Reflections about my Blog

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    Keeping a blog throughout this semester wasn't an easy task for me. I'm usually a very reserved person when it comes to my thoughts and my writing. The idea that any person would be able to see what I've written makes me a bit queasy, perhaps because I'm somewhat insecure that my writing isn't good enough, or my way of organizing my blog wouldn't be as nice or unique looking as my peers. This insecurity has followed me all through my high school and college career, and I’ve always wanted to find a way to work on reducing or eliminating.

     My blog has been therapeutic in that regard during these past few months. After a few entries the anxiousness associated with making a posts starts to go down. Reading my classmates blogs also helped me understand the perspective of those that might read mine. I wasn’t reading posts in order to find flaws or criticize in a hurtful way, the intent was exactly the opposite. Of course there’s always the random person that decides to say something negative anonymously, but the vast majority of people would just read it and move on, perhaps giving some helpful criticism. I’m still not completely over my hang-ups, but the more I write, the easier it gets each time.  

   

Tourism according to Jamaica Kincaid

"The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person day to day."

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                Through her writing, Jamaica Kincaid speaks volumes about the negative aspects she sees in the tourism industry, and in tourists themselves. She seems to dwell only on the negative aspects that tourism has brought to Antigua, ignoring that maybe it isn’t tourism that is the cause for all of this. Maybe these problems can be attributed to other problems, such as corruption and inequality, and one of the symptoms present is the “ugliness” of tourism on the island.  To call every tourist an ugly person is to generalize a group of people who come from all walks of life in order to explore a new place in the world.

While some tourists and their practices might be exploitative towards the natives in whatever region they happen to travel to, it can’t be denied that tourists also serve to improve local conditions in many cases. They bring money into otherwise poor yet beautiful areas, which helps the locals fund things such as schools, hospitals, parks, etc. The situation is obviously not so black and white, as tourists can and do cause harm to local monuments or fauna, but the situation is not as black and white as Jamaica Kincaid makes it seem through her writing.

My Experience as Tourist

     My weekend as a tourist was almost completely a failure. I traveled to Ponce with my friend Juan, in order to attend the ACS Senior Technical meeting that was being held at the Hilton Hotel. That must have been the best possible scenario to pretend to be a tourist, in a town where nobody knows me, but specially a hotel, which is exactly where tourists are supposed to be found. Well that wasn’t even close to the case, as I barely talked to any strangers during my stay in the hotel. Most Americans seemed unapproachable and not inclined to make small talk, while the Puerto Ricans where with their families so there wasn’t much I could have done to talk to them.

     

     My only experience making somebody believe I was a tourist was when we went to the town square in Ponce, and went around to the different bars. After a couple of beers I felt more comfortable telling the white lie that I was a tourist, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull off saying that I was from another country, so I decided that I was going to be a Puerto Rican raised in Florida and visiting family, which seemed like the most believable lie. I started talking to a girl in a bar, and she asked me where I was from because she thought I had an accent (that’s actually just how bad my Spanish is). I told her my spiel, and I thought she believed me, but I think the reality was that she must have seen through my poor disguise because the conversation fizzled from there on out. Everyone else I met during the trip was either a friend of mine, or a friend of a friend, so I didn’t feel comfortable lying. A better story might have gotten at least one person to believe me, and because of that I didn’t really get to feel what being a tourist is like in Puerto Rico, but I did get to enjoy the sights and nightlife of Ponce, which was completely foreign to me, so in a way that could have been considered my tourist experience.

My grandmother

           My grandmother, Raquel Estrada Gonzalez, has been an important part of my life since I was born. She has always been there for me, and goes out of the way to help me and my cousins in any way possible. Her love for me is a thing that I could never doubt, but she has always had a tendency to overreact to most situations, with results that vary from either being hilarious, or extremely frustrating. From what my father has told me, she has always been like this in every aspect of her life, and will continue to be like that for the foreseeable future.

            One of my first experiences with my grandmother’s overreactions was when my grandfather and I went to buy pool supplies. We had been tinkering with the filter motor, and headed out to buy a part that we needed, accidentally leaving the motor to start up on a timer. We were in Guaynabo when grandma calls my grandfather, screaming hysterically that water was flooding the outdoor patio and running into the street, at least that’s what we managed to understand after a few minutes of her babbling/screaming. The solution to this was simple, you turn off a small switch directly on top of the motor and it stops the flow of water, but between her anxiousness and trademarked tendency to overreact, she either couldn’t find it, or wouldn’t even attempt to. My grandfather was furious, yelling at the top of his lungs that she had to turn it off, but this continued all the way to Bayamon, and when we got to the house water was still rushing into the street. We got out of the car, and walked into my grandmother calling my uncle asking for help, while grandpa went straight to turn off the motor. Literally hundreds of gallons of water were wasted due to her overreaction that time.

While the previous example is slightly understandable for people that can’t handle high stress situations, her overreactions weren’t restricted to just serious events. A few years ago my father got a tattoo of an owl covering his chest and shoulders. Obviously my grandmother would disapprove since she’s very religious and doesn’t approve of tattoos, but her reaction at the time when my father showed her was to start crying uncontrollably all day. She would not stop crying, telling my father to get it removed, how he was going to hell, etc. This maybe would have been understandable if my cousin or I had gotten a similar tattoo, but my father is 40 years old, has his own job and family, and to top it off, has other tattoos. That’s what made it even less understandable for me, he already had about 5 other tattoos, why react like this to another?

But all of us know that her actions come from a place of love, if at times not rational thought. My grandmother might not react well to some situations, but that is usually because she cares very deeply about the people around her and wants them to do what she thinks is good. Usually she apologizes for an outburst after thinking clearly for a while, but we all know that’s the person that she is, and we love and accept her as such.

Character development in V.S. Naipaul’s Reading and Writing

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          Naipaul starts off reading and writing by talking about his early childhood experiences with wanting to become a great writer. He explains his lack of ability when it came to deciphering what he was reading by himself, which was something he only seemed able to do with the help of his father. He describes how his father was a self-taught journalist in Trinidad.  His way of describing his father is one that paints him, while not as traditionally one dimensional, as a character that is defined by some very specific qualities which the reader is to find interesting.

He describes how his father became a journalist through his own accord. His reading consisted of only reading the parts in a story that he found interesting, skipping the other parts in favor of starting another book. While this might have been his usual behavior, it is difficult to think that his father never actually read an entire book, or finished a story. What is more likely, is that Naipaul exaggerated some aspects of his father’s life, in order to make his autobiography more interesting to his readers. The intent here is obviously not to deceive readers about his true experiences, but to make reading about his life a more enjoyable experience, instead of a boring recounting of events.

Life is a Trip

     
        During Judith Feins trip through northern Spain she explores the popular pilgrim trail called the “Camino de Santiago”, which has its end in the Cathedral of Santiago de Campostela. During her travels she meets all the different people that decide to take the pilgrimage, which clashes with the idea of the stereotypical pilgrim in the average person’s eyes. The people walking the road come from all walks of life, from different countries, and profess beliefs in a variety of religions. Their reasons given for taking the pilgrimage range from spiritual, to more of a personal objective.

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During her trip Judith Fein also comes in contact with the people that help the pilgrims along the way. They provide directions, housing, etc. some due to their love for the idea the “camino”, and the process of discovery or awakening that they hope to inspire in others. It is because of this that Judith begins to question her ability to contribute to the “camino”, as she isn’t sacrificing much by staying at comfortable hotels, and using cars and other methods of transportation. But it is the realization that there is no “minimum” that has to be done to contribute, that her work as a writer was equally as valuable, that gives her confidence that she herself was also serving the pilgrims in a small way.

Thoughts on my Journey Journal

            If I compare my last few entries on my Journey Journal to those made in the first days of class, a slight change in tone and writing style is blatantly obvious. As I progressed through this assignment, my writing style got noticeably “looser” and much more free and comfortable. At the beginning I was a bit apprehensive about writing my unfiltered thoughts in a Journal, imagine “what if somebody read it?”, now that would be embarrassing. But those are just negative thoughts, they’re not based on reality since I know nobody would actually read it.

By reassuring myself of that, and that I could actually feel much better if I wrote down my feelings at least once a day, I managed to open up to myself about how I feel about the things that are bothering me in my day to day life. These aren’t things I’d feel comfortable sharing with anybody I know, so it feels good to have some sort of release for the pressure that builds up, especially in a high stress place like University. My compasses also reflected this positive change. Things like tests and homework started bothering me less mentally and made my emotional score higher as well since I didn’t worry as much. Finishing this project gave me a pretty good perspective on how much a person can improve themselves by just taking the time to make small changes, such as keeping a Journal. 

Carl Jung: Travels through North Africa

    Carl Jung was a renowned Swiss psychologist, perhaps most widely known for his concept of the “collective unconscious”, and his other contributions to related fields. Carl Jung was a man who kept extensive diaries of his travels, such as his journey through Africa discussed in class.  Through his writing it can be observed that Jung traveled through Tunisia with an open mind in order to better understand both the people that lived there, that he considered very different, and in some way himself.  As with any normal person, he wasn’t successful in completely eliminating any bias from his thoughts, but his writing tells us of his self-awareness with regards to his own prejudice, and gives valuable insight to the differences between his European point of view, and how he perceives the natives.

    Jung travels through the Saharan countryside with his guide, and is intrigued with the different attitude present towards gender and sexuality. In the village where they stop, he notices the stark separation of genders present throughout. This is not to say that Europeans didn’t have segregation of genders in some aspects at the time, but we can tell that it wasn’t anywhere near the level present in the Arab tribes. Another aspect found to differ even more was that of male homosexuality. The Arabs openly allowed these relationships, at one point even offering Jung himself to take part. This of course came as a shock to Jung, who had probably never seen such behavior openly in Europe. Instead of allowing himself to be overcome with prejudice at the thought of what at that time Europeans must have considered a great taboo, Jung instead keeps his composure and allows the reader an almost unbiased view of a star contrast between the Middle East and Europe at the time. If anyone reading this is curious about the history of Homosexuality in the Middle East, I suggest they start by reading the following link.

What does it mean to be Puerto Rican?

I’ve been debating about what to write for a while now, and when I really think about it I can’t think of anything that I find concrete to say about this topic. What does it actually mean to be from somewhere? Is it the food, the culture, where you live? I could go on and on about how being Puerto Rican for me is eating alcapurrias in my grandmother home and going to the beach on weekends, but that’s just really what it means for me. That’s not the reality, but the truth is being Puerto Rican for me could just consist of any random assortment of activities I as a person like to do.

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You could say that in general it could be considered that it means taking part in the activities that the average person in the island takes place in, but what about immigrants? Are they Puerto Rican if they take part as well? Or a mix of two or more cultures, something completely different to what they were before they arrived. Now imagine the differences between immigrants to Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans of differing religions, from different parts of the island. What could possibly singularly define us as a people, aside from the geographic area we live in?

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I’m obviously not saying that “Puertorricans” don’t exist, I know I am one, and you can usually notice one out in the wild. My point is that it’s one of those things that you just can’t describe, you just know it when you see it. Either you identify yourself as one and try to emulate the customs of the people around, or you do your own thing. But I believed that either of these behaviors could describe a Puerto Rican. What you do, where you do it, and with whom are, are not nearly as important as what you think you are.

About me

    I was born in Manati, but spent most of my life in Vega Baja, not that there’s much of a difference between these cities.  When I was less than a year old my parents moved with me to Florida for a year or two, so I managed to learn English and Spanish at the same time, which I think explains why I’m horrible when it comes to speaking either language. I really can’t remember much about my childhood, other than my grandparents, who took care of me most of the time.

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    I went to Brigida Alvarez for high school, which I really enjoyed because it was focused on Science and Math, but mostly because of the math. Being a part of the math and science teams was a godsend, since we got to skip out on some class days for competitions and there was usually a pretty well stocked buffet or full course lunch at these. We usually didn’t place too high in these, but the experiences are some of the most memorable from my time in High school.

Senior year my best friend and I managed to win first place in the Math Science fair, and we both got to travel to Los Angeles for the International competition.  That was a great way to end senior year since we managed to practically not do anything for our regular classes during our last semester, on the pretext that we were “working” on our project, when in reality we usually just ate BBQ and spent time at the beach.  That’s not to say we didn’t give a good presentation in LA, but honestly that was mostly second fiddle to having fun and meeting new people.

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    After graduating I started studying Mechanical Engineering in the UPRRP in a program where I take my general classes during two years here, then finish at the UPRM. So far I’ve really enjoyed my stay at “la IUPI” and I’ve made a lot of friends from all walks of life, from fellow MechE students, professor, and exchange students. I’m excited for the change of scenery next year, though I’ll miss the friends I’ve made here.