Speak out loud!!

I am not a clever guy (I even misspelled clever in this sentence, but the corrector helped me out), so I'm sure I don't have any brilliant solution for the world. I am, however, in this process of awareness of how much of the things in which my life relies, are lies: money, politics... But the fact that I don't have any actual solution shouldn't prevent that I act to say what I don't see right. I hope a smarter person will find out some solutions, maybe they are my acts which help this able one to become aware of the problems.

This is why, in the next elections I will wander the streets of wherever I'm at and write over each and every poster with politicians in it: "everything is a lie". A small action for a great purpose.

The price of the money...

...is a lie!!

Canteen of a public university in Germany, supposed to have lower prices for students:
1/2 chicken + fried chips + 20 cl coke: more than 6€, plus the chicken is row, the chips are cold, the coke is warm and any of the things tastes disgracefully (even the coke).

Turkish guy in the corner:
1/2 chicken + fried chips + 50 cl coke: less than 5€, plus coke is cold, chips have been done right now, chicken is completely cooked; everything tastes wonderful.

Further examples:

- I've lost my wallet so I need to cancel my card at the bank. This has a fee of 15€... I wonder what do I pay for. The girl at the bank presses a button: old card blocked + 15€ gone from my account. If I find my old card, it can be unblocked again without having to issue a new card. This means: I didn't pay the 15€ fee for issuing a new card, I payed them for the girl to press the "block" button. Same operation with a Spanish card is free, which makes me wonder how harder it is to press the computer "block card" key in a German computer than in a Spanish one.

- I've lost my wallet so I need a new student card. This has a fee of 16€... I wonder what do I pay for. By the way, the university is a public one and it's supposed to have popular prices. 16€ is cheap compared to... a new laptop, e.g. But it's a huge difference compared to the actual cost of issuing a student card. I wonder if the aims of the public university is to provide services to the people or to make money as any other private university does... Public universities just target a population sector which can't be targeted by private university. But the university itself seems to be a lie.

- I need to send a fax from Berlin to Spain. Doing some Google-Re-Search you can find the price for sending a fax can be as low as 10 cents a page. They charge me 1€/page in the place under my house, and an extra € because it's going to Spain. So random...

And so on and so forth...

Money is a lie. The price of money is a lie set almost by random. What more proofs are needed?? What's the supply and demand law justifying any of the prices above? It's just a stochastic game of a few obscene people.

My answer: boycott the money!!

Regret

It was and is quite trendy for many people to say that they don't regret anything. The mantra is that what happened to you is what made you what you are, and thus you should regret nothing.

Here my point: regret is a human feeling, like hunger or thirst, you can't control it. I'm quite proud to say that I regret things, a lot of things, indeed, because I'm human and it's human to regret as it's human to make mistakes that you'll later regret. Now, if you wish, you can lie and tell yourself the same old story, that you don't regret a single thing. But, tell the truth: that very lame moment of your childhood, teen-years, whatever. That moment when you though you'd better be at home sleeping... yeah, the feeling you get recalling this, this is regret. And you can't control this.

If you want, you can tell: OK, I regret I've say/done this pretty lame thing... but it made me who I am and I wouldn't change it now, for changing that little bit could be a great deal in the configuration of my personality. This is much more honest than the cool statement about not regretting anything: recognizing that some things which provoke regret in you are also a part of yourself.

I regret. And there are many things that I would change.

Luíño 2.0

I'm uploading my CV in the web: http://lf-seoane.wikidot.com/

This is gonna be fun :D

Trap for Mosquitos

Thanks to my friend Javi, currently researching somewhere in the middle of Finland.

I forgot to close the windows when I went out today, so when I came back my house was filled with mosquitos among other light-chasers. Ever happened to you? Now I can't sleep in the whole night because of them.. shit. So here's the trick. You put switch off the lights on your room, switch them on on the hall or whatever is next to your room and left the door open. You go back to the laptop and watch a movie for a while. Then close the door and switch the other light off. You've gotten a room free of mosquitos for a night...

Yeah, trivial... It took me 19 years before Javi told me... I didn't get to figure it out on my own...

To steal a book.

If everything works fine, in a few months I may be tackling some amazing projects which may also require some money. I mean, money enough to live for a while without any income. So it's clear that I have to spare some €€€. Straightforward actions: cheaper rum (though my beloved 'Admiral Vernon' is, if not the cheapest, quite close to it), cheaper activities... cheaper everything.

The other day I was to buy some books in this book trade fair of my home city (A Coruña). It's a problem for me every year if go to there because I want to buy a lot of stuff. And this year, the only 15 days that I've spent in my home city since January are exactly the days with this book trade fair... And there I was staring at that Complete Tales of Pushkin (here for a wikipedia link to Pushkin), or halting myself not to buy Neil Gaiman's Sandman (here for wiki)... The praises were way too large. In that moment I thought that the successive governments were not able to provide access to the culture for everyone, and I also though that if I wanted to spare I would have to choose between reading or eating... and even so, I ended up with two books from this great Bolaño guy whom I love so much: The Savage Detectives: A Novel [wiki] (which I commented the day before yesterday and which I'll comment again soon) and Putas Asesinas (Spanish Edition) (Killer whores, a small book with short stories and from which, it seems, there's no English translation yet... not even a wiki).

But then, now and again, the Providence!! It seems Providence likes me :) I began with the savage detectives. There, it's described (among a huge bunch of things) how a guy that we might think of as an alter ego from Bolaño steals books from libraries in Mexico DF. Great: there my way. I've decided it, and I'll do it. Now and on, first of all, I'll try to steal the book.

One hundred and thirty seven pages...

Few days ago I read that the first 100 pages of The savage detectives are part of the greatest of the literature in Castilian (Spanish) language... I didn't believe it. I was right. At least with the edition of the book that I have got. They are one hundred and thirty seven pages.

The Savage Detectives: A Novel