11 Questions from Once in a Blue Spoon!

Last week, my friend Taylor who runs an awesome blog full of delicious recipes, passed on the Liebster Blog Award to me. Instead of trying to summarize what it is, I'm just gonna quote Taylor on what the Liebster is: "the Liebster Award is kinda like blogger chain mail minus the supposed horrible consequences if you don’t pass it on." It's a fun way to get to know other bloggers and what makes them tick. These are the rules:

1. You state 11 facts about yourself.
2. You answer 11 questions from the person who sent it to you.
3. You pass it along to 11 other bloggers with 11 questions of your own.

And seriously, check out her blog--I get hungry every time she posts a new recipe.

 

 

11 Facts About Me

 

 

1. I once gave advice to an NFL player.

2. I start hallucinating when I spend over 24 hours without sleep.

3. I once taught an ex-con a little bit about how the internet works.

4. Although I can't play piano anymore, I once could, and I had the same professor as Michel Camilo.

5. I once got on a horse when I was a kid, and it tried to run away with me.

6. I co-wrote a rap when I was 8 years-old and it included the line "I went to the kitchen, to get some chicken".

7. I once had chocolate milk with ketchup just to see what it tasted like.

8. I want to write at least one poetry book, one novel, and one nonfiction book before I die.

9. I once interviewed Jeff Dunham.

10. I came out of my mother's womb upside down.

11. I just got into American University for an MFA program(woo!). Also, MFA programs are harder to get into than law school.

 

11 Questions from Once in a Blue Spoon

 

1. Why did you start blogging?

I started blogging in order to get in the habit of writing regularly. As as result, I've written about things I didn't even know I was interested in until now.

 

2. What's your favorite TV show?

Right now, Breaking Bad. All time, possibly The Sopranos.

 

3. What's your favorite food?

I love pub food. Sometimes, there's just nothing as good as pub burger with a Guinness or a Magner's.

 

4. If you could travel to anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Germany--I really wanna catch a football game there.

 

5. What's the first thing you ever remember cooking?

When I was a kid, my brothers and I would make something my parents called "toast". It was essentially bread with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon baked in the oven. Delicious.

 

6. If you could have any super power, what would it be?

Flight.

 

7. What's your favorite book?

I think "The Outsider" by Richard Wright.

 

8. What's your job or where did you go to school?

Unemployed, Gettysburg College.

 

9. Sweet or salty?

Both combined.

 

10. Which band/artist would write the soundtrack of your life?

The Verve.

 

11. Favorite drink (alcoholic or non, your choice)?

Jagerbomb.

 

11 Blogs

 

I don't really have regular contact with too many blogs so I'm gonna cheat here and only include two blogs written by good friends.

 

1. Working Title - My friend Xavier's tech blog.

2. Musings from a Not-So-Tortured Soul - My friend Morgan's blog on music and life.

 

11 Questions for You

 

1. What artist/band has affected your life the most?

2. What is your dream job?

3. What are two truths and a lie about you?

4. Why do you blog?

5. Until what age do you wanna live?

6. What does your dream home look like?

7. What's your favorite sport and why?

8. If you could visit one place for a day, what place would that be?

9. What would you do if you had a million dollars?

10. What is your biggest weakness?

11. Why did the chicken cross the road?







Deconstructing Ethnic Identity Today

A few weeks ago, I was at my friend Gia's birthday party in New York discussing how it's becoming increasingly complicated for our generation to fully grasp our identity from our ethnic standpoint (and, as you can imagine, Gia and I changed the mood of the party from lively and care-free to serious and somber). We were essentially talking about how being an 'American' or not an 'American' is becoming less of a black and white subject with the growing interest in specificity when exploring one's ethnic and cultural identity--this has been the result of the globalization in America and the rest of the world due to increased immigration and the fight for ethnic rights as well as the desire to preserve one's background while simultaneously adopting a new national identity.

For example, I have always felt to be sort of in between a lot of different nationalities and cultures, thus causing me to never feel entirely connected to one specific culture. I was born in Miami, I was raised in the Dominican Republic, and I have a German grandfather. Even though I was raised in the DR, I grew up with two passports, and a Dominican one wasn't one of them. So as far as the law was concerned, I was a German and an American living in the DR. At age 17, I eventually got my third passport confirming a nationality that would be the best fit for me. Ironically enough, this happened after I left the country to live in the United States for the first of what have now been six-plus years there. But it gets more complicated.

Even though I am mostly a Dominican, I grew up in a culture that was heavily influenced by the Americans. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years at a bilingual school where most of the teachers were American which made me feel like I was living in an American bubble for a large portion of my formative years. Plus there's the fact that my name, Karl Utermohlen, was given to me after my great-grandfather, a German soldier who lost a leg for his homeland during WWI, and that's hard to ignore. It's hard to overlook the fact that my background is almost exclusively European--from the long line of Utermohlens of Germany, to the Messinas in Sicily, to the Vinas in the Canary Islands, I am a person of European blood whose native tongue is a Romance language.

So in a country that prides itself on its indigenous and African roots, I have the skin of a European and the education of an American, thus causing some assumptions about who I am. Whenever I fly back home from the US, flight attendants and other airline employees assume that I am an American vacationing in the Caribbean and always talk to me in English. Although it's not as extreme back home, there are still people in the DR that see me mostly as an American. In fact, I have yet to meet an American who has figured out that I am foreign(even though I'm technically American) before someone told them so. Yet, as soon as they find out where I'm from, they see me in a different light. Not a negative one, but a different one that separates me from those who were raised in the US whether they realize it or not. Even within Americans, that's completely natural. If you take a person from New York and introduce them to someone from Alabama and then to someone else from New York, chances are that they'll have a better understanding of the other New Yorker's background than the person from Alabama.

And on still another level, race and ethnic background can also affect people's upbringings. If you take an African-American, an Italian-American, an Irish-American, and a Latino-American, there are certain cultural aspects of their background that are bound to stay with them. There's no doubt that the level of how much of their background is still a part of them depends on what generation American they are, but these differences are still noticeable because of the cultural influence at home. And this is basically what my conversation with Gia was about. I told her about how the many countries and people that make up my background have made it difficult for me to easily define my ethnic identity, and she felt the same way.

Gia said that despite her very Italian name, she's obviously more American than anything else because she grew up in the US. Nevertheless, one side of her family is Italian-American, and the other side is Irish-American--two cultures that don't exactly see eye-to-eye with everything. Because of this small difference in ethnicities, she's noticed certain clashes between the culture that makes it complicated for her to simply define herself as one or the other when people ask her what she is. Which brings me to Vargas.

Last year, a successful journalist named Jose Antonio Vargas came to Gettysburg College to talk about something similar to my blog post. He talked about his own experience growing up as a Filipino-American in California and how he first found out that he was in the US illegally at age 16. His parents sent him from the Philippines to his grandparents in California as a kid, and it wasn't until he tried to get his driver's license that he found out he didn't have the proper documents to prove that he was an American. Many years later, because of the fact that he felt like he was living a lie after winning a Pulitzer and many other accolades thanks to his journalism, he came out of the closet as an illegal immigrant.

He developed an interest in the subject of what it means to be American and started a non-profit named Define American which strives to start a conversation similar to the one I'm trying to create here about what it means to be American and how your background defines part of who you are. As I mentioned earlier, being an 'American', or a specific type of 'American', or a German-Spanish-Italian-American-Dominican, or whatever is becoming increasingly difficult, yet these things are still relevant in our lives whether we realize it or not.

Just consider the fact that even though Vargas has never been legally American, he considers himself an American because of where he grew up. And even though I can't speak German and I've never touched German soil, my German background and namesake has made me develop an affinity for certain German things. I always root for Germany in international football games, yet I sometimes call it soccer because of the American in me. I also became a fan of basketball and decided to follow the Mavericks when they acquired star German forward Dirk Nowitzki. And when it comes to baseball, the biggest sport in the Dominican Republic which was created by Americans, I always root for Dominican players and take pride in their success.

I could go on and on and talk about how I like the fact that Dominicans have a warm and welcoming personality, or the fact that Germany is probably the world's most resilient country since they lost two World Wars and still remain a world force with the strongest economy in Europe, but my point is that we are all affected, in one way or another, by our past and our present. And I think it's interesting and complicated to try to define who you are based on your background.

By the way, my mother once went to a man who knows a lot about faces and showed him a picture of me to try to decipher what I look like from a racial standpoint. He said I have the facial characteristics of Sephardic Jews who hailed from the Canary Islands.

Not Quite Liberal Arts

I spent all of last week visiting my friend Fernando at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(RPI) in upstate New York where he's a senior pursuing a degree in Air and Space Engineering. As a graduate of liberal arts and a possible MFA candidate(just got into American University, woo!), it was quite a culture shock for me to venture into an engineering school.

Although I had limited exposure to the actual campus since I was staying at my friend's frat house off-campus, one can learn a lot from simple conversation with engineering students. The first and most obvious thing I noticed was that I didn't meet a single person who majored in the humanities or the arts (except for one of the brothers' girlfriend who was an English major from another school). In Gettysburg College, asking a random array of students what their major is would usually result in something along the lines of Political Science, History, Spanish, Classics, and the occasional Bio student. In RPI, the same question would be more along the lines of Chemistry, Bio-Med, Applied Physics, Computer Science, Applied Science with Computing Concentration, etc.

Naturally, the fact that it's almost strictly an engineering school changes the culture of the institution quite a bit (it's so close to being entirely an engineering school that people would joke around about them even having easy majors such as psychology and the humanities). In general, engineering students seem to work harder than liberal arts students, but they also played harder (literally). Part of the culture of engineering student involves board games, card games, video games, computer games, etc. Unsurprisingly, these students had brains that were driven more by logic and reasoning which would explain their fascination for problem-solving in academics and outside activities such as puzzle games.

I was impressed by the campus itself--it blew my mind that they essentially had one building for every science they taught--there was a physics building, a chemistry one, a multi-floored computing lab, a biology one, an observatory, an experimental science one, etc. I asked where the English one was, but people just laughed. I thought that their arts building was, by far, the coolest one. RPI students told me that EMPAC(Experimential Media and Performing Arts Center) was the crown jewel of RPI. I went there to see Fernando play the congas during a jazz show inside one of the auditoriums.

I had never heard the sound of a live music show sound so crisp before this jazz ensemble before. Although a lot of credit should be given to the musicians themselves, the building is clearly an engineering masterpiece. It's supposed to be the second-most acoustically sound building in the world--the sound of the auditorium I was in is so sweet that you don't need a microphone since one's voice can project itself from the stage to the balcony and reverberate throughout the entire place. The seats were also created by precision-driven architects--they have three different sizes of seats in order to fit people of different builds. Oh, and the cushions on the seats have the same density as the human body(I guess engineers love their easter eggs).

Overall, it was a refreshing experience that exposed me to a side of higher education that I was largely oblivious to. The people were smart as hell and just as nice as a liberal arts crowd--they simply had a different, more practical way of looking at the world compared to the creative and philosophical mentality of the liberal arts world.

Confessions of an Addict Part II

A massive headache overtook my grandfather for a long period of time during one of his business trips. It started out as a mild headache, but it later evolved into a force so powerful that it kept him in bed for days--the headache lasted approximately eight days. After taking several aspirins throughout the course of the week to eliminate the headache to no avail, he was unable to figure out what was wrong with him. One day, he had the brilliant idea of making a cup of coffee--something he had not had in eight days. As he drank a cup, the caffeine that coursed through his veins immediately eliminated his headache and any other symptoms of exhaustion he might have.

I wasn't planning on making a series of posts about caffeine, something I don't consume regularly, but writing has continued to become a release for Pierina in her continuing struggle with her addiction to Coca-Cola (check out the first installment of Confessions of an Addict if you haven't already). In this edition, she documents days 4, 5, and 6 of her Coca-Cola-free aspirations:

 Day 4

I didn't think about Coca-Cola at all today. In fact, my abdomen has started to look less bloated--it's surprising how fattening Coke is. For some reason, I started eating sweets again--I think that I have substituted Coca-Cola for desserts. I had a brownie a la mode all by myself.

Day 5

I woke up with a bit of a headache but I had breakfast and it's been fading away--I'm not sure to what degree this has to do with the abstinence syndrome. I've definitely lost weight in the abdomen. I've always been skinny, but I had a belly that didn't fit with the rest of my body and it's slowly going away--I imagine that by doing some exercises I can eliminate all of it. The problem was that I had to snack something in the afternoon because I was starving, and when I stopped somewhere to get something to eat, it came with a soda so I impulsively ordered a Coca-Cola without thinking too much about it.

Day 6

And the abdomen keeps getting smaller... Up until now, I've had a good day without having any soda. That's the problem with these types of addictions. I'll see how I'll deal with this tonight because it's probable that I'll go out and drink with friends (home-made, and easy-to-mix drinks, for example: Cuba Libre). Coke is everywhere, everyone drinks it, and it mixes with everything. Anyways, in 6 days, I've only had one Coke on two occasions... YAY ME! It's a big step forward.