I sit in my couch beneath my puppy, whom I am currently using as a heater. She snores, but well, life isn’t perfect. It’s 6 degrees Celsius in Buenos Aires today. In my small hometown by the beach, it’s snowing, which is interesting because it never snows there. Global Warming? What Global Warming?
It’s June 6, 2012, and sixty-eight years ago today 160.000 Canadian, British and North American troops disembarked in a joint amphibious attack in a beach in Normandy.
The AFIP or Administracion Federal de Ingresos Publicos (Federal public revenue administration) has been rather off its admittedly already weak rocker and on the last few weeks has begun to do the most bizarre sort of questions when you request to buy foreign money.
Request? yes. In Argentina, one does not simply walk into an exchange office and change pesos for dollars. Not anymore. Now you have to go through the AFIP, submit data for it to be analyzed and wait for them to tell you how many dollars you can buy.
This isn’t entirely insane. It makes sense that they analyze how much money you make on a monthly basis and then correlate that to the amount of money you want to change into dollars. If you earn 5.000 pesos a month (barely enough to live comfortably), how come you have 20.000 pesos to change into dollars? It avoids the lamentably awkward situation of some poor AFIP clerk having to keep a straight face while realizing he’s letting some mobster launder his money. And through a federal entity no less.
I have successfully passed the flue on to my sister, thus ridding myself of, if not the biggest, certainly the most annoying of my woes. My dog saw fit to wake me this morning by landing on my chest with all four paws like a goat, which signals she, too, is feeling better.
I woke up this morning pretty sick.
It’s a horrible day out, and not even my puppy is interested in getting out of bed, so I dragged myself, still in my pajamas, to my living room, where I fully intended to lay on my couch under a blanket bemoaning my woes. And sipping hot tea.
This, as you can probably imagine, got old fast. So I got my laptop, and turned on the TV, and decided to give the day up as lost and devote myself to writing this novel I’m struggling with.
I turned the TV to the news channel. What the news channel at that moment in time saw necessary to inform me of was this new series they have, which is called Another Passion. As far as I can tell Another Passion is dedicated to those interested in futbol, or football for the Brits, or soccer for the US citizens, and women’s butts. This appears to be the gist of it.
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