El pais semanal psicologia no tengo tiempo

Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies: everything you wanted.

Ana María Matute has spent eight almost uninterrupted months in the hospital. She has glass bones, as she herself explains, and is already recovering, although the ravages of the ailments that have kept her away from her home and from literature, if this second were possible, are evident. She uses a crutch to walk and is thinner and smaller than I had imagined. It has been difficult for her to be ready at noon. She claims she is still clumsy and sleepy at that hour because she stays up so late reading. “What else was I going to do?” she wonders aloud with a comical grimace.

It seemed to me that out there anything could pop up. And so it does. The goblins, moreover, lie quietly in the embers. They play with the rats. They are neither bad nor good. Their nature is like that. They like to play pranks, but they like to play practical jokes on humans. They like that very much. And there are all kinds. For example, when a man gets drunk he can see a goblin. And if he drinks he can become visible to humans; too visible to humans. Because that’s the point at which they look alike, when they are drunk.

The value of handmade

Well, there was a famous saying applied to fine dining restaurants: “Everything on the bill, nothing on the plate”… I’ll tell you where we come from! There are people who tell us: “There is no cutlery”, “you didn’t put bread”, “there is no order on the plates”, “there are no desserts”, “why do you eat with your hands”.

But in the book Mugaritz. Puntos de fuga, you say that now you want to give the customer “a friendlier experience. What is that? Are you tired of -as you say- touching the…? It’s an approach to the customer’s perception.

And when they crunch you? Don’t tell me you’re mentally so prepared that it doesn’t affect you. I’m not. Me in the restaurant, or when I go on stage at a food festival, I have to give a sense of security, but I’m shitting myself. And I get dignified, and I get pissed off, and sometimes I get physically awful, I wake up at five in the morning and wake up… I’m like a dog that’s been beaten up. Deep down, mine is an exercise in fear. What happens is that I am defending the work of many people who work and have worked with me…, and I cannot fail.

The nazca culture in 5 minutes

In spite of everything, companies are also criticized: lack of technological independence, heavy indebtedness, lack of women in management positions, failure to comply with some principles of civil action of responsibility to which they often appeal, monopolistic or anti-competitive actions, scarce presence in China and India with few exceptions, doubts about the legitimacy of some actions in Third World countries… Many people do not even hesitate to label them as a reflection of the most exacerbated capitalism.

Puig can probably boast that the crisis has hardly had any effect on him. But it has not. The Puig family likes to be discreet, although they recognize that the company “went through its own crisis in 2004, which forced us to revise our strategy in depth and focus on innovation”. They are revered at international conventions and catwalks, but they like to keep a low media profile. However, reality gives them away. They have grown from a global market share of 3.5% in 2005 to 6.2% in 2009, with plans to reach between 8% and 10% in the near future and to consolidate their position against giants such as L’Oréal, Channel, Procter, Coty and Estée Lauder.

Flow diagram

That is to say: we live as if we did not have. We live seeing that everything has, pretending that it does not: facing the end -our end- we only know how to pretend that it will not come. Because there is nothing more terrifying than the end, there is nothing we forget so much. But there is also the end we pursue, and the doubt: have we reached the end, or did we not reach it? Did we reach it or did we not reach it?

We never desired an end so much: we never did so much, resigned so much, endured so much to reach it; we never expected an end so much as in all these months in which we lived something we had never lived before. We confined ourselves to flee from the definitive end. The end of so much effort was -we know- the end of the pandemic, and now we pretend it has already arrived. But we do not know: we are not sure. It is cruel not to be sure: to believe that it is, to doubt if it is not. In horror literature there are no more terrifying characters than those who have already come to an end and yet continue: zombies, vampires, the various undead. The pandemic could be one of these: if the living was brutal, the zombie would become tremendous.