¡¡¡Yo soy materialista!!! (#1)

I like my watch because it is plain and it is functional. I bought it at Mercado Central, Sucre with Sarah. I had needed a watch for weeks. It could sound insignificant but when you travel you actually require one. Mobile phones or the Microsoft clock do not feature in the travelling life.

To get this task, which I had been avoiding, out of the way we stopped at the first stall we found. We browsed the selection. Kitsch has always been a distraction; maybe a Barney the Dinosaur watch would be a goer? In the end there were only two legitimate contenders. Both plain. I went with the flatter one. Not slender like a chicks watch, or my dad would wear, but compact (in my mind at least).

The first thing I noticed about the watch was the seconds counter takes up half of the screen. This “function” was very distracting and seemed highly impractical. A watch is to tell the hour last time I checked. But I knew we could change that; Sarah and I worked at it for hours. Unfortunately our efforts went unrewarded. The big seconds - relentlessly ticking away - were here to stay.

A couple of days later I was surprised to find that I was becoming quite affectionate toward the big numbers. Out the corner of my eye I now have a counter that cost 25 Bolivianos. Out the corner of my eye I see my life ticking by second-after-second. It is my life evaporating in a way not dissimilar to the “sands in the hour glass” as described at the start of Days of Our Lives. I am getting more than my money’s worth with this one, clearly.