Ode to the news

The kitchen of the apartment I used to live in Venezuela is a quite cozy, small place. With yellowy tiles and formic top, there is not much to write about it: a single-doored fridge, four stoves, three knocked-down chairs and a table fixed on the wall. Just a normal kitchen.

Yet, upon visiting other houses in other places I found out that there was, indeed, something quite extravagant about my kitchen: a 32" TV situated right above the sink, looking down in an angle midways between security camera and church gargoyle.

Furniture is something rarely discussed outside of IKEA. The furnishing of the house you grow up into is something you find so natural that you don’t even notice it most times: its daily applications rarely exceed that of a mere backdrop. Those house appliances and fittings are just there, gazing quitely upon your growth with an endirely indifferente gape. This is, I assume, the reason why it is so shocking to find out something so taken for granted to be so eccentric.

The black rectangle hovering over the sink of my kitchen was always there, rhapsodizing about UN resolutions and bearing bad news about some law now forgotten somewhere in the cabinet of a corrupt politician. Ever since before I was born, the TV was there: a logical sister of the TVs in other rooms of the apartment. No matter how old and knocked down they were, they had to be there.

We might have never had a dishwasher, but we needed a TV. Several of them.

Nothing would ever surprise me in the streets because everything was already narrated from the TV. Newsflashes, accounts and press conferences were always looking at me from above and beyond, with the white letters over a black background of CNN in Spanish glistering over my eyes and, as I soon came to know, my memories.

The news were so present in my life I grew incredibly close to them. By the age of ten, I already knew who Christiane Amanpour was and had already learned about James Foley’s beheading somewhere in Syria. I had already woken up in the middle of the night sweating and shivering in fear because I dreamed of terrorists taking over my school just like Boko Haram did in Chibok in 2014.

The news were so present in my life I grew a fan of them. When I was in fifth grade, in around 2017, me and my friends established a “news broadcasting service” in my school that sought, amongst other aims, to act as a comptroller agent of measures taken my the school. The overseeing function of thews was, for me, crucial: something as essential as logical as having a TV in your kitchen.

Growing up in the Venezuela of the 2010s was, definitely, an interesting quest. As social media grew larger and government-set media controls grew tighter, my day to day was signed by watching my parents try and accesss information in different ways every day. It is very likely that, for each radio station closed down, ten new Twitter accounts of media-aware citizens were created. Information always found its way.

The good part is that it did. The bad part is that it did. As we made ourselves more and more aware of what was going on around us, we started to forget what was happening inside ourselves. News required such a big effort to be accessed that we focused all of our energies in doing so, leaving us as informed as drained.

We had no other option. My mother had to wake up every day as early as possible to browse an extended array of social media platforms just to look out for any event, be it a blocked road or a political meltdown, that might impede my from going safely to school.

Most times, this safety-aware overconnection worked: after all, nothing overtly serious ever happened to me or my family. Sometimes, it did not: the smell of tear gas in the hallways of my school was not unheard of and there were always several contingency plans in case i would be left stranded somewhere.

The plans were not simple. They involved not only friends, but friends of friends and provisional allies of the like that were not necessarily the most reliable ones. Yet, all the plans that my family came up with had one essential flaw: there was no way of informing me of what had happened.

And, for me, information was as essential as safety. Even though I might not have had the maturity necessary to properly understand what was going on, I had the need to. Understanding my surroundings could only be achieved through news.

The news that I grow up being denied access to. In the picture that heads this article, I am standing next to a traffic barrier with the letters “RCTV” on it, meaning Radio Caracas Televisión. Once Venezuela’s biggest broadcasting company, it was closed down in 2007 after much government-spearheaded efforts to limit its contents.

The photograph was taken a few days after it closed down. It never opened again, but the struggle for information would not end there.

It would keep staring down at me, glaring and angling over myself with the persistance and ominosity of a TV in the kitchen of a normal apartment.

Debunking the idea of the youth as the other

 One very interesting word that we have in our unique Venezuelan variety of Spanish is coroto. As the story goes, it came into popular use during one of the many dictatorships we have lived through when the big guy of the time, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, repeatedly asked his servants to be careful with one of his favourite paintings. ¡Cuidado con el Corot! -he said. Be careful with the Corot!

He was referring to the paintings of Camille Corot he had brought back from France upon request of his wife, Ana Teresa Ibarra. The servants, of course, had no clue who Camille Corot was: to their eyes, it was just another toy for the dictator. It could have been a Da Vinci or a Rembrandt, but for them it was just another thing.

As so, the word Corot was absorbed into the popular vocabulary as coroto and means, literally, thing. When Guzmán Blanco referred to the Corot instead of the painting, it was supposed to emphasize its extreme value. When he repeated it so much, it had the opposite effect.

As some sort of collective semantic satiation, repeating a word many times with any purpose will just result in its complete loss of meaning. And I am afraid that one of the words that are a victim of this reality is one that precissely should be treated with extreme care: youth.

As per the Cambridge dictionary, it is “the period of your life when you are young, or the state of being young”. As per our daily use, it is a group, an entity and an abstraction of everything born after ourselves. Youth is something that encompasses so much these days that, in the end, it means nothing.

It is not a period or a state anymore. It is something that decides on wallets, votes and, most importantly, seems to be tasked with changing the world. It ranges from any age to any age and the only criteria for something to be considered youth seems to be being different.

Guzmán Blanco’s Corot was a definite thing until it ceased to be so and became just a coroto, another thing. Youth was a definite thing until it became just an other, somewhere to shift the blame to.

It is clear that youth is a period in life where many special things happen: it is not only our physical peak, but also a moment where we are specially open to new ideas and willing to change. The reason why most of the people who drove the Beatles to stardom were young, and it was not immaturity. It was the bravery to step up and accept that new can also be good.

Yet, this does not mean that we are tasked with changing the world. It is not our sole responsibility.

Even if half of the world’s population is under 30 years old, leaving all of the weight of changing the world over our shoulders is not only unfair, but also illogical. First of all, we are just one half and it so happens that the world belongs, equally, to the two halves.

Although the future “belongs to us” and this might be a common explanation for us being tasked with solving our world’s issues, this is a problem in itself because “the youth” is a mobile concept. According to the OECD, the youth is the segment of the population under 15 years old: in the meanwhile, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification defines it as those people between 15 and 35 years of age.

If we overlap those two definitions, we end up with only 15-year-olds being true youth. In Latin America, we are used to throw big parties to celebrate someone turning 15: should we turn this into a ceremony to invest upon their shoulders the whole weight of being part of the group tasked to change the world for a single year? I don’t think so.

The problem with our current concept of youth is that it is used just as an idea of other, not as an actual term employed to describe anything. I will always defend the idea that youth is a symbol of hope, but I do not think that this can be described in terms of age, population or anything concrete.

If we try to describe it in those terms, we will always find ourselves in the conundrum of trying to find a barrier that cannot be objectively measured. If you asked me some six years ago if an 18-year-old is young, I would have probably frowned. If you ask me now, I would be completely sure of it.

The idea of young changes according to the observer because it is relative. Yet, this is an advantage: relative concepts can become whatever we want if we place them correctly. If we placed Neil Gaiman next to most Wattpad authors, he is definitely not young: if you place him next to Tolkien, he is a blossoming flower. And so it goes.

If you ask me, I will always say that Neil Gaiman is young as much as Corot and the Beatles are because their youth is not associated with age rather than with a certain approach. That is why Rain will always sound strange and The Sandman will always be striking: because they are young in essence.

As long as youth is employed as a term to shift the blame in the other, no one will do anything. It is easier to wait until you turn 35 -or 15- and, then, pass down the responsibility. If we start employing youth as a term to describe a certain essence rather than a segment of population, the reality can be different. For the better.

I agree that youth has to change the world as far as it describes an innovative and open approach towards our issues. In that way, not only people of a certain age would be enabled, as per the term, to change the world.

All of us would. And all of us should.

The fatigued student paradox: can we really do anything about it?

 One of the most interesting decisions ever taken in the history of user interface design is hidden in most clock apps: when you set an alarm, a pop-up notification immediately appears to notify you how much time you have until its demonic sounds break into the peacefulness of your sleep.

And this notification is definitely one of the most common images in a student’s life. It’s 2:00 a.m., you’re under heavy influence of caffeine-loaded drinks and the dim yellow light of your desk lamp is the only evidence that light ever existed in the world around you.

You are very sure of this because the light in your eyes has definitely gone away. After 10 straight hours of working on a presentation that you have most likely procrastinated for the past week or so, the only thing you can think about at that moment is turning your laptop down and, finally, go to sleep.

When this sought-after moment finally comes, you turn off your desk lamp -thankfully for your roommates- and go to sleep. Yet, right before sleep comes, its own death has to be announced: no student can go and rest without an alarm being set up first.

The clock’s always ticking, and the alarm is always eager to remind you so. In fact, when you finally go to sleep, the last thing that your infinitely tired eye balls see is the “Alarm sounding in 4 hours” pop-up that we have already discussed. And 4 hours is not nearly enough sleep for any human being.

Yet, resorting yourself to having that amount of sleep every single day of your life feels, sometimes, like the only option. In a never-stopping world where opportunities come and go at basically light-speed, being a student is not an easy thing to do.

Deadlines are always running after you, but they are not a lone chaser as much as they are only the leader of an entire platoon seeking out for your head. FOMO, extracurricular activities and family life are only a few of the many stalkers that are, sadly, an inevitable part of being a student.

However, I would argue that none of those are as harmful by themselves as tiredness, a direct consequence of them. It does not only hamper your capacity of going on, but it also affects your ability to be efficient: even if it may be not powerful enough to prevent you of doing work, it will affect your ability to do it correctly.

It is also very hard to get rid of tiredness. In fact, it can take up to four days of quality sleep in order to account for the “sleep debt” caused by a single night of bad sleep. In other words, if you pull an all-nighter on Monday to submit a deadline, you will have to go to sleep with military precision for the rest of the week in order to recover from it.

We all know it does not work like that. One all-nighter leads to an afternoon of naps that end up making you go late to bed again, and the next day you wake up a little bit later so you end up being very tired: yet, you cannot go to bed early because you had another homework to do… and it keeps going like that. Sleep is rarely a constant in a student’s life.

The problem with this reality is that its consequences might be life-long. From halting physical growth to stimulating the appearison of diseases such as hypertension or diabetes, sleep deprivation can lead to many consequences that are very different from just submitting a deadline on time.

And, for me, none of this makes sense. How come we need to alter something as essential as our sleeping schedule and remain most of our days in a perpetual tiredness only to meet our basic necessities?

There are various approaches to this question. The first one is, of course, the organization argument: if you sleep late, you need to organize your day in a more efficient way. While this might remain true for many cases, I do not think that sleep deprival due to academics can be completely avoided through organization.

For example, imagine that you have three or four tests on a single day. Even if you start studying a week or two before, your memory is probably too limited to retain all that information intact for such a long time, thus forcing you to do a review the day before the tests come. And that review takes a time that is not necessarily always available.

Another argument that might be used in order to answer such a question would be related to priorities. A well-known rule states that there are three S’s in student life: social life, sleep and study, but you can only have two at the same time. While it might be proven true, I think it is a completely senseless idea. A life with only two out of those three elements would not only be boring, but can also turn unhealthy.

Tiredness in student life, then, seems to be something you can’t escape from. The more tired you are, the less rest you get: thus, a true solution for it seems almost impossible.

The way our system works does not really help. In a world of deadlines, midterms and finals, there is not much that we can do in order to find a true solution for the tiredness paradox. Yet, I don’t think all hope is lost.

One of the main things we can do in order to try and find a solution for the tiredness paradox in our daily lives is actually understanding if it is actually worth it to be tired sometimes. If you have a test next day and plan on studying until 3 a.m., is it actually worth it? Would the increased knowledge overcome the effect of the added tiredness?

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And it is completely unpredictable. So, this is not a definitive solution.

Another proposed solution for this paradox would be simply assuming it and not being tired at all: from the three S standpoint, this would mean taking the “sleep” one as a definitive one and then alternating between “social” and “study”.

The issue with this one is that both socializing and study are always there. There is always a party to go as much as there is always a test to study for: thus, what is the order? Of course, in a finals season or during a break the decision seems obvious: yet, those are very limited periods throughout the year.

Most times, the border that separates the priority of studying from the one of socializing are rather diffuse. On a regular day, without any incoming deadlines or special social compromises, it can get quite hard to choose between going for a coffee with your friends and reviewing for a subject you don’t have any upcoming tests at the moment.

And both decisions might be as perjudicial. If you completely stop going out with your friends, your social life might start vanishing and that can be a big problem by itself: one basically as big as the one caused if you just study for tests a day before.

Another potential solution bites the dust. We could keep discussing different solutions to this issue, but it is very likely that all of them will arrive to deadpoints similar to the ones already exposed.

So, what can we do about the tiredness paradox?

First of all, accept it. I really think a current student’s life is not imaginable without a certain degree of chronic exhaustion going on. Our bodies are simply not hard-wired for the constant influx of information of all kinds that we are always exposed to.

School days that are very rarely less than 8 hours long and are usually followed by a 2 or 3-hour social corollary are always exhausting. It means being exposed to all kinds of information for the whole day that ranges from that related to social interaction to purely academical data, and this can be too much.

Therefore, being tired is natural. And recognizing it might be the first step to fight against it: if you cannot defeat them, join their side. If we play on tiredness’ side, we can have a chance of winning the game of student life.

This would be, for me, the second action we can take to solve this paradox. Playing on tiredness’ side also means not letting it consume too much of your life, both on a physical and psychological perspective.

As a beholder of the questionable title of energy drink enthusiast, I need to admit that tiredness might be already invading my physical health. However, even if I have been consuming them for only two years or so, I have already noticed the negative effect they have on me: now, it is very hard for me to be fully functional without any caffeine on my system.

So substances are probably not the best companion to fight tiredness. Yet, I think that not letting tiredness consume too much of your life can also have an influence on the scheduling side.

If being tired is okay, then you have to accept when it is the time to be tired. In my personal case, naps are a particularly sharp reflection of this. If I take a 30-minute nap, I am probably going to go to bed at least 2 hours later: therefore, it’s not worth it for me to take and nap. Better remain looking like a zombie for the last 3 hours of the day than look like a zombie for the wholeness of the next one.

And my last take on this issue is, basically, about a question: is it meant to be like this? Should we be always tired just in order to have a barely functioning academic life?

That, I don’t know. And I am not sure if our current system does.

Entering adulthood in 2024: does it still smell like Teen Spirit?

 When Pull&Bear’s favorite rock band, Nirvana, published “Nevermind” in 1991 a curious characteristic of the album sleeve was the lack of lyrics for most of the songs. The booklet that came with the CD contained only a few extracts from some songs of the album, making it hard for the fans to analyze what they were truly about.

One of the songs that was particularly affected by this was “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. Cobain’s voice is so guttural during this song that it can be quite hard for fans to grasp what he’s saying: I, for one, wasn’t able to make sense of the lyrics for a good while after discovering it.

And, when I looked them up, I was still unable to understand them. I was 13, was just starting to learn English by myself and did not really have a clue on what did he mean by the word “libido”. Times have changed and I might have learned the literal definitions of the words employed, but I think I still don’t get how “Teen Spirit” does smell like.

Apart from the deodorant brand, of course.

It is well known that the inspiration behind the song’s name came from a joke written on Cobain’s wall by fellow musician Kathleen Hanna, who said that “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” in reference to the deodorant used by his then-girlfriend. However, the joke turned into a song because it was understood as a revolutionary message rather than as a joke.

Yes, a whole anthem of teenage freedom and revolutionary sense came from a misunderstood joke. Probably because still no one knows how does Teen Spirit smell like.

On November 23rd, 2023, at 8:48 a.m. (GMT -4:00 time), I turned eighteen years old. While it might have been just another day of living for me, it was definitely an important date for the legal implications of my existence as a human being. From that moment on, the Convention on the Rights of the Child no longer shields me, I can go to adults’ jail and I have to legally pay taxes.

And, according to some sources, I ceased being a teenager. While there is much that can be argued about teenage years ending at 18, it certainly means the end of a whole era and the slow drift into adulthood.

Will I smell differently? I don’t know. Will the esoteric Teen Spirit magically exit my body like in this video? I haven’t seen any magical golden staircase over me yet. Will I slowly start drifting into adulthood? Certainly.

2024 will mark the year where I officially start being an adult, legally and physically. And it is not an easy year to do so: in almost every possible sense, our world is at stake during this year. It is not only the world’s biggest election year, but it will also be the year where humanity goes back to Moon’s orbit and when Mickey Mouse goes into public domain.

Increase of global GDP is set to slow down and interest rates from student loan lenders are expected to increase. The few travel restrictions remaining from COVID-19 will probably be lifted and people who were finishing high school when the pandemic started are going to graduate from college. Everything is going to be changing a lot.

And, in the midst of that chaos, many others and I will be figuring out how to become adults. Some of us are going to experience life-changing events while others will keep going on with their daily lives. Some of us are going to really experience the change, while others will just see every day pass by and adulthood still being little more than a simple word.

I am sure about all of that. What I cannot answer, though, is whether I am going to figure out what Teen Spirit is all about.

One of the most interesting quotes about adulthood I have ever read comes from a text about children books written by one of the most talented authors to ever set foot on Earth, C.S. Lewis.

In the essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”, he wrote that “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”. What he identified as the beginning true adulthood came only from an embracing of childishness, not from an attempt to escape it.

There is a certain logical implication of it that scratches my head, though. If adulthood is about not escaping childishness, then childishness is about escaping it: in this dichotomical approach to such transition, where can we fit teenagers?

And I think that the only answer to this lies in the true essence of teenage years lying in not escaping or embracing childishness, just trying to understand it. When Kurt Cobain wrote a full song after a joke written in his wall, he was not trying to escape or embrace it: he was figuring it out in his own, special way.

The true Teen Spirit is, for me, exactly that: figuring things out. Most things that happen during this hazily defined period can be explained in that way, from the TikToker era most of us go through to the strange stylistic choices that have lead in different eras to the surge of emos, punks and hipsters. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I think that being a teenager is a truly beautiful experience. It is the only moment in your life where you are tall enough to drive but not old enough to actually do so, as well as the only period where you have a certain degree of both freedom and lack of responsibilities.

It has many ups and downs. There are days where hormones, biological masters of your body, make you take strange pathways and might make you end up smelling like Teen Spirit as in the deodorant brand. There are moments when you really don’t know if you’re going the right way. There are many days when you wish you could just jump from childhood to adulthood, as Lewis might have proposed.

Yet, it is not possible. And I am very glad it’s not.

And, as I leave this beautiful period in 2024, I still don’t know how Teen Spirit smells like. I will probably have to figure it out at some point.

4 lessons after 4 months in 4 minutes: takeaways from my ongoing journey as an international student

 The first international student there is written record of is Emo of Friesland, a Frisian scholar who attended the University of Oxford in 1190 and paved the way for almost a millenium of international students.

And, of course, lots of things can happen in a millenium: in fact, that is about 33 human generations. Think about all the things that your grandparents went through, sum it with all the experiences of your parents and add it up to your own ones. Now, multiply it by 11 and you get a small grasp over the amount of things that can happen in a millenium.

Yet, the human act of going to another country to educate ourselves has survived that long. We have overcome long wars, rough winters and unsufferable visa offices to kept going on this wonderful journey of education: we have done it. Cheers to us.

Lesson 1: The importance of self-assurance

Talking about cheers, the first lesson that I have learnt in these four months is how important it is to recognize your own achievements, no matter how small they might seem. Coming from a background where nothing was ever celebrated because there were no means to do so, something that has helped me feel better in various occassions is congratulating myself.

It can be a chocolate, a coffee or just a small walk to the park: if you do not celebrate your small victories, there is no point in achieving them. And tiny achievements might seem worthless at first, but there are no big victories without small ones.

Even if no one is there to celebrate your achievements, you can always do it by yourself. In that case, the challenge comes in other way: recognizing them. And this is such a personal matter that there is potentially no advice helpful in achieving it.

After all, every person has different definitions of achievement. And all of them are equally valid.

Lesson 2: The unpredictability of homesickness

Something I was very proud about during my first two months was how immune I felt to homesickness. In fact, I did not really understand what was it all about until I left my home-far-from-home, Mostar. I wrote a little more about it in this other post.

This is quite a big topic to cover in this post: indeed, I think it is a topic that can never be fully covered. And that is, in itself, one of the lessons I have learned: homesickness comes in various ways, at various moments and in various degrees of intensity. The thing is that you never know any of those three.

At least not until it arrives.

Lesson 3: No fair comparison ever exists

In my school, I study with people from well over 100 countries of the world. Every single one of us comes from radically different schooling systems, with different opportunities and a set of life experiences so apart from one another that it is completely senseless for academic competition to exist.

Yet, it does. And this is not necessarily bad, but it is completely unfair. Competition can be undisputedly considered as fair when it depends on the effort and success of different parties towards achieving a certain goal: however, when different parties have absurdly different conditions to compete, the competition loses sense.

And the hard part about accepting this is that competition will still always exist. There will always be someone with a better grade that you want to achieve and someone you will feel a certain academic pity against. The challenge is accepting this and learning to live with it.

Lesson 4: Nothing is ever enough (and that’s okay)

As I am writing this post, I am spending my break in Porto after finishing my first term at the United World College in Mostar. A year ago, I was wondering if I could ever manage to travel to Europe on my own and had no concrete plans for my future had I not been accepted to UWC.

Yet, I feel the same sense of insatisfaction and hunger for more I felt back then. Even if I am living a dream and I could not be a little more thankful for it, I still feel that I am not doing enough. I still feel that there is always more work to be done.

This is directly correlated to what made me become an international student in first place: a never-ending hunger for more. An eternal flame that makes us endure everything not just to learn more, but also to make our world a better place: while some Airbnb hosts might think otherwise, I feel that the trace left behind international students tends to be positive.

And I think all of this is wonderful. I don’t know what our dear Emo of Friesland was thinking when he first enrolled in the University of Oxford, but I truly think he made the first step towards something beautiful. Something we are all a part of.

Losing my Spanish: the story of how my language has changed in three months

 One of the longest and most dazzling dances in history occurs between two immaterial maidens: language and the human race. They intertwine in an unnamable dance, which has the elegance of tango, the delicacy of waltz, and the energy of salsa. A dance that is sometimes incomprehensible, but always magnificent. That dance, like any masterpiece, is not exempt from criticism. Its endless turns confuse many, and the grandeur of all the movements of the suite that gives it music incites exaggerated passions for particular movements in certain fans. But that’s okay: after all, music is subjective.

Even so, within the subjective there is always room for the objective: even the most rebellious songs have a certain rhythm, melody, and harmony. In this infinite dance that intertwines humanity with its language, the rhythm is unmistakable with that of migration.

And to this rhythm, eternal books have been dedicated with titles with words as fancy as “comparative linguistics,” but it can be appreciated without the need to study it in a formal academic setting. It can, in fact, be experienced firsthand.

It all started in the back seat of a Renault Master, at some point along the 179.6 kilometers that separate Split Airport from the city of Mostar. It had been 48 hours since the last time I slept, in my bedroom bed in Venezuela, and now I was in the middle of a dark highway in the Balkans.

That was the first time in my life that I used English out of necessity. I had never taken formal English classes in my life or anything like it: everything I knew was the fruit of an early connection to the Internet and a fatuous boredom. My listening skills went hand in hand with my pronunciation, which is not saying much: in fact, it is closer to an insult than anything else.

And there I was, trying to understand my friends from the United Kingdom whose accent betrayed their origins. I have to say that I understood approximately 75% of the conversation: however, it was enough to change me for life. Because only then did I clearly hear, for the first time, the rhythm of the dance. Even though a thousand books could tell me that language changes with migration, only the need to speak another language to survive made me understand how loud the rhythm of migration can sound in our heads.

The first things were the words. The characteristic “o sea” of my almost-Caracas accent began to turn into a very unfriendly “like”, and confusions stopped being announced by the omnipresent “¿qué?” to sound like a strange “What?”. But then the persistence of the rhythm went beyond my eardrums, and Spanglish was more than the unconscious and unnecessary translation of perfectly existing words in Spanish. Even when my sentences were not full of English words, it was no longer just a superficial change. The rhythm was already in my brain.

It started subtly, with “hola” becoming a “¿Qué tal?” reminiscent of the Anglophone “What’s up?”. Then it started with the use of somewhat foreign words, like in the previous paragraph: who would use “reminiscent” as their first option when writing an entry?

Definitely not the Elías of August 2023. But that’s the beauty of the eternal dance of language and humans: it never stops, but it always changes. And in that change, it changes us ourselves.

In the same way that the melody of Bohemian Rhapsody changes in each of its five sections, the dance is sometimes faster or slower. But it is always changing, and the changes lead to ever more unexpected beauties.

Just as my Spanish has changed radically in three months, throughout our lives our language grows and transforms. It is nourished by the infinite influences to which we are constantly exposed and is permeable to different cultures, customs, and forms.

There is a very important current of people who consider themselves Spanish traditionalists. The use of Spanglish is a cardinal sin, and even direct Anglicisms are pronounced in the most Castilian way possible (what the hell is a CD?). I do not consider myself one of those. I believe that in every Anglicism there is a potential for growth for our language, and that closing ourselves off to foreign influences is to prohibit ourselves from enjoying new parts of the beautiful dance that is language.

And what an honor it is to be able to witness it live.

Losing my español: la historia de cómo mi idioma ha cambiado en tres meses

 Una de los bailes más largos y deslumbrantes de la historia ocurre entre dos doncellas inmateriales: la lengua y la raza humana. Ellas se entrecruzan en una danza innombrable, que tiene la elegancia del tango, la delicadeza del vals y la energía de la salsa. Una danza a veces incomprensible, pero siempre magnífica.

Esa danza, como toda obra maestra, no está exenta de críticas. Sus infinitas vueltas confunden a muchos, y la grandiosidad de todos los movimientos de la suite que la musicaliza instiga pasiones exageradas por movimientos particulares en ciertos fanáticos. Pero está bien: después de todo, la música es subjetiva.

Aun así, dentro de lo subjetivo siempre existe lugar para lo objetivo: hasta las canciones más rebeldes tienen cierto ritmo, melodía y armonía. En este baile infinito que entrecruza a la humanidad con su lenguaje, el ritmo es inconfundible con el de la migración.

Y a este ritmo se le han dedicado libros eternos titulados con palabras tan fancy como «lingüística comparativa», pero se puede apreciar sin necesidad de estudiarlo en un entorno académico formal. Se puede, de hecho, vivir en primera persona.

Todo empezó en el asiento trasero de una Renault Master, en algún punto de los 179.6 kilómetros que separan el aeropuerto de Split de la ciudad de Mostar. Habían pasado 48 horas desde la última vez que dormí, en la cama de mi cuarto en Venezuela, y ahora estaba en medio de una autopista oscura de los Balcanes.

Ahí fue la primera vez en mi vida que usé el inglés por necesidad. Jamás en mi vida había estado en clases formales de inglés ni nada que se le pareciese: todo lo que sabía era fruto de una prematura conexión a Internet y un aburrimiento fatuo . Mis habilidades de listening iban de la mano con mi pronunciation, lo cual no es decir mucho: de hecho, es más cercano a un insulto que a otra cosa.

Y ahí estaba, intentando entender a mis amigas del Reino Unido cuyo acento delataba su procedencia. He de decir que entendí aproximadamente un 75% de la conversación: sin embargo, fue suficiente para cambiarme de por vida.

Porque solo fue ahí que escuché claramente, por primera vez, el ritmo de la danza. Aun cuando mil libros me pudieran decir que el lenguaje cambia con la migración, solo la necesidad de hablar otro idioma para sobrevivir me hizo comprender lo fuerte que puede llegar a sonar en nuestras cabezas el ritmo de la migración.

Lo primero fueron las palabras. El característico “o sea” de mi acento cuasi-caraqueño empezó a convertirse en un muy antipático like, y las confusiones dejaron de ser anunciadas por el omnipresente “¿qué?” para sonar a un extraño “What?”.

Pero después la persistencia del ritmo fue más allá de mis tímpanos, y el espanglish fue más que la traducción inconsciente e innecesaria de palabras perfectamente existentes en el español. Aún cuando mis oraciones no estuviesen llenas de palabras en inglés, ya no era solo un cambio superficial. El ritmo ya estaba en mi cerebro.

Empezó sutilmente, con los “hola” convirtiéndose en un “¿Qué tal?” reminiscente al “What’s up?” anglófono. Luego empezó con el uso de palabras algo extranjeras, como en el párrafo anterior: ¿quién usaría “reminiscente” como primera opción al escribir una entrada?

Definitivamente, no el Elías de agosto de 2023. Pero eso es lo lindo de la danza eterna de la lengua y el humano: nunca para, pero siempre cambia. Y en ese cambiar, nos cambia a nosotros mismos.

De la misma forma que la melodía de Bohemian Rhapsody cambia en cada una de sus cinco secciones, la danza a veces es más rápida o más lenta. Pero siempre está cambiando, y los cambios llevan a bellezas cada vez más inesperadas.

Así como en tres meses mi español ha cambiado radicalmente, a lo largo de nuestras vidas nuestro lenguaje crece y se transforma. Se nutre de las infinitas influencias a las que estamos constantemente expuestos y es permeable a diferentes culturas, costumbres y formas.

Existe una corriente muy importante de personas que se consideran tradicionalistas de español. El uso de espanglish es un pecado capital, e incluso anglicismos directos se pronuncian de la forma más castellana imposible (¿qué demonios es un cedé?).

Yo no me considero de esos. Yo creo que en cada anglicismo hay un potencial de crecimiento para nuestra lengua, y que cerrarnos a influencias extranjeras es prohibirnos de disfrutar nuevas partes de la hermosa danza que es el lenguaje.

Y qué honor es poder presenciarla en vivo.