The noise eases itself out.
Boundless by the time I cried, I built your walls around me. White noise, what an awful sound. Fumbling by Rogue River, feel my feet above the ground. Hand of God, deliver me.
Recently, my perfectly capable friend KR, who has now practically lived three-quarters of her college years in an Apple ecosystem, gifted me her spare wired earphones— the classic, easily recognizable white ones that come with a 3.5mm jack. With humble gratitude and the compulsory “No, I cannot accept this, you shouldn’t have,” I yielded and accepted her token of friendship. “Tanggapin mo na. Kunwari ka pa!”, she joked so openly, to which all I could reply was to smile side-smirkingly. As buying it new in store is not cheap (at least to me), I was simply ecstatic with the gesture. Right there and then, I ditched my wireless earbuds (despite their factually better audio quality) and plugged the wired ones throughout our entire trip.
My morning run to the cafe today and the sudden downpour of rain (it hasn’t stopped for days) after its brief standstills, made me finally sit and get some writing done for my undergrad thesis. I reached for my backpack’s pocket to find out that I left my wireless earbuds at home. To my relief, the wired earphones that KR had given me, were there, wrapping itself around my forefinger like a chewed gum. It was an hour in before I realize that I got so used with ANC that I had forgotten how nice it is sometimes to hear ambient sounds while working. And so, there I was, admittedly nostalgic, birthing this entry in mind.
Ergo, I am simply writing this to articulate my love for this ever-tangling piece of technology.
This is, I suppose, my ode-like prose to the wired earphones.
It was almost the end of the week (after our four-day trip to the countryside) when the urge to completely withdraw from any form of social interaction took over. During this period of time, I spent my evenings rewatching Sharp Objects, like most normal people do in their devastatingly somber days off. There’s a scene where two of the many mentally unstable characters in the show, Alice and Camille, share a pair of wired earphones to “escape” the realities of their psychiatric hospital. “With these, I can get the hell out of here whenever I want,” Alice says as she hands Camille the opposite earpiece of her earphones. The image of them bonding over music in a depressing facility hallway stayed in my head for weeks and has strangely since provided some kind of therapy for my ill-defined sanity.
My first pair of wired earphones was also an Apple. It’s the second edition ones that you get as a set with an iPod shuffle, which I happened to purchase way back in high school and used to sneak in between bathroom breaks during class hours and recess. Back then, I was already listening to an array of genres of songs— from Joni Mitchell to Fiona Apple, to my teenage angst playlist of The Cure, Mazzy Star, and Radiohead, my overly self-aware niche playlist of Rilo Kiley, Coldplay, and Belle and Sebastian, and my local playlist of songs by Up Dharma Down and Bic Runga (who I just recently discovered is Kiwi and not Filipino! My bad.) Nowadays, my Spotify Recently Played are just a bunch of folk, indie music I happen to enjoy listening to. Over the years, I find that my taste has gotten more particular and a lot less smug (I blame getting older).
In my senior year of high school, a habit that I used to do was to skip lunch and instead of food, save almost the entirety of my weekly allowance to purchase something. One particular semester, it was for a ridiculously expensive pair of over-ear stereo headphones. I had hopes that it would make me seem like an intellectual listener. In the end, though, my hunger got the better of me. It led to my conclusion that I can live completely just fine without a bulk of pretentiousness weighing above me, which would nestle over my already heavy-minded head. I suppose I didn’t need the extra weight of materialism to comfort and reassure my lack of self-esteem. It wasn’t the sound that I was craving; it was a new personality. But regardless of how dynamic the sound quality produced by a better pair of headphones is as it reaches my ears (cue the Frances Ha clip, “aren’t these headphones tits?”) or, despite the super-duper noise cancelling, it no longer matters to me as much as it once did. I guess much like the grain in my photos, I’ve also grown to tolerate the low fidelity of sounds.
Here’s the catch— there’s just something casual about wired earphones that makes them stylish. Their appeal to make me seem rather pedestrian and laidback, amidst the surge of the tiny, minimal, wireless, and touch-receptive earbuds and earpods, makes me feel like an ordinary person with no concern at all for the constantly updating techwares of our time, despite being someway the opposite. From an aesthetic standpoint, it’s almost culturally at par with a digital camera (which is holding its own charm against the goliaths, that is the high-def mirrorless cameras of today). And while this may sound pretentious and critical of modern-day technology, I simply couldn’t deny that using it again for weeks has made me realize that I have missed the utility of things without the responsibility of charging them to use them (quite analogous to having games in my phone that do not require an internet connection to play them). But then again, such instances reaffirm my personal, adult-life byword:
I tend deeply to lessen the complications in my life, and only wish to bear the natural hardships of living, of which I have no control over.
A conjunctive piece of lore about me that connects to this writing is that I suffer from a ruptured eardrum, or a perforated tympanic membrane, as they medically call it, due to an inflamed and infected otitis media. Basically, there is a hole in the middle of my left ear, and to repair it, I must undergo a procedure called tympanoplasty. As to what caused it, my mother supposed that I was a heavy-crier as a baby, and with my tears entering my ear, it eventually severed my thin ear membrane. I often find this story poetic to some degree— that despite my mother’s persistence in making me agree to do the surgery, and despite my growing knowledge of how this condition continually harms me and provides me such discomfort, to this day, I still wouldn’t do it. Perhaps I’m still not prepared to let go of this incompleteness— the irony of which, of course, is that this condition completed what my persona has become. And despite my half-deaf introduction to the sounds of the world: to the sounds of people talking, of music playing, of liquids pouring, of birds chirping— of life itself, this minute puncture in my ear— my physical shortcoming— has defined my very connection to myself.
It’s among the low-fidelities of my body that I’ve grown to tolerate and love, and now stubbornly refuse to sever ties with.
The day will eventually come when I will have to say goodbye again to this piece of technology and finally bid farewell to my impairment. Until then, I will hurdle against the noises of life, carrying these distortions and these deformities— my quirks. The day will eventually come when I’d have to bask in the pool of mundaneness, to finally get my life together like an ordinary person, and ease through the noises with a better set of ears— ones that hear more clearly and listen more sincerely. And despite my stubborn refusal, my slight conservatism, and my utilitarian judgement of impracticalities, at least it’s a future I don’t mind looking forward to.