Orbitting Izzy review

Every day there is someone who got out of jail just trying to get a second chance at life and trying to do anything in their power to get on with their life. Unfortunately for ex-convicts it’s hard to get a job when you are just fresh out of prison or if you have a stained record because of a crime and a prison sentence. Despite that some of them are fortunate enough to find a job and keep going with their lives. It’s true that the jobs they usually get are very hard and most of the people don’t want them but something is something and they have to take whatever they can get.

 

This is the case of Nancy Whiteley, the author of "Orbiting Izzy" in which she tells a little bit of her story. In this story Nancy tells us her process of getting out of prison and getting a job and how it was hard to get accustomed to her new life. She first starts off by saying why she went to prison in the first place. It all started with a man, a bad man that led her down a criminal of stealing people’s identities and having a rich life because of this. Her glamourous life was cut short though by the law, who caught up with her and landed her in prison. After her time in prison she got out and got a job at a financial firm with a man named Isadore Weintraub, but she called him Izzy. Throughout the story she narrates how her process of getting accustomed to her non glamourous life, to which she never really gets accustomed to because she spends a lot of time thinking about how much she misses her old life and Aldo, the man who got her in her criminal life in the first place. During the rest of her time she spend it having fun with Izzy and showing him how to loosen up and on the process she learns responsibility. At the end she goes back to her old life because Izzy fell in love with her. After all she ended up in prison again.

 

This is also something that happens a lot. The people that get out and try to go on with life sometimes end up going back to their life of crime because of the lack of opportunities they have or rather get. It’s sad to see this but it happens. This becomes a cycle in which the person keeps getting in and out and just wanting to get better but can seem to do it.                  

 

Running Brave,a movie full of emotions

We all can say that we have some kind of dream that we would like to chase and accomplish. The difference is in whether the person decides to make their dreams come true or just set them aside because whatever reason they have. A lot of people life the rest of their lives in regret for not chasing their dreams so that is why people are always telling others to follow their dreams. We can see something like this in the movie Running Brave which tells the story of the North American Indian boy Billy Mills, who had a dream to be a professional runner and go to the Olympics.

            In the movie Billy Mills is an Indian that goes to Kansas City University after his high school coach brought the track and field team coach from the university to see Mills run and hopefully get him a scholarship to the university. The coach was hesitant at first because he already had bad experiences while working with Indians but after all he did agreed to take him. After much training and being pushed by his coach Mills got his dream and spend the next four years in KU running with the team in a display of great speed and talent by beating his opponents by a considerably big margin and not really getting that much tired. At the end of his four years he just lost the love of running and went back to the reserve until his brother killed himself, which made him go to the marines and later to the Olympics to end up winning in a tide race and fulfill his dream and bring happiness to his people.

            I have to say even though the movie is very old it is very entertaining and very inspirational. I definitely enjoyed watching the movie, especially the final race, which was the best part in my opinion. I have to say that I was like "come on Billy you have to run, you have to win, this movie can’t end like this, it’s too much sadness in one movie". In my 18 years of life not one movie has created that effect in me in which it is not something that is currently happening but I cheer the person anyway and I have watched "Space Jam" a lot of times. What made it more emotional for me is to know that it is based on real life because I tend to connect more and like more movies that are based on real life.

            I have to say that it is a very inspiring story to see in a movie and those people that are in a fight to follow their dream should see it to find some inspiration. The most inspiring thing for me was to see from where he came from, as we can see in the movie being an Indian at that time did not bring you too many opportunities, all the contrary it restrained you to stay in the reserve. Plus he lost his father when he was 12 and that is not something easy, if my dad died I wouldn’t want to do anything. Then his brother killed himself to make everything worst and he got rejected by his own king at one point. Plus he got sick of running at one time. To see him overcome all those odds and difficulties is a true testament of what will power and dedication can do when you decide to do anything against all odds. For me it was one of the best movies ever and everyone should see this at one point in their lives.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sN-CGgdZl4





      

First Thoughts Journal

The First Thoughts Activity was something new for me this year. First of all I have to say that I am one of those persons that doesn’t like to write, I find it boring. Never the less I have to say that I really enjoyed doing this activity. Like I said it was something new for me and I really liked the activity, it gave a new perspective of what writing is. I use to see it as something that they made us do in school just to do work but this change my way of thinking a lot. This exercise made me even enjoy writing for the first in my life that wasn’t writing my music. It even made it fun and gave it a meaning for me. It was all because I felt free writing with that activity. To know that I didn’t have to worry about how I’m writing, my grammar and that I could write whatever I was feeling at that time was liberating. It helped me blow off some steam a lot of times and it helped me in daily situations. I really plan to keep doing this even though the assignment is over because it is a really positive way to get everything out of your system.

To be honest I didn’t have any problems doing this activity because even though I don’t like to write when I do I always kind of write what’s on my mind. So I don’t when I started doing this it was like continue doing what you were already doing but now I have a reason to do it and that’s why I liked the assignment so much. That is why I was so successful at carrying out this assignment. As for not caring about the grammar and everything of that nature I was relief because I’m not the best at that. This exercise even made me find more time in the day for doing more stuff which is a relief really.

As for me as a writer I don’t see this changing my view. I am not someone who will write books for someone else to read. I will always write for myself, the only person that reads my stuff other than me are the professors and that’s because it is an obligation. This is unless it is my music and even this I don’t show to just anyone I have to have confidence in the person. The only that I show my writing is that I become a singer and that is not likely to happen.

Life compass

The life compass is the second activity that the professor has given us to have a way to express ourselves while we write so that we can have a way to let out everything that we have inside. This activity consist on, basically, making a circle with four extensions coming out of it. This extinctions represents the four core parts of a person, the spiritual side, the mental, the emotions and the body. So in this exercise you have to look at yourselves in very individual wat because you have to separate every aspect from each other in order to know how each one is feeling. After this the next step is that you have to give each aspect a score or rating between a 1 and a 3 depending on how each aspect of your person is feeling. A 3 is that you are feeling the best you ca be and the 1 is that you are a lousy as you can be so you have both sides of the coin. If you are feeling in between the two then you have the 2 score for those days when you are just good. Now to talk about my experience doing this assignment. Tobe honest I really liked to do this way of writing as oppose to the journal exercise for a variety of reasons. The first one being that it is more short and it is not that I don’t like writing it’s just that right now I have a lot of work and it’s hard to have to write ten minutes when you have so little time like we had to do with the journal, so to have a way to let out all my frustration and talk about what I did in the day that is much shorter is just an advantage for me and I really loved this exercise for that. I really plan to keep doing this even after the assignment is over just because of the huge impact that it had in my life. When I did the life compass I felt a huge amount of satisfaction with myself and it made me want to make myself better when I was down so it helped me a lot in my daily life. Maye know I won’t do it so often but maybe once a week just to let out all my frustrations off my mind. As for the numbers on my compass they were almost always a two in every category except in spirit which I always try to keep at three. Only one time it went down to two.













 

Hair chronicles My take

We all have our different life and our different situations and we each deal with this situations in our different ways. We also decide how we are going to tell our story differently as we are marked by different situations in our lives. The Hair Chronicles by Tabatha Rowley is a perfect example of this as we see the author tell her story in her own unique way. Tabatha was a black girl growing up in the ghetto of Connecticut. Sadly as many of the black people in the United States living in this communities Tabatha had a life full of difficulties and problems that led to her making some very bad decisions. It all started when she was little as she was molested by her uncle, who was not really her uncle, and we could say that that was what started it all for her. She was also bullied at school and ended up using drugs at a really young age, which is a scenario that, sadly, we see too much in young people. She even had to do drugs to perform in a rap group that she had with friends. To add to that her mother hit her a lot with a lot of objects like cables and her own fists. All this problems ended up with her leaving school and going to jail for an assault on her abusive boyfriend with a gun. In jail she started to explore herself and ended up finding out who she really was and how all her problems had affected her and how she had managed them in a poor way. She ended up getting detoxed from all the drugs and even got her high school diploma, is working know and has even reunited with her son. So we could say that she has rehabilitated herself. The curious thing about her story is that she uses her hair as a sort of timeline. Each style of hair she had represented a phase in her life and her style of hair reflected how she was acting and thinking. That is why at the end when she is clear of who she is she decides to go with her natural form of hair, to represent exactly that.    

My take on the mission

As most of us know by now in the university the students you have to take classes that are from general studies. I would go on to say that even the students in high school know about this and know that this classes are waiting for them when they graduate. Probably every student from first year or second year or even a student that is in his fourth year could have the question, as well as the high school students that are going to be in the university in the near future, have asked themselves why in the world do we have to take this classes if we have been taking general classes all of our lives in our school. Is not the university supposed to teach us how to be professionals and show us how to perform in our life career? To this the answer is a very big yes but also the university has a valid reason of why they give this general classes that a lot of students find as useless and a waste of our time and money. The reason to give this classes is to continue the process that started our school teachers and bring it to the university to make us all part of a community of intellectual people that can function properly in our society. It wants to make us thinking people that can face the difficulties that come with life by using the knowledge that we get from this classes. This helps become a full student because if we do not learn about the basics how will we understand the more complex classes if his classes give an idea to understand the concentration classes. I have to admit that I was one of the students that thought that this classes had no meaning of reason to be but after reading its intentions I know get it and think that they really are useful.     
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY_8h6LNI9M



 

Thinking before acting

Throughout this semester of the class we have been discussing the danger that is drinking while intoxicated or under the influence of alcohol. We saw this in the novel Long Drive Home by Will Allison in which a young boy of eighteen years of age that was driving under the influence of alcohol and had a car accident and ended up dead. Even though he did not primarily die because of driving drunk but it did have a part in the accident. Then we went to see the exhibit in the University of Puerto Rico that the group Fiesta II did about the dangers and consequences about drunk driving which was very well put and had a lot of information that helps the people understand and control themselves from doing this. They even put a poster that said the amount of alcohol that you could drink, so they are not telling that you cannot drink alcohol it is just that you have to control yourself and if you drink too much you cannot drive. They even put examples about accidents that have happened because of drunk driving and the stats of how many accidents are caused by drunk driving and the number is alarming. Then we were assigned to listen to a song called "where is the love" by the Black Eyed Peas in which they talk about how humanity is doing things without thinking about other people and how it could affect them. Plus everyone I doing things to get something in return, that something most of the times being money. This can relate to Long Drive Home and the Fiesta II exhibit because by Glen cutting in front of Juwan he caused the accident and got him killed. On the other hand Juwan was irresponsible too because he did not think of the consequences of drunk driving as neither did the drunk drivers who’s stories where told in the exhibit and caused the death of so many people they did not know.  

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpYeekQkAdc

A little bit of me

Well to start this blog I would like to introduce myself. My name is Francisco Javier Pastrana Aleman and I was born in the most beautiful place in the world, my island, Puerto Rico, the island of charm. To be more specific I was born in the hospital Pavia in Hato Rey. Currently, as I have always, I live in Trujillo Alto which mostly composed of countryside where I love to live and I have to say that I cannot imagine living in any other place because I have grown accustomed to living there plus I love living here because it is super quiet and you usually do not have problems other than what to do with so much quiet. I am the youngest of three wonderful brothers, two boys and one girl. My brother’s name is David Enrique Pastrana Aleman and my sister’s name is Keishla Marie Pastrana Aleman. My brother is the oldest and I have always had a bond with him that is unbreakable, he basically knows everything about me and I trust him with my eyes closed, which is why it was so hard for me when he got a girlfriend and started spending so much time with her but now I do not mind plus she is very nice and I am happy for him. My sister and I do not have the same bond but it is still a very good relationship and I trust her a lot and she is like my second mom. Obviously I cannot forget my parents Pedro David Pastrana Martinez and Edna Maria Aleman Ruiz. I have to say that I feel like I have the best parents in the world because they everything literally for me and my brothers and even though we do not always see eye to eye but we always end up making up and I love them with all my eyes. As for me I really consider myself as pretty normal guy. I have done sports basically all my life, mostly basketball and volleyball but never reached the next level so I did not expect a career out of it so I did it for fun. I have always been a straight A student and my GPA when I graduated was 381. Other than that I love music from reggaeton to salsa and hip hop and rap in both English and Spanish. Plus that I also write music and sing but have never decided to have a career out of it because of fear even though everyone tells me I am good at it. I usually record myself and just send it to my friends for fun. I can write both rap and reggaeton, from romantic to gangster. My favorite singers are in Spanish Ñengo Flow and in English Eminem, the greatest rapper ever. Others than them I like Cosculluela and Kendo Kaponi in Spanish and Lil Wayne and Tupac in English. Right now I am studying in the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras. I am studying to be a physical education teacher because that way I feel I can help the young people of the world because they need it a lot to have an example as I did at that age.