A Philosophy of Phones

The woman next to me in the phone store kept staring at me, expecting me to answer her desperate pleas for conversation. "What about this weather? It's crazy, huh?" Although the weather was clearly not as crazy as this woman, I humored her for as long as I could before finally deciding that getting a phone wasn't worth standing in line with her. I politely excused myself. My first day in Madrid was filled with these everyday kinds of occurrences. I felt it during the hour-long subway ride into town, where there was ample time to think over my new life, even as my hiking backpack slowly forced my spine into an unholy and agonizing curve. Wasn't the metro supposed to be so much more exotic than this? Why don't the people seem quite as vastly different from my cultural perspective as before?

It is amazing to think that my perspective on Spain has changed so much. Sometime, after years of being idolized in my head, it had gained this other-worldly touch that perhaps it doesn't really have. And this isn't a bad thing: it was comforting to see familiar landmarks, to hear old friends' voices again, to have people ask me for directions. Perhaps that's what I'm stuck on, this idea that Spain no longer feels like this foreign country for me. It feels like somewhere I understand.

In part, at least. Some of this is first-day exhilaration talking. There will be nasty Spain days, of that I am certain. Even as I stepped out of the metro into my old neighborhood for the first time in two years, a wave of fear rolled over me. Am I really doing the right thing? Should I have stayed home? These questions, much like my incessant search for the perfect mobile telephone today, may likely be rhetorical; they mull over past and future as if they were things I could now change. The mobile phone remains unbought because I hesitated too long over a phone with a camera (lots of euros) versus the phone without it (not a lot of euros). But see, it's not whether I choose the perfect phone, because either one of them will accomplish its primary function, it's all the future possibilities and scenarios I imagine as I think of having one phone as opposed to having the other. Will I regret it? Am I really doing the right thing by spending this money? Don't these questions sound similar? See the connection between my phone preoccupations and my much-larger Spain issues?

Buy the phone. Make the trip. Do the deed. Ridiculously carpe diem, I know.