Omar On The Go

Day 31 Definitely a day of records, I was finally able to stick to my german classes via Duolingo and I have been on a 42 days streak and on a sirt of related note, I've been writing my blog for a full month today. To be honest, besides some very addictive and engaging videogames, in the last few years of my life its been really hard for me to stay focused for long on certain activities. Sometimes I lose interest, or I had some more important thing to do, or I was just simply lazy to continue, a feeling I still fight with (laziness) but honestly, these two activities really have me engaged mainly because I find them fun. I just wish I could be like this with other things like reading, an activity that is really hard for me to keep engaged with. But well, I think I may have found one (or two) !!!  The language topic is one that deserves a post or two in part because become a polyglot is a bit of a frustrated dream I slowly but surely want to achieve, but, that's a story for anot

Day 30 I know I said a few paragraphs a day, but tonight I feel that I have so many ideas in my head that I don't know where to start. Many different topics brought the day: friendship, loss, laughter, sadness, family, memories, upbrings, crushes, etc etc that I rather skip the night and just play a bit of videogames. Need to wind down a bit and put my ideas better in my head before sitting down to write.  It will be better for myself and the depth I would like to achieve while writing about some of the topics mentioned above. In the mean time, I'll leave you with a picture of one of my parents dogs, Cocker, which btw has his well deserved post on my blog, but that will be another day.

Day 29 In between meeting new family members (and realizing my family is way bigger than what I thought) I haven't been able to shake off a feeling of rage.  This is unrelated to my family, which I have plenty of stories to tell, but this is more related to either the goverment of my home country or its habitants, or maybe both. I've been between Santo Domingo and Enriquillo, Barahona which is about 235KM with a few more if we add the furthest destination I went to today: Bahía de las águilas (Eagles's Bay) and god damn, what a depressing site that along the way (the whole way) with the amount of contamination due to plastics and improvised community dumpsters which is depressing and infuriating at the same time. My country is beautiful, the people very nice and happy, my family has been a blast but dear lord, we are our very own enemies.  Dominican Republic has many great qualities but we honestly lack a wide understanding on how big of a problem we have in our hands.  I h

Day 28 Today it will be a short post, in part because I'm extremely tired and I have to do this on my phone with extremely unreliable internet connection. One thing that I wanted to do for a very long time was to revisit my dad little hometown, a very small town called Enriquillo in the province of Barahona in the Dominican Republic.  In part because I haven't visit it in over 25 years (I think the last time I was 8 or 9 years old), but also because in part to bond a bit with dad and understand his upbring a bit better now that I'm more mature. You can also add that I wanted to reconnect a little with my family roots and analyze my life through a different perspective considering that even though the town used to have a lot of family members around, nowadays, not that many because everybody has left for a better life.  You see, the "Sur Profundo" (The Deep South), as this area of the country is known, is a very poor area that is highly under develop even in 2023 s

Day 27 After 3 years, I finally made it back to DR and still feels like I never left even though the few things I've seen from the city, something has definitely changed. Kind of cool to have a familiarity feeling, helps to calm the anxiety I had prior the trip nevertheless, still a lot to digest and see and share. The one thing I didn't like much is that my parents pets are definitely showing their age but they still as loving animals as ever. No crazy story to share tonight, just a feeling of calm and peace at the moment. Peace out ✌️ I'm back home

Day 26 Even though I've said on the very first post that this is not a diary and is not intended to be one, today's post will be a bit diary-ish. But first a bit on my thought process to write on the blog: There's none. My days go by as usual but certain events may trigger a memory that would be worth to write about and today it was my friend's Peter birthday mainly because he is a really close friend of mine and is worth highlighting the attributes and the quality of person, he is BUT that won't be today. Today was fairly straightforward but after work I had a couple of errands to do buy some specialty coffee for my little brother and parents before my visit to DR and pick up a Steam Deck a friend lent me.  After I got back home, I noticed this kid and some ladies trying to catch a huge dog I offered to help and they told me that they are not the owners, that the dog seems lost, and they don't live in the community and were very worried for the dog. I hesitated

Day 25 And just out of the blue Nintendo and Microsoft announced that Goldeneye 007 is dropping this Friday on Nintendo Switch Online and Xbox consoles, and I couldn't be happier or more excited for this re-release.  You see this game originally came out in 1997 and it was the game that proved many things back in the day like that First person shooters could actually work on consoles or that couch multiplayer was here to stay. After Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye 007 became the second-best and popular multiplayer on the Nintendo 64 and not only the multiplayer was magnificent, the single-player mode introduced and adapted many concepts in such a great way, that 26 years later, many FPS games still follow. Back then I was barely 12 years old, in my 3rd year at this new school I was in and that then I felt very weird.  I did not necessarily feel unwelcomed, but I did feel like I didn't fit in.  I was not part of the popular kids, I was not looking to be one either, I was a bit of an in

Day 24 Feeling a bit tired to write something but a friend gave me the great idea to use ChatGPT to write today's post and go from there.  I went into the SW, gave it a few directions and bam, read below: My second trip outside the Dominican Republic was a week-long Boy Scout camp at Guajataca in Puerto Rico. My father, who had the idea to go, had arranged for my brother and I to attend, even though we were not Boy Scouts. It was the summer of 1994, and I was only 9 years old. I was nervous and excited all at the same time. It was the first time I had ever been on a plane and the first time I had ever been away from my family for more than a few days. The camp was located in the middle of the jungle, but to our surprise, we didn't have to hike to get to the campsite. Instead, we arrived by bus. I had never seen anything like it before and I was in awe of the beauty around me. The sleeping arrangements were in a communal dormitory, but my brother and I didn't have any linens

Day 23 On my free time there are plenty of things I like to do, and watching TV (may that be for movies, shows, documentaries, etc) is one of them.  Last night, before watching the latest episode of The Last of Us, I realized that I besides that one show, I'm not really watching anything else at the moment. Looking for what to watch I came across what I thought it was the movie "12 Monkeys", a movie that, even though is an old film, I haven't watched so I decided to sit down and watch it, just to be surprised that it wasn't the movie, but a TV show based on the movie. The fact I have never watched 12 Monkeys made me think about a thing I've been doing for the past few recent years: watch old movies, may I have seen them before or not.  The 7th art (as we tend to call it back home) is one of those passions of mine but it was not a thing I was really encouraged to by my parents or siblings, and I have very few anecdotes related to going to the movies with either

Day 22 I'm pretty sure my cousin Sandy will hate for this, but since the last few days many stories have been about my cousins in the barrio, I want to make sure this one in particular is not forgotten. "Back in the day", the neighborhood I grew up in was a very cool place for kids and young people to be around since there were many big number families around, and each with at least 2 kids per household there were the Barranco Arache (4 kids), the Soto Sanchez (4 kids), the Minaya Pimentel (3 kids), the Pichardo Taveras (3 kids), the Polanco Rosarios (4+ kids), there was even one, that they were so much that they were known as "los muchos" (the many ones), obviously mine (5 kids) and many others. There were people around for each generation of kids, there were many youngers, teenagers, young adults, and so on, but this particular story is not even from my generation but an older one, but I remember so clearly because:  My cousin used to get super mad about it. I

Day 21 After thinking about what to write about today, many topics came through my head like my relationship with food or my love/hate relationship with working out, how bad I am at playing sports (but play them when I have to), my 2.5 years late IG post about my cats and how they have help me with stress, continue stories about travel or share some additional family drama, but going through social media I came across an interesting post by CAPCOM (the game developer) that today is the 25th Anniversary of Resident Evil 2.  As posted on Instagram You can bet that this entry will be about that particular game and how it changed my perspective of what a videogame could really be regarding storytelling, atmosphere and gameplay.  I have to give a little bit of background first though, as mentioned before, I'm a Nintendo fanboy at heart and by the fifth generation of gaming consoles, I definitely choose the Nintendo 64 over the PlayStation (PSX) and there were a few reasons why:  The mos

Day 20 On yesterday's post I mentioned my cousin Sandy and that made me think about a lot of things that I like in part because I hanged out a lot with him and his brother Rafelo.  There are way too many stories to tell about his family, from how we are related (not necessarily their parents are my parents' siblings), the epic new year's celebration in the barrio by my uncle, and many more, but now I want to focus particularly on how my cousins being very into computer gaming had me fall in love with computers. At home, our very first computer was an intel 386 computer, I barely remember the specs though, but it had a 5 1/4 and a 3 1/2 floppy drives and probably a barely-there hard drive.  We probably got it in the early 90's and I remember clearly that the operating system was MS-DOS and well, I had no idea how to use it, but I did learn a lot from my brother who was the one who, I bet my ass, bribed my dad to get it.  You see, him being my dad's firstborn kind of

Day 19 How often you ever think about your early childhood?  I bet that we don't think much about it considering the fact that most people rarely remember things so early in their life.  I think my early memories have to be around the time I was 3 or 4 years old but as of today I'm not sure and I may need to talk to my parents about events around then to see how accurate they are. The reason why I'm talking about this is that my mom recently sent me pictures of myself when they were celebrating my first birthday, back in 1986, and it's kind of funny to see at the pictures but also kind of sad that I can't remember early childhood. I do however have flashbacks of things when I was fairly young (5 years or younger) and sometimes I find funny I remember those stupid details. Thankfully most, if not all of my memories are nice ones, I remember how crazy I was whenever dad showed around, I would run around and go to him in a flash, or how I won $10 pesos (or $20?) when s

Day 18 Sitting down on the computer a bit earlier today particularly to prevent rushing into my ideas because it's too late and tiredness.   Every morning when I sat in my car to drive to work, I normally put my office address on the GPS to prevent (or mentally prepare) for any delay along the way and as "music" I tend to either be listening to "Elvis Duran and the Morning Show" or listening to some YouTube video. My radio, for whatever reason, sometimes changes the audio input automatically and starts playing the music I have on the CD player (yes, CD player in 2023) but I could never be happier with the music that starts playing.  I have inserted the album "Minutes to Midnight" by Linkin Park which I honestly think is my all-time favorite band. You see, when I discovered them, it was at the very beginning of career when "One Step Closer" started to creep into MTV and MTV Latino and I instantly fell in love with the song.  In general, I cons

Day 17 My head is literally blank at the moment.  I wish I had some deep thoughts or anything like it but at the moment I just feel like playing more Octopath Traveler. At least I'm feeling calm and a bit excited (even if a bit anxious too) about the trip I booked to visit my home country.  It has been 3 long years since the last time I visited in 2020 right before the lockdowns 🙃. This is hands down, the most I've been without visiting home.  Every year since I moved to Miami I've gone back home at least twice a year and I've always felt very connected (if sometimes annoyed) with my home country due to my upbring, family, friends, customs, etc. But even though 3 years have passed, technology has helped a lot to make the gap feel less lengthy since I get to talk with friends and family on a daily basis, social media and news websites (Remolacha.net) keep me up to date on current events, so there's that. One thing though, that technology can't help is with socia

Day 16 Today I was finally able to do what I wanted to do during my Christmas break, DO NOTHING AT HOME.  Even though it is Monday, I was off work in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day which allowed some free time to relax at home and my activities could be summarized in 3 things: play a lot of Octopath Traveler on my switch, do a "majarete" (a Dominican style corn pudding) and watch lot of TV including but not limited to: a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, Welcome to the Chippendales and the movie Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The movie originally came out in 1993 and is a parody of the Robin Hood story, is silly as fuck, quotable as hell, "bad" objectively speaking, but I REALLY like this movie.  The movie itself brings me back to simpler times in my life, back to the high school days specifically (a time where this movie was already "old").  You see, it was a very popular movie among me and my some of my friends who have the same stupid sense

Day 15 Oh, Sunday but I'm actually feeling very happy about it mainly because tomorrow is a holiday for me, the second one of the year (if we count new year's day) but the last one until May 29th, 2023, for Memorial Day, so a few months of pure work ahead.  That said, so far, the weekend has been amazing and chill and the temperature in Miami is quite cool, and it will definitely get better considering that The Last of Us on HBO is coming out in less than two hours. Also today is my dear Tia Yeya birthday, she is turning 82 and is my dad's oldest sister, a woman full of life and with an amazing heart.  She has been living in NYC for the past 30 years or so and it is someone who I visit mostly every time I'm in the city.  She hosted me in the summer of 2001, when I was 16 years old and is the trip that I can definitely say was my first independent travel experience, much like my nephew's one.  Thinking about my aunt and how old is she, had me thinking a bit about my

Day 14 Saturday, day off.  As usual, just a day where the main thing I do is go to the gym but today was a little bit different since it was the birthday celebration of a friend where the "party" started at 1PM and finished way past 8PM. It was a fun day for sure and at various points of the day I kept reminding myself how nice is to have a nice group of friends and the importance of friendship.  Weirdly enough, memories of my dad came rushing throughout the day, you see, dad is an avid reader and has always tried to highlight the habit to me.   When I was very young (5 years old or even younger) he taught me a poem by Jose Martí called "Cultivo una rosa blanca" (I cultivate a white rose) and goes as follows: Cultivo una rosa blanca En Junio como en Enero Para el amigo sincero Que me da su mano franca Pero para el cruel que me arranca El corazon con que vivo Cardo ni ortigas cultivo Cultivo una rosa blanca Roughly translate as I cultivate a white rose In July as in