ANDES DANDY

Have you ever felt like a specific action or event could be a metaphor for your entire life or wherever you are in life at the moment? ( How you got to Memphis - if you will)  Sunday morning, I woke up craving hard-boiled eggs and toast. (Sometimes I get these cravings, much like a pregnant woman, and I will spend an hour searching for it in stores and preparing it.) I got some nice rolls at a bakery and returned home to boil the eggs. I had never boiled an egg before, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I placed three eggs in a pot with some water and set the pot on the stove. In the back of my head I seemed to have remembered that eggs need ten minutes, so I set the timer on my phone and went to the living room to read.  When my phone rang, I went to the kitchen, took the eggs out of the water and put them into cold water, just like I saw my father do it numerous times before. I left them to cool down for about three minutes, during which I cut the rolls in half, butt

“Let’s go and wash the car” Erato said, with fake enthusiasm. So we did. We got in and went to the edge of town to a car wash, where hoses were installed every three meters, and buckets and brushes provided by the company. Erato started by hosing the car off, meanwhile I watched from a relative distance. “Do you want me to help?” I asked. “Nah, you wouldn’t be able to do a good job, so just keep me company and I’ll wash the car.” I shrugged and continued conversing with her. After a while I asked again, for hosing the car off every two minutes with high pressured water seemed like fun. She didn’t let me again. The next time she wanted to use the water, I used the phrase “can I please”. Before I knew it I was happily doing what she was told by her mother to do. Only once I had the vacuum cleaner’s hose in my hands did I realize that she Tom Sawyered me. She made me think of her chore as a privileged way of spending one’s afternoon. Well played Erato. Well played.

“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…” I’m not saying that having no internet in my apartment has been the best thing that has happened to me in Ecuador, because my Latina girlfriend would kill me, but it is most certainly in the top ten. I am part of the generation which can’t remember a time when the internet wasn’t around.  When I was a little boy, my parents had dial-up internet. Then, as we moved to our new apartment and I turned eleven, we got proper cable internet. And by the time I got my first smart phone, we had Wi-Fi installed throughout the house. When I went to high school, some of my teachers started using programs like Quizlet, or posted our homework on a blog. As the world of the internet grew, my generation got more and more attached to it, with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and all the others slowly consuming all of our time. We talked without speaking, we heard without listening, and listened to songs that voices never share