Literary Contest 2018

I got so excited to get to experience this contest because I have never been to one where you get to get compete with poetry, essays, mini saga and short stories. Also because my friend Isabel won second place in the category of essay and Angela who won first place in the same category. So this whole thing was new to me and I wanted to see how it was organized, how it worked, see just about everything. I arrived at the Amphitheater No. 3 and it surprised me that there was food. It’s so obvious that I tasted everything in that table because food is amazing. When Alondra, Francellys and I ate just about everything, we entered the amphitheater cause the contest was about to start.

I listened to all the welcome and opening remarks but I really loved the speech by Elidio La Torres Lagares, who was the special guest speaker. I am not someone who loves to write because I find very difficult to organize my ideas and thoughts into words. He motivated me to not use this as an excuse seeing that I have the duty to tell my own story. To never stay silence no matter what. “We are made of tales, pigments of imagination”. We, humans, wouldn’t be anything without the ability express our own story. I want to stop being so insecure about my writing and just embrace it, so that one day I could be standing on that stage.

The first category presented by the Awards Ceremony was the “Mini Saga”. I didn’t know anything about this so I had to google it. “A mini saga is a piece of writing which has exactly fifty words” (One Stop English). I got amazed by how much you can say whit a small quantity of words. The first place was “Missing Place” by Lesmalee Gonzalez Esquilin; second place, “Clinging to Life” by Sonia I. Neris Alicea and third place, “Sixty Nine Bucks” by Jeaneishka Ruiz Vazquez. They were all really good but the next category really stuck to my heart. This is because it was poetry and Sheila M. Figueroa Suarez for her work of “A Challenge”. It was such a beautiful and moving poem and I was glad that she won third place. Finally, the next category was “essays”. Alondra and I immediately started to get ready by grabbing our phones to take a lot of pictures and to, well, scream our hearts out. So as they were saying the names and all that, I got really nervous and excited that I couldn’t take it anymore. Then they said “Isabel M. Bravo Carretero for Proud to be Puerto Rican” and all us began screaming so much that I’m pretty sure that we embarrassed Isabel but sorry not sorry.  We screamed and cheered again for Angela because she won first place for her essay of “About Home”. Both of this amazing essays were about how “home” can be different for each of us but that no matter where they are Puerto Rico will always be their home. My favorite thing is that they both finished their essays with “Yo seria borincano aunque naciera en la luna”.                        

Little Details

Since I was a little girl, I used my imagination for everything. I walked around my house or any street pretending that I was a wizard waiting for Hogwarts letter (I still do this). Because let’s face it, reality is boring and just stupid. But sometimes my imagination and distractions get the better of me. I don’t pay attention when someone is speaking to me o when I’m walking around my campus so I could easily bump into someone. I get so caught up in my own mind just because I worried all the time about whether or not I’ll pass the exam or if I forgot to something. My mind is a constant cycle of stress and worries of basically anything that can be done very easily. That’s why music means so much to me because is a why of shutting up my mind for a while and just being relax. The problem is that this also distracts more thanks to my imagination. I pretend that I’m Beyoncé or a member of Little Mix that on the outside you may see me with a serious face but on the inside… Huh! I swear to God that is like I’m in a concert.

There are many reasons why this project was very hard for me, which some of them I mentioned above. But the main one is that I didn’t know if I could’ve see all the details and the things that I always miss when I’m walking around on my usual route. You see, it is complicated for me to focus on more than one thing but that didn’t stop me in seeing’s things that I never saw before. Of course, that I never saw them because either I’m running to get to class, I’m talking to my friends or the main one, I’m in my own world. Nevertheless, I grabbed my phone and back pack, and started the new journey of noticing the little things.

The first thing that I said to myself:” Okay, Kiara don’t start thinking about other things like Netflix or something, just focus on this journey”. Trust me, this is very necessary. As I’m walking though DMN to get to my class in the department of Humanities, I noticed a lot of things such as nature and all the people that I never saw before. The students were just so relaxed reading listening to their friends and I don’t why but it made me very happy. There was one thing that I saw very different than before and that is that my university has a lot of nature, which makes it so much better. There was this one big tree just at the start of DMN that I couldn’t help but feel amazed by all the details. It’s really weird how I didn’t see it before. As I kept walking, I saw the most beautiful thing ever: a Puertorrican flag in mosaic. The place of flag is a little secluded so I understand why I didn’t see it before but now that I did, I will always look for it. When I arrived to Humanities, I concluded that this place has the most nature. It has so many trees and flowers but the most thing that I love is the detail of its arquitecture. I thought that I was in the medieval times or something like. I couldn’t stop taking pictures but eventually I did just because people were looking at me. The art, mosaic, how in a window you can get a picture of tree and how one door had “UPR’ up were the littlest details that made me fall in love with my university. I really hope that I continue to do this all through my life because you cant go your whole life not noticing the little things, you know? Those are what makes life beautiful and mean something.

This is the collage of my "little details" tour and it has all the pictures of the things that I found amazing

Amateur Eyes

     We are constantly missing things just because we tend to be in our own little world. What I do is that I just focus on my music, when I’m walking somewhere or doing an exercise in the gym, or just listen and worry over my own thoughts. This has been quite the talk on numerous of documentaries and interviews. They talk about how basically you, most of the time, don’t notice that someone is in trouble because you’re worried about your own problems.  This can all be presented on the beautiful and quite literally, eye opener essay called “Amateur Eyes” by Alexandra Horowitz.

     Horowitz starts with two sentences that glued me more and more to her essay. These sentences are: “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” (Horowitz, 1).  To me, these sentences represent the whole idea of her essay about how we can easily get focused on one thing and lose sight from everything that’s around us. I think that is impossible to concentrate on everything that’s happening at the moment because our mind can do so much. But when you get rid of all the distractions, your worries or music, you can always see something new wherever you go.

      I learned this from the ‘experiments’ that Horowitz did to conclude her essay. I loved how, in doing so, she used the perspective of her dog just because he or she could see, hear and smell everything. “What my dog showed me was that my attention invited along attention’s companion: inattention to everything else” (Horowitz 2). Thanks to her dog, she “perceived ordinary elements I was missing” (Horowitz, 3). Whenever we use a different a perspective we see new thing. Just as in the tourist project. Where when I acted like a tourist, I appreciated and learned new things from Puerto Rico that I have never known before. I reflected over how I’m so used to seeing the places or the things form my home that I don’t look for something new to appreciate from them.

In this essay, Horowitz tells us that she wants us to perceive all the ordinary things from a place because to me, that’s where the magic starts. When we get rid of all thoughts and distractions that’s worrying us, we can see all that flowers that are in the pavement, how many trees or how funny people act when they think no one is watching them.  For example, today while I was driving home, I was so busy worrying and stressing about my exams that I didn’t notice the beautiful sunset that was outside. It immediately erased my mind and calmed me. Because “the capacity to attend is ours; we just forget how to turn it on” (Horowitz, 3). Forgetting for one moment all of your worries can help you appreciate the beautiful things outside your comfort zone. From now, I want to see all things that I missed when I walked to an old place because I was busy or distracted in my own little world. “In this book, I am looking for what it is that I miss, everyday, right in front of me, while walking around the block” (Horowitz, 15).