Oh my gosh this is it! I can't believe we've gotten to the last blog post!
This experience has honestly been an incredible one and I do hope to be able to continue doing this in another blog. Its an entirely new concept to me as I had never written a blog before and always wondered how the people that do this for a living managed to do it. While this experience is merely a brief glimpse into theirs I did thoroughly enjoy it.
I spent the last 15 minutes re-reading everything I posted, noticing errors in grammar and places where my argument could have been presented better and with more evidence than I had in that moment. But even if I can go back and fix them now I'm not going to, it shows my growth and expansion of knowledge in the last few months. In all honesty this has turned out more fun than I could have hoped for, the readings allowed me to explore different sides of myself and Puerto Rico and how we all feet kind of seamlessly into this chaotic puzzle of the world.
Looking back at the very first post I did, and the way I decorated the blog speaks volumes of who I am and the last few posts show who I am becoming. At the beginning of it all, I was very bitter considering everything that had been happening in my life during that time, and now though the situation is by no means fixed it has become easier to deal with. The quote at the top of my bog is from one of my favorite authors, J.R.R Tolkien and its from the poem "All That is Gold Does Not Glitter", which goes as follows:
The whole poem is one huge monument of inspiration because it describes a character who has shunned his lineage, refused to be king because he believes his father's line is weak, and that the same weakness flows through his veins but in the end he perseveres and wins the battle against the darkest forces of his land. The line that is featured in my blog is the one I most look to when I am lost, I take solace in it because it tells me that even if I am wandering around not knowing exactly what I am going to do with my life it doesn't mean I am forever lost.
To this I add that the song I have on the side of my blog also reflects a new part of my life and I shall once again be explicit on which lyrics I am talking about:
Every time I hear this song, this line gives me chills and I think it is because a part of me understood that there comes a time when you are going to have to start again, be it with friendship, university degrees or any other situation. Its learning how to be alone after being with someone for so long, its learning that sometimes people grow apart and that that is a part of life and you cant change that. Times change and you have to change with them even if it means starting again. Its amazing that something as simple (and complex) as this blog has helped me come to these conclusions.
It has not been easy doing all this plus all my other university work, and dealing with the transfer to another university which means dealing with two financial offices instead of one, and applying for scholarships. It has been an uphill climb but I am finally seeing the top of the mountain.
With this I leave you, for the last time, with a song YES from a Musical! and again from Hamilton!
This songs speaks about George Washington asking Alexander to write his Farewell Address and the line that speaks out to me the most is "We're going to teach them how to say goodbye."
So this is me, saying goodbye to you One Last Time.
Goodbye ladies, gents and celestial beings. Until we meet again.
Out of all the chapters that I saw in passing in the book Geography of Bliss I chose the last one, America. I didn't choose it necessarily because it was a theme I am familiar with, but because the line accompanying the title struck a chord in me.
HAPPINESS IS HOME
Eric Weiner chose to come back to America after nearly a decade of being abroad by entering through Miami, at first by the prompting of a friend by simply say Dockominium. When he finally did get there, it was to find out his friend had died of a sudden heart attack and chose to actually move to Miami with his wife. The first thing he points out is that Miami (and America in general) take almost an aggressive stance to promote happiness, mentioning Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". He also notes that the study of happiness in the US had been majorly stable and only marginally affected by situations like the Cuban Missile Crisis of '62 or 9/11. He also takes notice of the peculiarity of this fact considering that divorce, suicide, mental disorders, violent crimes and other factors seem to be increasing. Weiner then speaks about how America subsists not on the idea of happiness but on the notion of hope to one day be happier than they are at the moment also mentioning that, "Americas current fixation with finding happiness coincides with an era of unprecedented material prosperity" which makes it seem like the only happiness Americans can get is by possessing more property or material things.
I differ on this stance because while I don't doubt this complex of having a lot of material things or wanting to have more than someone else exists, the experiences I've had with most US citizens today is that they are barely scraping by with what they have yet they still manage to be happy. I take this to be something akin to Judith Fein's experience with the Vietnamese citizens after the war. They are honestly just happy to be alive and be able to feed their families, and he mentions something similar to this when throwing the Self-help books under the bus by saying that instead of searching inwards for happiness like the books suggest it is better to look outward to the happiness a close bond to another person can give you.
Weiner states at one point that although he has attempted to like Miami, he just cant seem to and wonders if he would enjoy it more if he was latino and he asked a Cuban American friend of his why the Latin people were so happy given their relative poverty to which he answers that it is in part on their focus on family, which gives you a sense of focus and sense of meaning.
Near the end of the chapter he speaks to two women, one who moves every few years as she gets angsty if she is one place for too long and the other who is a two time cancer survivor who has lived in the same place for 22 years. He came to the conclusion that the lack of happiness one felt could be caused by a lack of commitment, one woman doesn't like living in one place. With the other woman is where the notion of home came to play, when prompted by Weiner to tell him where she would want to die instead of where she considers home to which she answers Vermont, the place where she grew up instead of Asheville where she currently lives.
This brings an interesting theme in to play, where would you want to die if you lived somewhere other than the place you were born?
That is a question I cannot answer right now, as I am living in the very island I was born on. But when I look to the future, a future I can only see being lived in New York or Washington D.C, when I die if I am in either of those places or somewhere else I would like to be buried in Puerto Rico. This is simply because my family will be there, my mother is buried here. This in turn brings us back to family, a theme I believe is fundamental in the pursuit of happiness, it doesn't necessarily have to be biological family. It is finding someone you love to be with, having a close bond to someone is a profound sense of happiness that I do not believe anyone can be without.
In the end, what drew me to this chapter was the quote Happiness is Home, because as I mentioned a few blog posts back I do believe home is where your heart is. Mine will always be with my father and niece and the friends who have been with me through the hellish parts of my.
As ever, I leave you with a song from ANOTHER musical. This one tells of the story of a year and the different ways to measure it be it deaths, love, happiness or friends.
Despite how much we like to fool ourselves the educational differences between US Public Schools and Puerto Rican public schools is stark. The only way I've seen that you can get an education similar to that of a good US Public School is by enrolling your kid in a Private School which not a lot people are able to do. I was one of those students that started out in private school when my dad had a good paying job and after was transferred to public school for fourth grade. Apparently the difference was so present that the first time I took the PPAA ( Pruebas puertorriqueñas) when they got my results at the beginning of 5th grade they wanted to bump me up to 6th Grade, 7th if I did well in another test they wanted me to take. But for some godforsaken reason I said no, sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I'd said yes but I don't regret it because if I had said yes I wouldn't have met the amazing best friends I have right now.
For me, during this reading, the quote that most stood out to me amidst the disaster that is the Department of Education in the 50's was this:
"I think I did teach my students a little English, but probably anything they learned was just from having been in contact with a native speaker of the language for a few hours a week."
This statement that Jim Cooper plants is a very important point as it is the most common way that some Puerto Ricans learn English, the majority of my learning English did not occur in course through private school, nor do I credit it to the English classes in Public School thought they were an important part in spelling and grammar. The majority of my English came from spending every summer since I was a kid with my aunt in Miami where she made me speak English if I ever had a question about something at a store or whenever it was needed in social interactions. It goes without question that at first I was petrified, and my aunt did help me in those occasions. And of course she didn't send me out unprepared, the moments of social interaction came after a grueling month of English Class during the summer and her speaking to me in Spanish and me answering in English. It became a survival tool and it got to the point that one summer after I had been transferred to Public School, I came back from Miami speaking better English than some of the teachers at school. I, horrifically, became a model student in my English classes which caused some animosity from my fellow classmates but I took it in stride and helped them out when they did ask for help.
And as always I close with a song, which has been meticulously chosen from the bottomless pit that is my music collection. This one was actually chosen because of an essay I was writing in which I touched the subject about how experiences and mistakes change a person, sometimes not for the best but what matters is that you realize your going down a path that is not the right one for you and you choose to take (or forge) a better path:
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As you can probably tell from the past 8-ish posts I have thing for Musicals(I am not sorry), anyways here are the lyrics in case you want to follow along.
