascination with human frailty combined with sheer horror, I would say. And that's fine.
What isn't fine is when one takes this suspect instinct and gorges it on the misery and pain of others. I am speaking, of course, of the publishing phenomenon that is the Tragic Life Story. At first these type of books did well because they were well-written, interesting and emphasised the triumph of the human being over horrible and disturbing adversity.
I think a list of some of the titles of the modern crop of Tragic Life Stories illustrates what has happened now.
Now, I assume the poor victims who write these books achieve some kind of catharsis out of them, as well as the promise of some pennies. Calling your book Please, Daddy, No seems a strange way, to me, to deal with the abuse one has suffered. But, really, what do I know? I've never been through the terrible things the author has been through and it would be unfair and stupid to criticize him or her for dealing with their issues in this way.
What concerns me is the many, many, many people who buy these books. Glancing at a car crash is all very well, but these people are stopping the car, running over to the crumpled vehicle and jamming their faces into the mangled guts of the unfortunate driver. Seriously, what kind of person buys a book called When Daddy Comes Home? What are they thinking?
"Ooh! This one's definitely got a lot of incest and abuse in it. I might read it twice!"
It's horrible and it's wrong and it's strange and it's sick and we'd all be going to hell if there was one which there isn't.
But I'm going to Ecuador. And, surely, they only write magic realism over there.
Goodbye UK internets.
I'm done.
No more Daily Mails. No more lottery. No more scratchcards. No more wincing as someone buys Psychic News and rips into it as if - well, as if their life depended on it. No more staring in bemused fascination at Chat magazine, who have felt it necessary, with characteristic helpfulness, to furnish the headline "Rapist gave me HIV" with the explanatory legend "Tragic!". Just in case you thought it was a humour piece.
No more smiling at sweet little children only to then accidentally jump-cut the smile to their conspicuously unsweet mothers; paper-skinned, perma-snarled, terrifyingly young creatures from very bad dreams, with faces that one can obtain oneself by adhering to the following steps.
1. Buy Cosmopolitan.
2. Cut out a model's face from an advert in Cosmopolitan.
3. Colour in the model's face with old watercolours and dying pencils.
4. Smash the model's face into your own repeatedly in a desperate attempt at emulation.
If exclamation marks were something I indulged in, I would fill up the whole of the internets with them at this point.
And so it ends.
Observation the last: The Human Creature Is A Shameless Voyeur
We all - or the vast majority of us, anyway - have that rather worrying tendency to crane our necks at car crashes as we dribble past them on the motorway, hoping/not hoping to catch sight of a body. It's not an attractive instinct, but it is understandable; a kind of fascination with human frailty combined with sheer horror, I would say. And that's fine.
What isn't fine is when one takes this suspect instinct and gorges it on the misery and pain of others. I am speaking, of course, of the publishing phenomenon that is the Tragic Life Story. At first these type of books did well because they were well-written, interesting and emphasised the triumph of the human being over horrible and disturbing adversity.
I think a list of some of the titles of the modern crop of Tragic Life Stories illustrates what has happened now.
- Please Let It Stop
- The Family Friend
- Dance For Your Daddy
- Daddy's Little Girl
- Tears at Bedtime
- Daddy's Little Earner
- Tell Me Why, Mummy
- When Daddy Comes Home
- Please, Daddy, No
Now, I assume the poor victims who write these books achieve some kind of catharsis out of them, as well as the promise of some pennies. Calling your book Please, Daddy, No seems a strange way, to me, to deal with the abuse one has suffered. But, really, what do I know? I've never been through the terrible things the author has been through and it would be unfair and stupid to criticize him or her for dealing with their issues in this way.
What concerns me is the many, many, many people who buy these books. Glancing at a car crash is all very well, but these people are stopping the car, running over to the crumpled vehicle and jamming their faces into the mangled guts of the unfortunate driver. Seriously, what kind of person buys a book called When Daddy Comes Home? What are they thinking?
"Ooh! This one's definitely got a lot of incest and abuse in it. I might read it twice!"
It's horrible and it's wrong and it's strange and it's sick and we'd all be going to hell if there was one which there isn't.
But I'm going to Ecuador. And, surely, they only write magic realism over there.
Goodbye UK internets.
Friday, 15 February 2008
The words are coming out all weird
Last week I worked 64 hours. No words can adequately describe the vacuous stupor I had regressed to by the time Saturday - my only day off - rolled around. As a Sales Assistant, you basically act as an automaton, spewing out a few set phrases while handling the cash and dying inside. It's not challenging work, to say the least, but, as I discovered, once you do it for ten hours a day, things quickly start to go wrong.
What happens is that those mechanical sentences that you blurt out to customer after customer, day after day, start to become interchangeable. Already devoid of meaning due to endless repetition, they begin to arbitrarily swap places. So instead of saying "Do you want a bag?" to the woman who has loaded herself up with trash mags and paid, you shriek out, "No problem". Then, disturbed by her confused gaze, numbly aware that you have done something wrong but unsure what, you yelp, "Good morning!". Which you've already said. Twice. And it's the afternoon. The woman scuttles off, befuddled and bagless. Meanwhile, you're barking "Bye! Take it easy!" to the businessman who's just sidled up to the counter to buy cigarettes.
Semantics no longer apply to the overworked retail pleb.
It has thus been a very easy ride this week, with a much more piddly and sensible 25 hours spent acting as conduit between consumer and hate-rag. What's more, refreshed after last week's brain burnout, I have been able to finalise my anthropological study of the shopping human.
Observation the third: The Human Creature Is Fervently, Relentlessly, Unwaveringly Solipsistic
The thing about humans is they assume that you care. They really do. They assume you care, they assume you remember them, and they assume you want to engage them in a discussion. What they do not understand is that, to you, the zombified lackey, they are just a stack of dull colours conveyor-belting past the desk, droning and cluttering coins and cards. There are no individuals from the perspective of the Sales Assistant; and the human desperately needs to learn this before, driven over the edge by some jovial Telegraph reader's account of his scout days, a pleb attacks their own face with a stapler while screaming about the lack of a Darwinian imperative to empathise with humans not in one's social circle. I reckon I could last about two more weeks before I'd do it.
Observation the fourth: The Human Creature Is Afflicted With Bizarre Paranoia
This one actually does strike me as quite revealing. About one in every seven or eight customers will demand their receipt, justifying the need specifically as "just in case I get stopped and I've got no proof that I've bought it". For funsies, I like to pretend sometimes that I've thrown the receipt away by accident, just to witness the look of sheer horror that sweeps through the faces of those - young and old, male and female - who presumably envisage a burly policeman tapping on their shoulder and growling, "Have you got a receipt for that chocolate bar? NO? You're fucking nicked then, my beauty!"
When has this ever, ever, ever happened? What empirical evidence are this huge demographic working from that they feel there is a genuine risk of being collared for the lack of a receipt? Humans. There's CCTV cameras in the store; there's CCTV cameras on the high-street outside; there's probably CCTV cameras on almost every road you walked through to get here. If needs be, they can trace your properly purchased, receiptless 68p magazine through the whole town. You're not going to go to jail, but your every movement has been tracked. Your worrying, I feel, would be vastly better spent on this fact.
Observation the fifth: The Human Creature Is A Slave To The Gift Card
I have never understood why humans buy gift cards. Never have, never will. For what other almost instantly discarded product are sensible people prepared to stump up £5? Five pounds! For a piece of paper which is looked at for a few seconds, and then placed away and forgotten forever. In the run up to Valentine's day, it got worse: eight, nine, ten quid spent on cards with terrible, saccharine poems and big shiny red hearts. I'm sorry. But I really feel this is worthy of an italicised rant. This is what I have wanted to say to around 500 people over the last couple of weeks:
Hello fool. Do you realise you could buy three second-hand books for that price at the Oxfam shop down the road? You could also write your partner a letter expressing how YOU feel, goddammit, instead of conveying your affections through this fiscally hideous, prosodically toxic, folding bit of tree. Where's your god damn originality? You're supposed to be in love, for christ's sake. Buy a god damn book - at a third of the price - and write a message on the title page. Stop being such a passive, ovine lummox. Just think, your spouse'll flick through the book in twenty years, long after they've left you, and might get a rueful smile out of it. "How things change," they might reflect. "Isn't it interesting how ephemeral amorousness can be?" they might ask their younger, newer, betterer-than-you partner.
My final - and only 100% serious - observation on the human creature, gleaned from my time in the retail sector, I shall write a couple of days before I fly to Ecuador on the 22nd.
This time next week I'll be 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.
What happens is that those mechanical sentences that you blurt out to customer after customer, day after day, start to become interchangeable. Already devoid of meaning due to endless repetition, they begin to arbitrarily swap places. So instead of saying "Do you want a bag?" to the woman who has loaded herself up with trash mags and paid, you shriek out, "No problem". Then, disturbed by her confused gaze, numbly aware that you have done something wrong but unsure what, you yelp, "Good morning!". Which you've already said. Twice. And it's the afternoon. The woman scuttles off, befuddled and bagless. Meanwhile, you're barking "Bye! Take it easy!" to the businessman who's just sidled up to the counter to buy cigarettes.
Semantics no longer apply to the overworked retail pleb.
It has thus been a very easy ride this week, with a much more piddly and sensible 25 hours spent acting as conduit between consumer and hate-rag. What's more, refreshed after last week's brain burnout, I have been able to finalise my anthropological study of the shopping human.
Observation the third: The Human Creature Is Fervently, Relentlessly, Unwaveringly Solipsistic
The thing about humans is they assume that you care. They really do. They assume you care, they assume you remember them, and they assume you want to engage them in a discussion. What they do not understand is that, to you, the zombified lackey, they are just a stack of dull colours conveyor-belting past the desk, droning and cluttering coins and cards. There are no individuals from the perspective of the Sales Assistant; and the human desperately needs to learn this before, driven over the edge by some jovial Telegraph reader's account of his scout days, a pleb attacks their own face with a stapler while screaming about the lack of a Darwinian imperative to empathise with humans not in one's social circle. I reckon I could last about two more weeks before I'd do it.
Observation the fourth: The Human Creature Is Afflicted With Bizarre Paranoia
This one actually does strike me as quite revealing. About one in every seven or eight customers will demand their receipt, justifying the need specifically as "just in case I get stopped and I've got no proof that I've bought it". For funsies, I like to pretend sometimes that I've thrown the receipt away by accident, just to witness the look of sheer horror that sweeps through the faces of those - young and old, male and female - who presumably envisage a burly policeman tapping on their shoulder and growling, "Have you got a receipt for that chocolate bar? NO? You're fucking nicked then, my beauty!"
When has this ever, ever, ever happened? What empirical evidence are this huge demographic working from that they feel there is a genuine risk of being collared for the lack of a receipt? Humans. There's CCTV cameras in the store; there's CCTV cameras on the high-street outside; there's probably CCTV cameras on almost every road you walked through to get here. If needs be, they can trace your properly purchased, receiptless 68p magazine through the whole town. You're not going to go to jail, but your every movement has been tracked. Your worrying, I feel, would be vastly better spent on this fact.
Observation the fifth: The Human Creature Is A Slave To The Gift Card
I have never understood why humans buy gift cards. Never have, never will. For what other almost instantly discarded product are sensible people prepared to stump up £5? Five pounds! For a piece of paper which is looked at for a few seconds, and then placed away and forgotten forever. In the run up to Valentine's day, it got worse: eight, nine, ten quid spent on cards with terrible, saccharine poems and big shiny red hearts. I'm sorry. But I really feel this is worthy of an italicised rant. This is what I have wanted to say to around 500 people over the last couple of weeks:
Hello fool. Do you realise you could buy three second-hand books for that price at the Oxfam shop down the road? You could also write your partner a letter expressing how YOU feel, goddammit, instead of conveying your affections through this fiscally hideous, prosodically toxic, folding bit of tree. Where's your god damn originality? You're supposed to be in love, for christ's sake. Buy a god damn book - at a third of the price - and write a message on the title page. Stop being such a passive, ovine lummox. Just think, your spouse'll flick through the book in twenty years, long after they've left you, and might get a rueful smile out of it. "How things change," they might reflect. "Isn't it interesting how ephemeral amorousness can be?" they might ask their younger, newer, betterer-than-you partner.
My final - and only 100% serious - observation on the human creature, gleaned from my time in the retail sector, I shall write a couple of days before I fly to Ecuador on the 22nd.
This time next week I'll be 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.
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