Penny Post #14: Spain

Thank you Steve Jobs, I guess?

I realized that I forgot my AirPods when I sat down to write this essay. I forgot my AirPods, and suddenly I felt as if I could not write at all. To have my ears plugged with noise other than the immediate space around me is apparently essential to great (ahem, okay, maybe halfway decent) writing. Without AirPods, not a single word would find its way onto the page.

Thankfully, my boyfriend lent me his 2nd Generation AirPods Pro. His AirPods are unlike mine; they offer active noise cancelling which is perhaps the most eerily penetrative sensation offered by any Apple products (I haven’t tried Vision Pro yet). Immediately upon plugging them into my ears, the world fell away. I couldn’t even hear my boyfriend’s video game heckling just five feet away. These AirPods must be miraculous.

Nothing else exists beyond the noise in my head. We plug our ears with a variety of gear - from airpods to earbuds to headphones to wax - to separate ourselves from our immediate reality. It is a lovely escape, where we can melt into the melodies of Taylor, the nostalgia of Noah, or the melancholy of Phoebe. It is also a mechanism of focus. Without the constant auditory distractions that our world offers, we can pivot elsewhere. Writing is where I go beyond and the vehicle by which I arrive at the beyond is a not-so-delicious looking apple that someone already took a bite out of.

Photo by Bangyu Wang on Unsplash

I’m reminded of my time in Spain. I studied abroad in Spain during the spring semester of Junior year. There was no doubt that my experience studying abroad presented its fair share of challenges, most of which I don’t wish to relive. Over a year later, however, and I find I miss how insular Spain was. By insular, I don’t mean ignorant or uninterested, I mean inward-looking and narrow. Much of Spain’s insularity was the product of living in a language of which I was only beginning to learn.

Living in a country that communicated, moved, and functioned in a language other than my own meant more opportunity to retreat inwards. It was not unlike my boyfriend’s 2nd generation AirPod Pros that cancel out all the noise of the world around me. I was not burdened by auditory distraction because I could not keep up with the pace of native-spanish speakers anyway. Half the time, I tuned it all out. Opportunities to interpret the world in English became fewer and fewer as the semester continued. Most of my conversations were in Spanish - in school, at home, and (on the rare occasion) during a weekend getaway. The English had no escape, it was trapped inside my head. It must’ve gotten pretty crowded up there because there was such a need to interpret my shifting world at the time. Despite the crowdedness in my head, my English prospered. In fact, it grew so abundant that the only place to put it was on several hundred note files which crowd my other apple products to this day. I’ve never written more English than I did while living in a Spanish-speaking country. The irony is not lost on me.

This is not to discredit my nearly-successful acquisition of the language, where I could have fluent conversations with my host family at the end of my three months there. Most curiously, my English became stronger as my Spanish did. It is interesting how languages work that way. Although different in syntax & significance, the acquisition of one language favored the strengthening of another. I wrote my best English essay to date after spending three months studying Spanish. Huh.

I’ll leave you to ponder this thought as I recommit to my Spanish not from my wonderfully kind host family nor extremely patient Spanish professors, but from a trusted little owl named Duo.

Photo by ilgmyzin on Unsplash

Saludos cordiales,

Kiera