• When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I spent a day at the Long Beach Aquarium with my parents. We were wearing the same blue, grey, and white striped shirts from GAP.
  • I got into a fight in the second grade with a boy in my class and his older brother. My glasses broke but I put up a good fight. I think…
  • One of the kids in my third grade class brought a peanut butter, ant, cockroach, fly, and jelly sandwich. We watched him eat it at the bottom of the stairs next to our classroom.
  • On those stairs, the new choir teacher auditioned the kids in my class 5 at a time.
  • I walked home with my friends from a middle school that was a mile away from home, and we did it often.
  • I drank coconut boba drinks with friends at the cafe near my middle school called What’s Brewing?
  • In middle school, we all loved when we had subsitute teachers until Ms. Lee substituted for my 6th grade math and science teacher for a week. Everytime we heard there was going to be a sub, we prayed it wasn’t Ms. Lee.
  • I started ditching in elementary school when I would walk home wearing an overfilled backpack and holding a guitar too big for me so I wouldn’t have to go to the afterschool program where they would force me to learn math of levels far too advanced for me. I distinctly remember looking at a sheet of paper with long division on it thinking, “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?” because we had only just started multiplication tables in class let alone single digit division.
  • When I was a kid, my dad would bring blank sheets of paper with him when we went to church that I used to draw on and make paper airplanes with to keep my hyperactive self occupied.
  • I had to bargain or negotiate with my dad to convince him to buy me toys and games.
  • Immediately after my birthday, I began to think about what I would want for Christmas. Can you guess what I did on Christmas evenings?