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Cristal Ramales Individual Blog
KIMBERLE’S PLAYLIST
I only picked four songs for this because I think these were all enough to properly encapsulate the mystery and complexity of the story. This Is Me Trying by Taylor Swift is a song about trying your best and trying to show others that you really are trying. I think this was a good song to describe the phone call between Kimberle and the narrator at the start of the story. She’s feeling suicidal but shes also asking for help. Its almost a twisted way of her showing the narrator that she’s still trying. Burned Out is more about the narrator in her moment of just complete exhaustion between having to deal with Kimberle and also her mom’s cat, all while also worrying about the potential murder that will happen, it just matches very well. Class of 2013 is back to Kimberle, relating to how she’s basically a drop out drug addict living on someone’s couch, the only difference here is that in the song, Mitski is talking to her mom and not an old acquaintance like the narrator in the story. Liability can relate to both characters who feel an isolation in their lives. They both just feel like they only have themselves for most of the story.
PANDORAS BOX
In this article by Pink News, we see a man do the next closest thing to what Arturo Arias writes about in Pandoras Box. In the story, Juan is a man who falls in love with a beautiful woman and ends up somehow magically changing to a woman and having to deal with the difficulties of eing a woman and having to learn how to properly present himself as a woman. In the article I chose, a man did something similar where he dressed up in drag to try and experience the way women are treated like when they get catcalled and other forms of street harassment. These two are also similar in the way that the Man in each story end up with completely different outlooks and are shocked with how different life is as a woman.
Photography and My interpretation
Mexico is known for being particularly Catholic, like many other Latin American countries. So the moment my eyes landed on the first picture by Dulce Pinzon, my little Mexican heart fluttered. As a child, I remember being dressed up every 12th of December to go to church and honor La Virgen De Guadalupe. She’s our patron Saint. With the festivities we always held, it was always a given that we would hear the story about La Virgen and how she decided to make Mexico her home. The picture by Pinzon portrays a young indigenous man named Juan Diego who first saw La Virgen in the desert part of Mexico. This is where the second picture I chose from Graciela Iturbide’s page comes in. Her picture just seems to illustrate to me the area that the Virgen would’ve appeared for the first time. The two pictures go hand in hand to tell the Mexican story that I grew up listening to ever since I was a child.
Porcupine Love
The weeks after I returned from Don Juan’s session, there was an eerie calm in my place. Where I would usually sit and contemplate with my hand in my pants and many anxieties plaguing my every thought and movement, I just sat and stared into space. The emptiness in my soul becoming more and more prominent as time passed. After what seemed like hours but in reality was only a few minutes, I walked over to my computer and opened my email. There she was.
Antenita.
Her name no longer felt like the temptation it once was, not after the freedom I felt during Don Juan’s session. My therapist rang my phone but I didn’t answer, knowing that overanalyzing my love life would only make me revert back to my old ways. I chose instead to let it go. Accept the insignificantness of my life and accept I didn’t need anyones love. While staring at Antenitas name on that screen, I felt nothing. I convinced myself I couldn’t feel anything. While I deleted my email account with the help of instructions I got online, I went numb. I stared at the confirmation screen for hours and then got up and went to sleep. I would only ever see her in my dreams now.
Just me and Antenita in my dreams.
Mexican Heaven and I’m No Longer Here
There’s a certain pain that comes with being Mexican, at least thats what the poem tells us. I took Heaven to mean The US in the poem written by Jose Olivarez. He writes about it so tragically and the experiences in the poem seem like excerpts taken from life. In Mexico, many people call the US “El Norte” meaning The North, so the analogy of it actually being the US is really interesting. The movie “I’m No Longer Here” explores the struggles Mexicans who just come to this country can face and it seems to go oddly hand and hand with the poem to portray the Mexican existence in the United States as something negative and harmful to us. The Mexican experience is different for everyone here but these two pieces of work show us just one dark side of what its like here.
Link to Trailer: I’m No Longer Here
La Guera
Audio Transcript: The story named “La Gurea starts with something a lot of first generation Chicanos can identify with which is being the first in your family to attend school all the way until college. I don’t think there was ever a time in my life where college wasn’t an option, it was always mandatory. I was just waiting to graduate so I could go off and finish my schooling in a college like I was told and it was fine, I never questioned it. Now here I am, In college, fulfilling the dream that was set for me for as long as I could remember, discussing things like government policies and trying my best to work through the immense pressure. Sometimes I wished it wasn’t like this. Sometimes I wished it was less Black and White. I wish the pressure wasn’t as bad as it is. But there’s nothing I could do about it. The internalized fear of being a disappointment runs deep in the minds of Latinx people like me, all we can do is just dream and try our best.
Written By Cristal Ramales
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A gift wrap that does not match the gift.By Loredana Militello And so, it’s time to reflect of the screenings I was able to watch at the Reelabilities Festival, held in New York City, from April 3rd to the 9th. I was so looking forward to being able to participate in person to this event, I even imagined going to multiple locations with different companions…but the reality was, instead, a tight work schedule, and a series of duties that just did not allow me to go in person. I was very happy to have the option to watch some of the movies from home, so I did not have to embark on a journey of multiple metro trains and or buses to get to the destination. I wish the streaming option was available for all the programmed movies and documentaries, but it was not. 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As I mentioned before, after watching the trailer, we were cynical about this cinematic product: there was this constant accent on her immense courage and resilience as a person that became blind at the age of 36 and did not accept to live her life with limitations of any sort. We turned our heads at each other, and we raised our eyebrows: a clear signal of skepticism. But nonetheless we decided to watch the whole film. And that was a good decision: it was a case of “gift wrap not matching the gift itself” (yes, I came up with it). What we were exposed to was much more than “simply” another story of overcoming for a blind person; it was not the usual “if you want it, you get it”. Shawn starts telling her story, the part that is intuitive about her blindness: she was a veteran, and she decided to go back to school to become a paramedic. During a paramedical intervention, while dealing with an agitated patient in the ambulance, she is kicked out and she suffers a brain injury that results in her complete vision loss. After that, she goes into months of physical rehabilitation, adaptation sports learning and PTSD informed healing. She then starts to compete, on high levels, and she participates in the Rio Paralympics in 2016, where she wins multiple medals biking in tandem. But she keeps saying this phrase “I didn’t want to feel stuck”. So, because of that, she embarks in this hard to imagine journey to cross the U.S. on a single bike. Sure, she has a whole team helping her, biking by her side, but ultimately it is her and her bike, relying heavily on sounds and the voice of her guide-biker. While the journey unfolds, we discover many other details of Shawn’s life, and we start to understand that this is not about overcoming blindness. Shawn is an abuse “survivor”: she was completely and heavily neglected by her mother, and, because of that, she went to live with her grandmother from the age of 13. She then ended up establishing a very abusing relationship with a guy that she married and had two kids with and who was constantly abusing and threatening her. Until she felt that she could not bear it anymore and she left. But, as we dived even deeper, we found her having a conversation with her half-sister, who was abused by her father and Shawn remembers that the same thing happened to her. This part was extremely dramatic, and I could not believe such an intimate space was shared with no filters. But I don’t want to judge this: maybe it was somehow cathartic for the protagonist, maybe it is helpful for some of the victims of domestic abuse, but it certainly hit me right in my guts. This is when we understand that blindness is not the whole story: she is trying to overcome something else that has more to do with trauma due to her abuse as a child. The documentary was somewhat different than we expected by only watching the trailer and it proved to be a “gift that did not match the wrapping paper”. It also promoted a conversation between me and my “watching partner” (for convenience we will call him S.). He said that “sometimes the thing that is the source of torment for someone, becomes an inspiration for someone else”. I found this true: probably many people have felt inspired by this documentary, but what we are really watching is Shawn’s attempt to silence her interior torment, that is not due to her newly acquired blindness more than the abuses she suffered in her childhood and young adulthood. In fact, S., as a blind person himself, acutely noticed that for him watching a blind person biking all the way across the U.S is not a replacement for the experience that he is losing. For him, he explained to me, biking is to relax to enjoy the panorama while on two wheels. But for Shawn, biking meant a constant sense of fear and terror and a necessity to constantly concentrate on the goal of not getting hit by a car passing by. “For herself it is a freakshow”. So, it may not be necessarily inspiring for other blind people, but maybe for sighted people that do not question their beliefs. While watching the trailer, we could not help but think of “Code of the freaks” and how it criticizes the overcoming urgency that many movies with a disabled character have. But then, the documentary was not necessarily pushing that idea of overcoming at any cost, and that let S.’s and mine eyebrows down. 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Directed by Salome Chasnoff, performances by AlysonPatsavas, Mike Ervin, and Ann Finger, Kartemquin Films, 2020. “Blind A.F.” Directed by Gina LeVay, starring Shawn Cheshire, 2024. ReelAbilities Streaming, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0uoH_aqKvQ “Millstone”. Directed by Peter Hoffman Kimball, starring Bellamie Bachleda, Eddie Buck, Daniel Durant, Dont’ M […] “A gift wrap that does not match the gift.”
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