External Journey (Our journey has just begun...)

From the beginning of the semester we were assigned to do a blog when we were supposed to write about our point of view of everything that we discussed in class. This blog represented our external journey during these months. For me this activity was pretty hard because I’m not an easy person when it comes to write and expose myself to others. But then I found out that it was a good way to improve my skills on writing and had another experience in my education.  Also the opportunity to express myself and be creative was my favorite part. At the beginning trying to find the perfect background, editing the font, pictures and every detail to give a good impression was really fun.

In my opinion, I can see that every post have it’s own mark of what message I wanted to lead. Any of them are longer than others but each one has approximate from 250 – 500 words following the professor’s rules. I also enjoyed posting pictures among the text, because it gives a vision and entertain the readers. From the start I was scared to write and being reviewed by my professor and also my classmates, but this begin to change because I saw that we(classmates) were in the same position and it was more comfortable to me.  Also it’s really hard to express about something you find interested when English isn’t your native language.

From all the blogs I have written, my favorite is “The adventure of being a tourist.” This one was the best of the best; I had the opportunity to act like a tourist and performed everything that we discussed in class. The vision of that tourist of seeking a Paradise, which I agree, that out Puerto Rico is, but seeing my island from another perspective was an awesome experience. Also being with some friends in a mission for my class was really fun too. The good thing about this was enjoying the same place I’ve always visited but in a different way and having the opportunity to write about it.

This post has being difficult to write, because it feels like is the ending of my journey in this course. This ending is different from others; it’s one full of good personal experiences that I will cherish forever. Thanks to professor Pittmann to give us the opportunity to be part of this course and all the activities involved in it. Our journey has just begun…

"Internal Journey"

       

       Back in the day, when we got to this class for the first time the professor said that this class was going to be a journey, one were your transportation were a notebook and the journey was to your mind.  In order to make that possible the deal was to write every day, during the class a 10-minute free writing.  In this free writing we had to look deep in our minds, and write down to paper every thought, every feeling spontaneously. But it was definitely not that simple, we had to write but we cannot worry about spelling, cross out words and we had to do it without stopping for ten minutes straight. And that’s were the journey in the search of our thoughts began.

 

            Then, when the free writing was done our goal was to reach deep down in our minds and feelings, so we had to make some kind of journey compasses. As we know a compass has 4 points, north, south, east and west, but in this case our points were spiritual, emotion, mind and physical. The point was to write how you felt in that moment about all of the 4 points of the compass and then rate them with a scale from one to three, where one was really poor and three excellent.

            At the end our journey had a total of forty exercises of free writing and twenty-four compasses.  When I started writing in January I just saw it like a simple writing but now that I look back in time I can see how much I’ve grown in English and personally. The latest free writing showed me how much I improved, at first I was writing, kind of robotically and trying to take care of my spelling and then I just started to write, to express my feelings and let my mind do all the job and all the spelling thing was gone.  For the compasses all I can say is that doing them was really a journey, having the opportunity to just sit down and think about my life and getting to know where I was bad and where not was it. It really helped me in a way that I couldn’t think before.

            Finally I want to mention that the deal for this class wasn’t complete without the fact that we had to decorate our transportation (the notebook), it had to have personality and meaning. For this I just thought that the perfect way of showing all of this was to put on all of these places that I want to go and some quotes that I really found interesting and like.

"Life is notes under our fingers -- we just have to figure out what notes to play." - Jamie Fox

"Rum Diary"

Our class is basically all about what are identity and the problems of it. Through all this time we had the opportunity to read stories about other countries and compare them with our situation in Puerto Rico, but not one were Puerto Rico was the place where the story takes place. This opportunity came with the movie: The Rum Diary, one that takes place in Puerto Rico in the 1960’s. The question is: ¿What is this movie about? This movie is about a book written by Hunter S. Thompson where a novelist in the search for a job moves to Puerto Rico to work at the San Juan Star.

           

            One curious thing about this movie is that we can see what Jamaica Kincaid said in her essay about tourists; but now from Puerto Rico. Through the entire movie we see how tourists see or saw our island back then, specially Americans and other problems that affect our society.  They mention the problems of alcohol, culture and even criminality in our island.

            For me one quote that shows directly our problem of identity is when Lotterman said: “This is a schizoid society Kemp. They got two languages, two flags, two loyalties, two anthems. We bring them stuff they never had. They either hate it or they want more of it. It’s a reluctant part of America. It’s like England with tropical fruit.” This shows exactly the problem that Puerto Ricans have, but not only that, it shows what Americans thinks of us. A way where they think they’re superior to us and were just a territory, with people without expectations.  And then we have the fact that when Kemp asked the tourists about Puerto Rico they just said: “We don’t leave the hotel, it isn’t safe.

            Unlike them there is our protagonist, Paul Kemp, a novelist from New York that once got to Puerto Rico he started to see the reality about it, he was an alcoholic, and Lotterman said to him that Puerto Rico wasn’t to place to stop drinking but apart of that he started to see poverty and serious problems that our island has, so he finally decided to speak the truth and write about it. Truth that took all movie to prove, since all they do was to make money and publish they’re stories.

            Personally I found interesting the opportunity to watch this movie while doing this class since it is all about identity. I really enjoyed watching it after I’ve read the Jamaica Kincaid essay, it definitely showed me what I thought about tourists in a movie. But the factor that really got me is that the movie took place back in 1960 but in 2014 we still facing some of the problems they showed in the movie, we still have poverty, we still have alcoholism and we definitely still have the identity problem where all we got is two languages, two flags, two loyalties and two anthems.

Mini Sagas and Immigration Panel

Last week I had to attend to another conference from the Student Conference titled: “Student Interventions in General Studies: Interdisciplinary projects and creative initiatives” presented by the faculty of General Studies. This one was about the Mini Sagas: My creativity process. What is a Mini Saga? Well, they explained to the audience that Brian Aldiss originally created Mini-sagas. These sagas consist in a short piece of writing that contents only 50 words. What I found interesting and hard to do was to write something good, special and emotional in just 50 words. One of the students wrote about eating disorders and she read it to the audience like it was a poem. I loved it because it was straight to the point but at the same time with a pure message. Other was about racist and what women expect to find in a husband. This panel was definitely fun and I enjoyed it from beginning to end.

Another panel that was presented was about the Immigration of Dominicans in Puerto Rico.    This one called my attention immediately because the girls that were presented are Dominicans. They started to explain their perspective of the topic and their personal experience. What called my attention was that for Dominicans it’s really difficult to adapt in this island, and it’s not because of the island conditions, but Puerto Ricans as civilization make this process harder than I thought. The racism in Puerto Rico is a fact and while I was listening to these brilliant girls, I thought that every Puerto Rican should have been listening to their panel. Without question this panel was very emotional and educational as well. As a Puerto Rican we face this issues in other countries and it’s unreasonable that these things still happening at this time. We all are humans and where we belong can’t be a reason to discrimination.

Conference Day One

As part of my assignments to this course the professor invite us to attend at the Student Conference titled: “Student Interventions in General Studies: Interdisciplinary projects and creative initiatives” presented by the faculty of General Studies. There some of my classmates presented their work to the audience about the topics of our course. First, Laura presented her paper making an introduction of what it was our course about. She explained very well the journey that we were doing in this class from difference perspectives and papers. We’ve been able to experience two types of journeys, the internal and external. According to Laura the external was the experiences based on interactions with the external social world and the internal was based on your internal interactions. This definition that I agree with them because gives the essence of the course. Later she started to talk about how the world see Puerto Rico and how important is the global view of it. Also she mentioned that the political status of Puerto Rico is an issue that people don’t understand very well.  In second place, Carla talked about the helping method and communication from the Cooper’s essays. She mentioned that this method was wrong and to be able to succeed we had to put it away.  Also she said that in a professional world this method couldn’t be used. In third place, Lorna talked about Small place and Peter Roberts.  Then Sylvette show us her paper, about the communication between tourists and travelers. This one was my favorite because she explained through all the conference the point of view of tourists and travelers. Finally, in my opinion this conference was a good source to every student that want to expand their knowledge about the identity of each country and how outsiders perceive them.