I met an American who’s been in Cuba. I shy away from getting a Cuban stamp on a US passport. The convo started about what “Guantanamera” (the song) meant. He says, “It is easy to get there, if you go to Panama first. They stamp your passport there and not in Cuba.”
Guantanamera is about a woman street vendor who is happy and dances all the time and her movements cause others to want to dance. This is from the horse’s mouth, apparently only Cuban people truly understand the song. So I’ve heard.He describes the place [Cuba] as like the 1950’s, you can get any woman for $1.00. (Although he said 10 cents, it must lose something [in the translation].) Further, he reports [that] restaurants run out of private houses are big business. People from Spain, Portugal and “even Puerto Rico” are millionaires in this business. I’ll think about it, but it sounds intricate [the travel part] and doesn’t mesh with my experience that US passport officials are loathsome creatures best left knowing nothing, their natural state.
The computer dude at work is also looking for a place [we had considered sharing an apartment] but A) he’s from work [so I’d see him all day and again at home] and B) he is too young (30) to understand full costs which is what I charge when I am wronged [when you help yourself to my property] and which always happens because I operate at a surplus [I have things others seem to need once they learn I have them]. Remember Ken, who horrified by my bill for $114.00 to replace the can of WD-40 he “liberated”.
Actually, he would have gotten away with it except he said exactly the wrong thing – that I could pick up a can; the store was just down the road. [He should have said he would go himself.] He learned about opportunity costs, time costs, replacement costs, collateral and contingent damages costs, overhead, penalty, distribution, pain and suffering, rescheduling costs, materials costs, profit replacement and depreciation, and a whopping $20 consultation fee to set it all up. Now its $114.00.
Elaboration: Ken, a nice but permanently peasant-minded individual, lacked the education to process this amount of information. Opportunity costs especially baffled him, that he must pay me for making arrangements to go get the product because I can prove I would normally use that same time to do something where I made or saved money that was lost when I had to modify my situation on his behalf. He may have glimpsed the point, but like most of his sort, could not bear to mentally go there.
