The whole process of phone cards in Trinidad is symbolic of something far greater than the simple ability to call down the road. In the states i have a phone plan, I pay it monthly, I have an agreement with the phone company to be a customer and they agree to keep my service running 24/7. this involves complicated legal contracts that bind me to them for two or more years and can be slightly problematic when they dont provide the quality of service I am expecting, But at the end of the day, my phone calls out when i need it to and i dont really have to pay that much attention to it. Here however, I need to continuously buy phone cards, running from one to the next, discovering, as I have, late at night, that I have run through all of my minutes and still need to make calls but unable to obtain more minutes. It is such a tenuous agreement, no long term security, no cushy convenience of a once a month bill. It is momentary, living in this minute rather than the next, no future plan, simply a call, right here, right now.
It is the same concept that "liming" follows: what I am doing right here, right now, supersedes everything else in importance. It is a moment to moment experience, more raw and in touch but also more haphazard, pieced together.
Given this analysis of phone card use as a small replica of society as a whole, I think they will play some role in the final product, small and insignificant, used up, useless, but somehow added together to mean something more. Thats the whole idea, right?
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