Friday, July 22, 2005

La Hora Chapina

Philosophers speak of phenomenological time and cosmological time, but the situation in our home is a tad more complicated: we have bedroom time, living room time, kitchen time etc.

Bedroom time for instance runs roughly ten minutes ahead of TV time. In fact not a single member of the heterogenous collection of time-keeping devices that V maintains around the flat has been set to follow TV Time. Yet she knows exactly how fast or slow each of them is in relation to it.

This convulted, self-referential time-keeping system sustains a well-honed strategy for arriving consistently late at all locations outside of its compass...or better still, not at all - Hora Chapina.

Don't ever let anyone convince you that Guatemalans have a 'relaxed' attitude to time! Their ancestors were Maya.

Televisions, telephones? Let's not go there.

No comments: