For my first topic, I chose the adjustment to the armed forces. I decided to focus on veterans from the Vietnam war or simply soldiers in Afghanistan/Iraq today. My question would be how do these soldiers cope with living safely back home when coming back from always being constantly in danger/fear. Or I could ask how regular citizens( college students etc.) reacted when drafted into the Vietnam War.

I chose the experience of Jewish refugees in WWII next. Specifically, the journey Jewish people encountered when they were ripped away from their homes by the nazi’s and sent to concentration camps. My question would then be how a Jewish refugee adapted to this imprisoned environment when living freely beforehand.

Lastly, I chose nursing homes. Many families are unable to care for their elderly because they are too busy with work or school etc. Therefore , they are sent to nursing homes to live out the rest of their lives. This is an entirely new environment since a person’s freedom is now more restricted than if they lived with their family members. My question would be how is life different for an elderly person confined in a nursing home rather than living alone or with family members.

I chose this particular picture because this man’s story reminds me a lot of my family’s story before they came to the states. My grandmother had 10 children back in Peru and it was a struggle to try and raise them since they definitely did not have the means to live in a safer neighborhood or even put food on the table. My uncle tells stories about how my grandmother had to cook his pet chicken because there was simply no food left to eat. Therefore, when I read that this man would go to the port every day to hand out bread to the refugees because he remembers what it felt like to have nothing, I somehow felt grateful. Grateful that maybe there was someone like him who helped my family when they had nothing.

Hot Fuzz Trailer

In this film, Nicholas Angel is a hotshot cop who strives to be the best of the best. In doing so, he ends up being so good that he causes the entire London police force to look bad. Therefore, he gets reassigned to the safest town in the U.K. Angel now has to adapt to going from a crime-filled urban area to, quite literally, the safest town in the country. Angel now faces a displacement in his new surroundings where he no longer fits in due to his extensive experience he cannot apply. I think this properly applies to the “fish out of water” formula since Angel now has to adapt in a new environment that’s different than what he is used to in order to fit in.

The prompt i decided to write about was the very first and i’ll be using  “On the Rainy River”. This is mainly because i think this is the text that i understood the best out of all three. It was also the most intriguing and interesting. I chose this prompt with this text because i think it fits perfectly i.e Tim has a transition from being an educated civilian to a military soldier. In this transition he goes through many phases and changes throughout the course of this narrative. He’s constantly battling himself and his mindset in which he really cares about what other people think about him. Apart from that, there is the encounter with Elroy which adds on to his moral dilemma in a more positive way. With all this, i think i’d be able to write a good and lengthy essay on the first prompt apart from the others given.

The questions that i could think of regarding the film were:

1.) I noticed that as Marjane was explaining her life story it was in black and white then once it was the present it would change to color. What was the author’s idea when applying this style of color throughout the film?

2.) As Marjane was getting back on her feet after her first relationship ended badly, she said she needed to learn everything possible about western culture. Why did she need to know rather than her wanting to know? Since when she was a teenager, she wanted to listen to these western artist groups. She did not need to listen to them.

3.) I was confused under what circumstances caused policies, against the way women dressed in Iran and how they acted with their significant other, to increase dramatically rather than during Marjane’s father lifetime when the policy was not as strict?

So far for the first prompt in which you describe an experience where you and your family felt displaced, i thought i would use the event where i lived in Jersey for a couple of months on and off. It was entirely different from Queens and it showed me another side of the world, where everything wasn’t so close and bunched together so i think i can write a good deal about side effects and so on.

My second idea came from the fourth prompt because i could relate to most of the elements in the essays of Tan and Rodriguez. Like most of my classmates, i come from a bilingual household and that gives you not only different styles of speaking english but also different styles of speaking spanish. also, i can’t roll my r’s in spanish so i thought i could also connect that with the last question that asked how languages reflect/express yourself.

My third idea came from the third prompt related Andre Aciman. He described in detail how foreigners become stagnant in there new place away from home, that it becomes their first home. Although the tri-state area was my first and only home, i can relate to the feelings he explains in “Shadow Cities”. There’s been lots of changes in my neighborhood from upscale to new demographics. So there’s a bunch of stuff, factual to anecdotal, that i can use for this topic.