Assignment #14

Write Your Life Story In Less Than A Day

I came out Carly Allyse Ng. I was supposed to be named Hannah but my mom’s friend had her baby first and named it Hannah. Instead, I’m now named after a pop star from the 70s or 80s or somethings. 60s? We ended up naming our dog Hannah.

I spent the first nine years of my life in Alpine, California. We lived in a small neighborhood in between some hills. 8942 Hunter Pass, Alpine, CA 91901, exactly. It was the kind of street where you actually have neighbors. The Mormon neighbors with a family of 8, the neighbor who’s sleeping with the other neighbor although they’re both clearly married, the neighbor who’s 40 and secretly smokes pot with an old college friend who’s actually just your best friend’s dad. The kids in the neighborhood grew up together, though I was always the youngest. I got tricked into doing some pretty dumb things because of that. One time I pet a wild rooster to prove to the older boys that I was tough. It almost bit off my hand (i think i was about 4-- i had tiny hands at the time) and it turns out that the boys were lying in the first place and they were too scared to go near it themselves. My neighbor to the right was boy a couple years older than me and the whole neighborhood picked on him. His house was toilet-papered every weekend but that also meant that every weekend there was a tournament: whoever could reach the highest bit of toilet paper in the tallest tree could pick any piece of candy from his candy drawer. I won and I picked gummy sharks.

I went to some Christian Preschool and I remember we used to sing a song every morning that went “this is the day/this is the day/ this is the day that the lord has made/ I will rejoice” and also that one that everyone knows that goes “this little light of mine/ I’m gonna let it shine.” There was a boy who lived down the street who I carpooled to preschool with. Brett Allen. One day my mom and I picked him up to go to school and half way down the block, with the car moving, he opened his door and ran back home. He was my first kiss and his mother has the proof hanging above her mantel. I think sometime in high school he started selling pot, but i guess i only knew him until he was about 11.

I was set up with a pretty good family, too. Bethany is my oldest sister and we’re five years apart. I think she resented me until about a year ago. I'm fine with that though, we get along just fine now. Last time i saw her, she tried to teach me how to skateboard. The time before that we made cupcakes together and the time before that she snuck me beer at our family Christmas dinner. Aubree’s in the middle and we’re three years apart. We’ve got plans to open a small boutique that sells clothes and cupcakes. Right now she has some science job that i don't understand and i think we're both pretty excited about the future. My mom paints and cares. She finds old pieces of furniture that are going to be thrown away and tries to make them look new again. I told her that she's totally dumpster diving and that she's so DIY but i don't think she knows what i mean. And my dad’s in the telecommunications business. He’s also Chinese, making me half Chinese and half Caucasian. Sometimes he's all business but in the time that he's not, he writes surf rock.

After preschool I attended Shadow Hills Elementary School. The parents always come for half of your first day of school and then they leave you so that you can get situated. I didn’t know that they left half way in between. I thought they were going to go to kindergarten with me. When they left I couldn’t stop crying and my teacher told me to count as high as I could count. I got close to 100 before I started making up numbers. My best friend Carrie was in that class with me. She didn’t cry but that’s probably because she was happy to get away from her terrible mother. I remember my friend from class named Amber died in a fire. The school tried to avoid explaining death to us and instead we planted a tree. I never really got what happened until recently.

At about this age, I took tap dance classes. Every year we’d put on a recital for our parents to show them what we’ve been learning. My parents have some home videos of our recitals so there’s proof to what I’m about to say: I was by far the best in the class. I had two instructors, Dorothy and Christina. I remember liking Dorothy significantly more.

First grade was super boring but I remember I had a wart right above my left knee that I always tried to hide. That’s basically all that happened in first grade.

Second and third grade didn’t really matter all that much either. I took up gymnastic, that’s what happened here. I made it to level 4 and I could do a round-off back-handspring and I could do a back-walkover on the balance beam but I could never to a kip.

When I was in fourth grade I had Ms. Chism. After class she would play basketball with the other basketball playing teachers. One time, her boyfriend came to class dressed like Elvis and proposed to her. This inspired a boy in my class named Casey to get down on one knee and propose to me. I said no. I think it was in fourth grade that everyone got really mean.

And then there was that one night that my parents came into my room (shared by my sister) and they told us that we were moving. It was like, the worst news ever at the time. I had lots of goodbye parties and there were flowers and balloons and everyone gave me their address and we all promised to be best friends forever. That never really panned out.

We moved to Carlsbad, California and we spent our first three months in a tiny apartment while our house was being built. This time it was all three sisters in a tiny room. My dad would read to us each night to make us feel less sad and it almost worked. Things were tough at first, but probably only because I was 11 or something and because the kids at my new school were huge jerks. But I soon made two friends and fifth grade became pretty alright.

Since we moved away from our old gym, I quit gymnastics and started competitive cheerleading. My coach was named Jen and she winked a lot and for the first couple years I had fun. But then Tannaz came to help coach and everything turned too serious for only being 11. And then for some reason I continued until junior year in high school. Something ridiculous like 5 times National Champions or something. Who knows, it doesn’t seem like any of that actually happened.

Junior high was super weird. I won the science fair in 8^th grade. I dated a boy named Robert. I performed in the 7^th grade talent show—we danced to “Whoop There It Is.”

Then I went to La Costa Canyon High School. The first year was filled with pool parties and learning how to play guitar and falling out with a couple good friends. The second year was just a continuation and the third year was constant ditching or eating lunch in my car. I dated a boy named Alex and we were both really into kittens but after couple months we weren’t really into each other. I cut his hair for the first time in sophmore year and he told me I had to sing the “Haircutting Song” which just turned out to be me humming “So What?” A couple years later i cut his hair after taking four shots of whiskey. Every time his hair turned out fine, i think. A boy named Andy told me he was seriously crushin’ but now we’re just “B.F.F. & E.” In Physics I had a funny lab partner named Bailen. He was almost a bro but his father was a physicist and so as a trade, he did our labs and I gave him cigarettes.

Between my junior and senior year I made a handful of good friends. We dumpster dived and we went to shows and everyone smoked cigarettes and went to Food Not Bombs and there was Kelly Kay and Shivaun and Jacob etc. At one point I worked at a taco shop with two babes and we started a band called Cake Maps. I think we all look back at that time and think of it as our “Glory Days.” I’m stuck between these things: 1. we thought we were way cooler than we actually were and 2. maybe we were actually just really cool.

For my senior year I transferred to San Dieguito Academy and everything was magically 183287542389 times better. Blaze Newman let me know that I can secretly write a killer essay. Except I still don’t separate paragraphs properly and who really knows how to use commas? I dated, fell in love with, and broke up with a boy named Kevin. That was the first time that dating was a serious thing and that was the first time a heart break was ever so sad. I listened to lots of “The Good Life” by Weezer and kissed a lot of boys and stayed out late and hung out with a girl named Anna and a boy named Riley. At the end of the summer we went to Big Sur, along with Andy, and we stayed in tents and went on hikes. One night we drank an outrageous amount and Riley enjoyed it because it looked like there were twice as many stars.

Either way, I graduated in 06 and I told my peers that “all in all, we cannot stop singing. We cannot start sinking, we’ll swim until it ends. They may kill and we may be parted but we will never be broken hearted.” Thanks, Ted Leo.

After a summer wilder than any other moment in my life, I left San Diego to attend UC Santa Cruz. I technically lived in Stevenson College but I actually lived in Kelly and Ariel’s apartment in Kresge. They lived next to a cute boy named Chris and one time we all ate dinner together and Chris’s friend Izaak came. Izaak was wearing a K Records pin and I was immediately crushin’. He wrote my number on his arm and I learned how to spell his name. I learned how to take 10 shots of whiskey in 10 minutes and I learned that college is so easy. I went on a couple scavenger hunts, one I don’t remember too well. I spent too much time thinking about San Diego. I dated an old friend named Matt and it was nice but in retrospective, very very strange. I kissed the aforementioned boy named Chris and then he told me he was dropping out of college and moving to Philadelphia. He came back in the late spring and there was a welcome that kind of warms your whole stomach and there was this day where all of my closest friends laid in a meadow with honeybees and birds and a stream and the sun. Miguel was naked and the dandelions popped and there were poppies and grasshoppers.

There was this one time that Izaak and I sponge bathed Miguel for his 19^th birthday.

After school ended, Izaak, Miguel, and I took a road trip to Portland to visit Joey and Chris. We spent a day on the coast and my heart exploded a couple times and then we drove back down to California. Now both Izaak and Chris are in Philadelphia and Joey and Miguel are in Santa Cruz. I think that at some point we were all supposed to be in Portland, but that fell through somehow.

I spent a restless summer in San Diego. There was the beach and there were old friends and there was too much time spent missing people. In August, I drove my car up to Portland with my friend Natalie. After a week or so of being homeless, we got a house on SE Main St with our two other friends, Kelly and Lauren. I saw a boy named Matt for a couple seconds and it involved lots of scary movies and some metal. Every once and a while Joey’s here and all the time that he’s here it’s the best. We try to have family dinners every night and sometimes Nick will show up on his bike.

I now spend more time on my own and it gets hard sometimes but I’m learning to do it. In a couple months I’ll leave again to go back to Santa Cruz. It’s going to be hard to leave.