My Brazilian Trip

Over summer I visited Brazil for 3 weeks, and like the sons and daughters of most professors at the U of I, many of the places they went were payed for them by the University so they could study abroad. This time they had found a way to tag us along, meaning that it would basically be a vacation for my brother and I. Even better though was the fact that one of my best friends, who goes to Brazil every summer to visit family, would meet us in Fortaleza (the beach town we were staying at.

                One of the aspects which interested me as I arrived in Fortaleza was how unique the structures were. Each building was at least 20+ stories high but spread out over a large expanse of space. I wasn’t curious enough to ask why, although I had some guesses that it would prevent robberies or save ground space. Anyway I was astonished because the city looked three times as large as Chicago with the amount of high rises, but the population is only 1/3 the size. As we arrived to our hotel I was joyful to realize that it was right next to the beach, so we could walk out and be surrounded by the Brazilian culture. On the down side, since all the businesses knew that the Fortaleza beach was a place tourists went, everything was twice as expensive. But there were a lot of activities to do without money, many fitness programs were going on at the beach in addition to dozens of people playing beach soccer. Every time Omeed and I would stare in awe at the beach soccer players, partly because of the fact that they were Brazilian and in arguably the greatest Soccer nation in the world. But also because of this new style of soccer we had never seen before. The sand made the ball inconvenient to dribble, so frequently players would pop the ball up in the air and juggle or volley it. This style looked really elegant and I wanted to join with them. The only problem was that I didn’t know how to speak Portuguese so my friend became my official translator. We ended up getting in on a game of pickup soccer and I even scored a goal.

                The rest of the trip was fun and I did learn a lot about the socio-economic inequalities Brazil has been facing for the past couple years, by being dragged along to my parents’ activities. But other than that one major highlight would have to have been dune boarding. One day we were taken on a 4 wheeler and I had no clue where we were going but the parents said it would be fun. Before I knew it we were in this desert oasis that faded into a grassland. More specifically, I was on a 100 feet sand dune that inclined down into a lake. It was so pure, yet so hard to describe. The people I went with brought with them a boogie board and Omeed being the most excited jumped head first down the dune. It looked cool because of the splash he made, but we later out found that it was super dangerous, because you are going so fast, the water slapping you hurts badly, and it is really easy to lose your balance. So I don’t know how Omeed didn’t end up injuring himself.

                There is so many more activities to describe on this trip but I don’t have enough space to explain it all. The main point to take back from it was that it was a success and really fun, I learned how to surf, kite board, while being educated about the politics and history going on in Brazil at the time. 

The Sk8 Park

I’ve been living on Hill Street for 8 years and I’ve always known that there was a skate park in Spalding Park next to my house which is also right next to Franklin. I used to only go to Spalding Park to play tennis, which I’m actually pretty decent at and got 2^nd in a Labor Day tournament but don’t quote me on that. Anyway, Spalding Park was a pretty normal park with the average amount of utilities and facilities, except that in the far corner you can see a pretty well rounded skate park. I was super surprised when I first saw it, and whenever I was young, I would pear over the fence to watch the skaters and admire how deep the pit was and the courage skaters had to go down it. But I would never go inside because I didn’t want people thinking I could skate and some of the people there were pretty sketchy and looked like weirdos. In addition, one day I went to Spalding Park with my friend and Omeed to play tennis, and soon enough two kids come up to us trying to act all macho even though they were at least 2 years younger than us, and they tried to steal our bikes. After a little bit of awkwardness figuring out that they weren’t just “trying to see your bike” but steal it, we just left because they weren’t going away. From then on I tried to stay away from that park because I assumed that the people there were all weirdos and wanna be tough guys who tried to steal bikes.

It wasn’t until last week that I started to visit the park again, it was out of boredom but my friends and I thought it would be a good idea to grind some rails and shred the course on the down low. I had drove past the skate park earlier and there had been about 2 dozen people there and they all fit the description of the people I saw a couple years ago. So we decided to go at like 10pm with 3 scooters 1 rip stick and a BMX bike. Funny thing is, there were still 4 kids there in the pitch dark smoking weed, so we tried to act casual walking in with everything but a skateboard to the skate park that late. We used our headlights on the car to shed light on the course, and when Tony Li came in with his scooter, one of the kids said “I’m tired of seeing Mother F***ers coming in here with scooters”. I found it really funny and we just ignored them. The next hour turned out to be really fun, I was finally able to go in the course which I had been peering through a fence hole for years. None of us were actually able to do anything, but just riding around on ramps and slopes was thrilling and motivated me to one day be the best sk8r in the streets, I have played skate 3 on the PlayStation 3 for a couple years so I think I would be pretty decent to be honest. I have visited the park once after that but I plan to visit the park more often from now on, regardless of whose there because you’re always going to get judged and you have to start somewhere.

Here’s a go fund me for a buying a skateboard for me and my super poor friends, any amount of cents donated is welcomed.

https://funds.gofundme.com/dashboard/7xx6w-skate-board

Edison Cross Country

I miss Edison to be honest, it was a fun two years at the school where I met a lot of friends which I have still kept in touch with in high school. I remember how nervous I was on the first day of school, sticking next to Isandro, Omeed and my other friend Daniel Giger, during the opening assembly. I was bummed that middle schools didn’t have soccer teams, so I joined the cross country team with my friends to get to know a lot of the kids there, and because I thought I was a fast kid. There I realized just how much stamina I had.

                Compared to other schools, I’m pretty sure Edison had one of the toughest cross country programs, we would run about 2 miles around the neighborhood every day after school, and on good days once in a while we would go on ice cream runs. We would have to be careful though because there had been recent kidnappings of middle school students and one group of Edison runners had reported a car following them during practice.

                The meets were what we worked up to, and they were fun. Dozens of schools putting up there 7 best runners, to see which team and individual would be the best. It was exciting because you felt that you mattered since every person you passed would mean an extra point for your team. Right before the race started you could sense how nervous everyone was, stretching, constantly moving and having unnecessary nervous laughter, was what kept everyone together. Everything built up to the announcer shouting through a speaker phone, to a crowd of runners in their starting positions, “On your marks” followed by a gunshot. After the gunshot all hell would break loose, with runners jostling for position, and it could be dangerous sometimes when there was a narrow entrance, because all the runners would get crammed and when every runner has spikes it can get dangerous, especially if you fall. I remember one race when Isandro was spiked and bleeding from the kick of the person in front of him. Isandro and I would always stick next to each other and finish right after each other, I believe by the end of 7^th grade we had beat each other an equal amount of times, but by the end of 7^th grade my PR was 11:30 compared to his 11:33. Just saying.

                All in all Cross Country was one of the highlights of middle school for me, and I still regret missing running in state for a soccer game. Believe it or not, I was not actually that enthusiastic about going to Uni the next year and if you were to ask me what Uni was at the beginning of 7^th grade I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. I was barely persuaded to go and it was only because Omeed and Isandro were going too. I say this because I was super pumped for 8^th grade cross country in Edison because we would have a varsity team that would have gotten all times under 11:30 by the end of the year, and having a solid team like that would definitely guaranteed us a spot for being one of the top 3 teams in the state.

Although going to Uni meant leaving that dream aside, I knew it was better in the long run, and unfortunately subbie year Doug didn’t let me do Cross Country along with club soccer and that was the end of the line for me and Cross Country.

(Follow @roid_squad on Instagram for more pics and stories about my childhood and Edison Cross Country!)

Sethe Ignoring Slavery and its Effects

Throughout almost all of the books that we have read in class this year, the theme of identity has been brought up because it is so important in the shaping of African American history. It also happens to be one of Beloved’s central themes, with it particularly touching on Sethe’s journey to find an identity after slavery by supporting a family and starting a life in Blue Stone. However, Beloved shows how this past of slavery can affect African Americans in forming their identity. I know that in Mr. Sutton’s history class we are learning about how when slaves were suddenly released (but in Sethe’s case she escaped) they were still treated unequally and since they had no background in being an individual and making her own plans, they were completely lost, attempting to find a path to success.

In the case of Sethe, slavery had its serious mental toll on her, when Sethe was with schoolteacher I remember they started measuring her body parts and determining which ones were human or animal. In addition to this they stole her breast milk while she is awake is, which adds onto her further dehumanization. So after Sethe escaped it looked like she chose to ignore the fact that slavery had ever affected her, but by doing it seemed to me that she unintentionally made her mental state worse because her past kept on coming to haunt her. For example, when the school teacher comes back to take control of Sethe’s children, Sethe gets a sense that no matter how far she runs away the effects of slavery is inevitable, but because she thinks that there is still a chance that her children can avoid it, she kills Beloved.

On the other hand, I think it would have been better if Sethe confronted her past of slavery in order to empower herself and find her true identity. Morrison even shows how when Beloved is reincarnated she feels like she is losing her identity when she loses a tooth and irrationally feels like she is falling apart. To me the reason was because Sethe had always hid her past from Beloved and I think that Morrison is implying that in order for Beloved to form her own identity she must have a sense of what tragic part of American history her mother and family were a part of.

Ultimately, Morrison shows how African Americans must accept their history of slavery as something they have faced AND THEN move on from there in order to find themselves, even though it’s hard and painful to do so. With the return of Beloved and the teacher, Morrison shows that Sethe can’t be free from her past relating to slavery until she is open and accepting with it. But when she tries to avoid her unavoidable roots, in order to start a new life, it actually works against her. Slavery is such a large and long lasting setback for African American’s that it has in a way become embedded in their culture, and by ignoring it Sethe is ignoring a part of her and her relatives’ history.

A Continuation of the Reasons Behind Gunner's Depression

                This post is kind of adding onto and in a way answering my last post where I questioned if we would see how Gunner becomes the pessimistic person shown in the prologue. What I realized especially from the last couple pages of this book is that we did see this change, and that a lot of it had to do with the racism that Gunner thinks he can change but is actually unavoidable, which I talked about also in my last post. More specifically, in this post I wanted to briefly analyze how Gunner got to this point in his life where he was so depressed because of the racist systematic depression in the nation.

                Throughout The White Boy Shuffle I noticed that before Gunner got into this deep of a depression and crash he had a sense of hope that drove him. This sense of hope was the changing of the inequalities that African Americans faced, especially in L.A. Gunner early on in his life had a great sense of the inequalities that African Americans faced because of the fact that he had lived both in the hood and in wealthier white neighborhoods and gone to school there as a black student. Throughout his adolescent and teenage life, he realized this, but more importantly felt the need to do something about it and change the way things are. This resulted in Gunner picking up Poetry and writing a little about life in L.A as a black person. Then with the Rodney King beating, being the first to be caught on camera and spread nationwide, he had a larger drive for change. He said that he really hoped that the cops will be caught this time, and we can see his urge for change when him and Scoby really wanted to rob some stores and be part of the rebellious L.A riots.

But right afterwards he realizes that the robbery isn’t as exciting as he thought and it’s orderly and quiet, almost in a sense boring. This to me marks the change where Gunner is hit with this sense of hopelessness that grows to the character in the prologue, he thinks to himself “I never felt so worthless in my life”, and starts to feel like his poetry and all his work has done no change and is worthless. Even when he’s in the basketball camp it seems like his mind is somewhere else, because he hates listening to people talking about basketball and he rides horses in the middle of the day. When he visits Boston University, he notices that he’s actually a lot more popular than he thought, but once again becomes depressed because he found out that one of the main reasons he’s famous is because he’s a good black poet, his blackness having a lot to do with it. Therefore, he realizes that he hasn’t broken out of this racial barrier which he was working on destroying. Saying, “I felt like I had been outed and exposed by my worst enemies, white kids that were embarrassingly like myself but with whom I had nothing in common”. Basically meaning that they’re similar in that they both like writing and are intrigued by poetry, but they just don’t have the right mindset and are all part of this racist system which he feels like is surrounding him so much that he has to strip his clothes off to escape it, to which the students still grab his clothes and chase after him.

In the end it is this rise of hope and sudden fall after realizing that nothing really has changed which affected Gunner to the point of depression. Gunner eventually thinks about suicide which is his form of not letting whites take advantage of him anymore. In all Beatty does a great job in the representation of black life in L.A and what makes this book so important is that it’s something we are still seeing today with the black lives matter movement where blacks like Gunner Kaufman are worried about the mistreatment of their race.

Can Color Be Avoided?

                Already in the first two chapters in The White Boy Shuffle, Beatty dives in and indirectly questions the universal problem asking if it is possible not to judge somebody based off of the color of their skin. Beatty uses the character of Ms. Cegeny—the main character’s third grade teacher--, and shows how she always pounds into the heads of kids should be judged for their “minds” and not their “color”. But through this process Beatty hints at how it is almost impossible in modern America to do so.

                The method which Beatty uses to show how racism is something hard to avoid, is by relating it to something that has embedded itself in the world, such as nature, human eyesight, and mental capabilities. For example, when Melissa –one of the students—reads an article in the class about sunlight, I believe that Beatty purposely left in the part where Melissa says “Dark colors such as black absorb sunlight and light colors such as white reflect sunlight”. He does this to show that even something as necessary and common in daily life as sunlight is not colorblind, but treats blacks differently than whites. Later on in the day the main character goes to the doctor’s office to get examined, and asks the doctor “Our teacher says that we should be colorblind. That’s hard when you can see color, isn’t it?”. Here Beatty is making a metaphor to race, where even though the teacher is asking the students to be colorblind it’s almost impossible when humans can see the color on people’s skin, and sometimes it’s hard not to treat others differently based off of the history that is behind the color of their skin and the stereotypes which come with that.

                In The White Boy Shuffle Ms. Cegeny is a perfect example of the naïve white, patriotic, American who although is under good intentions to try and forget America’s racist past, thinks that it can be forgotten in an instant, in this case by telling 3^rd graders to do so. Like I said before, it is smart to try and change racism in America, but it cannot simply be told to children at a young age. Children should be informed of the racism in America first, so they can understand why it’s such a deep problem, and how much harder it is to change. In result they won’t just think of equality as something that is morally right like washing your hands, but something which is more of a sensitive issue, that might be solved in a couple centuries.

 In Beatty’s prologue, he takes on a pessimistic point of view and implies that it is such of a problem that it will never be solved. Beatty says, “In the quest for equality black folks have tried everything. We’ve begged, revolted, entertained, and intermarried and still are treated like shit. Nothing works, so why suffer the slow deaths of toxic addiction [] when the immediate gratification of suicide awaits [] our mass suicide will be the ultimate sit-in”. I wonder if similar to invisible man, this story will show a transformation illustrating how the main character changes from a fun-loving kid, being taught that everyone is equal regardless of their skin color, to the pessimistic man we see in the prologue who knows it is impossible to erase racism because he has experienced so much of it that it has become a permanent part of the world.

Comparing Invisible Man and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Currently, because we have just started Their eyes were watching God, and just finished analyzing Invisible Man, I noticed some important connections between the two books through the first five chapters of Their eyes were watching God.

 The first similarity to Invisible Man which I saw in Their eyes were watching God, was how the narrator’s start their respective books. In the prologue of Invisible Man, we see the narrator foreshadow his situation by telling the readers that he is an invisible man, and leading us into the book by saying “But what did I do to be so blue? Bear with me.”. Ellison then goes on to explain the narrator’s life to show how people like him can become invisible. In Their eyes were watching God, I also saw a similar introduction where Hurston foreshadows the book in the first paragraph. Hurston basically states that most of the time men do not achieve their dreams, and their dreams stay out on the horizon like a ship. But women never give up on their dreams, they make their dreams the truth and “act on them accordingly”. The narrator then goes onto give the example of Janie saying, “So the beginning of this was a woman” (Hurston 1). This made it easy for me to make the connection that since women never give up on their dreams, and that this book starts out with a woman, then it must be about a woman who never gives up on her dreams.

Later on in the book, I noticed the similarities in how both characters were treated with some invisibility, through the process of achieving their dreams. In Invisible Man, the narrator’s goal is to make an identity for himself, and by doing so he gets ridiculed. For example, in the Battle Royal scene, when the narrator was making a speech to share his thoughts on the advancement of African Americans, the white people there constantly laughed, interrupted, and asked to repeat information multiple times. The wealthy white men couldn’t care less on what the narrator was saying because he was invisible to them. Comparatively, in the first scene of Their eyes were watching God, Janie’s was struggling to achieve her dream of finding a man that she loved and could marry. That becomes the reason she leaves Tea Cake and walks alone through the town she lived in, wearing muddy overalls. Through this scene Janie is treated with invisibility, by being made fun of by the local residents, and talked about right tin front of her as if she’s another sub-human object. The only difference which I found here was that Janie was aware of her invisibility, where as in Invisible Man the narrator wasn’t.

Another similarity which I found through both novels so far, is that there have been strong forces, which the main characters become passive to. In Invisible Man, the narrator is naïve to the intentions of Bledsoe kicking him out of the school, and listens to his advice to go to Harlem and get some discipline. While in Their eyes were watching God, Janie becomes controlled by her Grandmother who forces her to marry Logan Killicks, even when Janie comes back protesting that she’s not in love and cannot keep her marriage.

It would be interesting to see how the end of Their eyes were watching God plays out, and if it’s similar in any way to Invisible Man, because I am still finding more similarities. For example, Janie recently is disillusioned with the thought that she has to stay in marriage with Logan, and marries Joe Starks instead –showing that she is still following her dreams--. This is just like in the Invisible Man when the narrator realizes through Bledsoe’s letter, that he was sent to Harem so that Bledsoe could get rid of him. From then on the narrator realizes the truths behind the forces he has been blind to, and I hope that, similarly, Janie overcomes whatever manipulative forces she encounters throughout the rest of the novel.