My Walk: to Health!

The idea was that I was, that I was, gonna take pictures of things I wanted to talk about as I walked, but, someone forgot to charge they phone (or check if it had battery) before the walk, so I was left with: a damaged mp3 player, headphones, a dead phone, a wallet, sketching pencils and my journal. I decided to make the best of it, and be creative. Before i left the house and took of which direction I wanted to take my walk, I took out the journal and sketched a very badly done path of where I wanted to go and I relived that, theres a lot of blanks for me when it comes to the path I usually take, for example: I couldn’t remember what was right next to the store or… much of anything besides the way to get there, my mission: to figure it out. 

Usually I get home from school, take a bath and either go to the gym or for a walk to my favorite healthy food place after I’ve had my after school snack. Today I gave myself time to do both (it was leg day, you cant skip leg day). I got home from school took a bath, went to the gym, took a shower and went on my walk. 

I was gonna take some pictures of the first few things that I noticed, but like I stated before the universe was not having it. So I drew some to the best of my abilities (not much of it to be sincere). There was a bench I’ve never noticed and the restaurant even had a huge tree that i hand even payed attention to, and that made me feel kind of awkward; being in a place I was so familiar with and realizing that I wasn’t as aware of it as I thought. I give credit to my phone being dead, and giving myself the chance to look attaching for the first time ever, it seems. I gave myself the opportunity to not be in a hurry because I had things to do (even though I had this blog to do, but oh well, fight me).

Things and activities like this give you the opportunity to realize that the world is so much bigger that what we make it look, because we are too distracted with other, more ‘important’ things to give it the time of day or space for analysis. The overwhelming amount of technology we use and the lack of attention we give to people, and out surrounding; as someone who is so into fitness and wellness and health and everything to do with a wholesome way of life, it made me feel like I wasn’t fallowing my own ideals. I think we should all do this every once in a while. Turn off our phones and just, live a minute, out there, in the big bad unknown world. This accident turned out to help me (my phone is alive now by the way, he’s recovering slowly).

On Looking

“You missed that. Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawnmower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.” (Horowitz) 

I think this quote is very eye catching, it makes you think almost immediately; if you were anything like me, you took a double take and decided to look up and around you, just to prove the writer wrong, or to prove a point. It quite interesting that we don’t really think about anything outside of who we are and what we do. We can be selfish and self-important, and we don’t really do it on purpose, we are just so caught up in our lives that we forget that, things happen, the wind blows, the flowers grow, people stare; and anecdote that i experienced that proves this is how I met my boyfriend. 

Four years ago, I went on a trip to Boston where I stayed with my aunt (and godmother) for around five months, kind of as a method and moment of distraction from the things going on in my life then. I really liked books and anything to do with writing so my aunt gave me my little cousins library card to keep (because she didn’t use it), so I because Andy for five months. During that time I went almost daily there, from open to close, and I read over twenty books, while I did, I never noticed someone looking at me from far away. Turns out he had been mastering up the courage to talk to me, and here we are, three years in. 

We don’t look at the small things because we cannot seem to give them enough importance, even though there are occasion where the small things are what makes the moment; my family is relatively fast walkers (including me) but sometimes I like to say “lets slow down and smell the flowers”, to kind of tell them to look around and feel the wind and the sun on their faces. Whats the point of being self involved and “living your own life” all the time? The world deserved to be looked at, we can let such beauty go unnoticed forever. 

Work Cited

Horowitz, Alexandra. Amateur Eyes. http://www.nicenet.org/ICA/class/document_show.cfm?do cument_id=2186116

Infinity

I remember the days under the sun and the heat of San Juan and how the world was always so wonderful and big and so very united. I used to love the colors of the sky and I really liked the sound of the birds. I always considered the world too big for me and my older brother always reminded me that I was just as big as the world. 

On one of my many trips to San Juan I begged and cried o my hero about a little cute infinity neckless that I really liked in one of the vendors tables and he was sweet enough to get it for me. I never wanted to part with it because the person I looked up to the most had gotten it for me. One day on my brothers 20th birthday he was cruelly taken way from us. I remembered my remaining brother running out of the house crying and I locked myself on my brothers room.

I didn’t know what was going on, the two days he was missing, I was at the movies when my aunt told me we had to leave, quickly, because there were urgent news, I didn’t really caught on with the situation, and I couldn’t understand when they told me. From then on that little neckless meant the world to me. it never left my side and I refused to let anyone touch it no matter how much they said it was pretty or beautiful. It was more than a simple neckless it was all I had left of my brother. 

One day on a cruel joke pulled on me by the kids I lost it. i saw it break and fall and I froze as I saw them throwing it away. Just like that. Like it meant nothing. My brother had been my security blanket and the person who inspired me to be whoever I decide to be. The kids didn’t get that, to them,  that neckless was just that, a neckless. While for me it was my brother, the very last thing I had of my brother. it wasn’t fair. That they could go home and have the most precious thing to them, and I had to go home and cry because it felt like I had lost my brother. 

I didn’t want to forget such a beautiful soul and an inspiring person, my best friend, the other side of my hip, but we grow and we learn if who we are through out the hardships of life. and let me tell you life is hard. This taught me to be strong and it reminded me that, that neckless wasn’t my brother, my brother was always going to be with me, forever and always no matter what. My brother is the reason I am where I am, and why I am who I am. Told me life wasn’t one to live for other, but it was only meant to be lived by ourselves and only ourselves. I love you Jorge, and we miss you, forever and always. 

All about being a Tourist

Tourism is defined—with a simple google search—as: “the commercial organization and operation of vacations and visits to places of interest” and by the Marriam Webster dictionary as: “the practice of traveling for recreation” among other similar sounding definitions. Tourism can be extremely beneficial for the economy and can definitely aid in the betterment of a place due to economic instability or such other causes; but it can have a lot of disadvantages and damaging consequences: locally and socially. 

Locally, the effects not really things people really pay a lot of attention to, which they should; something that comes to mind really quickly and its so pronounced, would be the pollution of local tourist locations: beaches, San Juan, etc. I admit, we locals don’t really have the most amazing track record when it comes to keeping said places super clean, but we have to recognize something, tourist don’t really feel the need to take care of things that are not ‘theirs’. These “outsiders”, don’t really feel the need to be clean, because they are not home. Puerto Rico is not really a place they feel the need to take care of, because they are here to have fun not, be clean.

The worth of the natives, in this case puertorricans,  are boiled down to one thing: how much their hotel and plain ticket cost; how much the life of the native is worth. We discuss in our class a lot of the stereotypes that tourist have for us: how we party, and drink all day, how we can’t possibly be smart or accomplished professionals and my conclusion is one thing; they can’t seem to realize that this might be a tropical island but we still have a life outside of their vacation. I think below being “the help” we lose the right to be human, in their eyes we lose our humanity, our aspirations, our hopes, dreams, goals and  everything that define us as humans. We are nothing outside some exotic object that needs to be observed, some strange expectation to describe to their friends and family when they get back home as they hand them the keychain they bought near the beach. 

      Recently I took the adventure of pretending to be foreign in several activities with various degrees of understanding: to get some supplements (where I pretended to not be able to speak or understand english), to the capital city (Where I didn't speak english or spanish and relied on very bad french), and to a restaurant (purely english). I got treated like some sort of special costumer simply because I did not speak the language, but something I found very curious, while I was asking questions and getting supplements and wondering around the register a couple with a few kids came in asking about random stuff that I wasn't really paying attention to, the two sales clerks seem to make fun of them more openly then they would had I been be able to understand and once the couple left they were loudly making fun of them for their lack of knowledge and shapes while giving me sweet smiles and spaced out giggles. It was very rude. I promptly made a complaint.

Tourism can be extremely beneficial, or it can be dangerously demanding to the locals as humans. We create a dependency economically to these travelers and strangers buying things from us, and we create a vision of inferiority to them. The idea of tourist being somehow superior even alters how we act when we approach them. Go to San Juan during “high season” and look at how locals interact with them. Treated like royalty, not as equals; which is what we should be.

Works Cited

Randle, Dave. “The Tourism Crisis: Impacts and Solutions.” Huffington Posts, 6 Dec. 2017, 12:26 Pm, www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-dave-randle/the-tourism-crisis-impact_b_3900503.html.

____________ “Tourism.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tourism.