Carey, 25, Northern Ireland
>>The prompt: 400-word autobiography
My earliest memory is eating tuna sashimi off a Morey Boogie Board on the beach with my family, in the windy summer sun. It was, I think, my parents’ anniversary. I grew up singing as I walked to school on the gravel road, attended elementary school at a high school that had been vacated and reemployed as a bilingual elementary called Alianza, or “Alliance” of the Latino community, the Anglos, and anyone else who wanted to learn the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. At age ten I moved to remote Northern California, where I was never successful in convincing my parents that the local livelihood was growing marijuana. I was obsessed with the city, and believed that ‘real’ people only lived in cities. I spent every opportunity in the Bay Area. Fortune and persistence allowed me to leave California (something wholeheartedly spurned by my fourth-generation California family) for a private university education. Surrounded by eerily like-minded youngsters, I developed a plan for world salvation through the application of theoretical social science, social work, and social lubrication. The plan has yet to be realized. Diploma in hand, I had the good fortune to move to Northern Ireland. Perhaps it is the malaise of American privilege, but there is a vitality about Northern Ireland that is lost in the cocoon of late capitalism. Here the industrial revolution is just closing up shop. Urban form began to take shape in my mind, as I discovered that what I really loved was spatial theory, expatriation, and the man by my side. Last winter I agreed to get married: the new revolution for this staunch feminist. Third Wave it is, as I breathe life into the oldest agreement on this planet.
Carey – Age 25 – Derry, Northern Ireland
from 400 Words, Issue 1–Autobiographies
page 128
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