My name is Alex, and I write stuff. This blog has served as a space for me to write about the areas of study I focused on in college, my travels around my new home city, reflections on a dynamic lived experience, and my thoughts on culture and art.
This post isn’t going to be an exhaustive biography of my entire life. But I did want to share some of the experiences that inform my writing.
The first chapters of my life were spent in the Los Angeles suburbs in a working-class (lower-middle class on a good day) Christian family. I attended a small private Lutheran school. The entire student body was around 250 kids, kindergarten through 8th grade. My parents met in California but were from very different cultural climates. My father’s family immigrated to the US from the Philippines, and my mother and grandmother fled an abusive relationship in rural North Carolina.
We then relocated just south to Orange County, California, where I stayed for most of my teens and twenties. For the first time in my life, I attended public schools. This change meant I was coming into contact with far more people, experiences, and media than my conservative upbringing had previously allowed.
This transition into a more diverse (and sometimes secular) world created a lot of anger in my teenage heart. I was angry at my family and the Christian Church because I thought they had taken something away from me. I thought that I had been missing out on so much of what the social world around me had to offer.
But I’m not angry anymore. With age came the realization that my parents and their friends were just raising children the best way they knew how with the information they were presented with.
Part of the process of deconstructing my religious beliefs involved adopting a staunch anti-authority view of the world. I failed a lot of classes simply because I didn’t want to be there, I chose not to excel in any subject through high school. There’s a long line of frustrated educators because I would get the highest grade on the final, and still fail their class. I stumbled across the finish line and took night classes to make up the credits lost for ditching school.
I was good at one thing in high school: music. Without any direction or work ethic, I attempted to get a music performance degree for my first two years of college. I floundered and dropped out.
I was eventually recalibrated, I and learned invaluable lessons in patience and delayed gratification when a friend offered to pay for a 5-month backpacking trip through the Appalachian Mountains. I decided to give college another try, this time to become a teacher. Eight years after getting off the Appalachian Trail, I had an MA in Sociology. I focused my studies on social inequality, food systems, and globalization.
Of course, there are other major events that have shaped my worldview. But I see a major throughline in my education that brought me from a little Lutheran school in the suburbs to writing a blog in Portland, Oregon.
I live here now with my dogs, girlfriend, and a baby (coming August 2022). Like any writer, my lived experiences have shaped what and how I write. And I’m happy you’re along for the ride.
Thanks for letting me overshare.
Alex Francisco
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