About

“Hello World!”

Welcome to Carly’s Bananas. 

This blog is starting out of a what I call quirky what others call demented appreciation for the ordinariness of bananas showing up on sidewalks.  In college, I met a girl who had major sweet spot for brown, mushy, so-close-to-spoiled-you-almost-throw-them-out bananas.  Probably 2/3 of our earliest conversations were about this penchant.  We moved on to bigger conversation topics (best brunch meal in the cafeteria, why JFK is the best/hottest president, how much we loved our sociology prof’s outfits) and she became one of my best friends.  Turns out she could appreciate mushy, almost-rotten people as well as she could bananas.  We moved on, graduated from college, moved to different cities. But the bananas never went away. At least for me anyway.  No matter how far I traveled down I5 (SEA>PDX>EUG>SF), I consistently saw bananas everywhere.  Well mostly in metropolitan areas where, by the way, it totally makes sense to see bananas everywhere because more people == more bananas consumed.  I don’t even need a reference for that kind of conclusion.  What I’m saying is, this isn’t a cutesy blog that is pointing out how much this fruit permeates our society.  Nor is it supposed to be an artful expression of peels in conspicuous places.  It’s just me noticing a few years ago that if you looked for bananas, you’d see them.  And if you keep looking, you keep seeing them and pretty soon you have 45 pictures of bananas in various cities just sitting on your iPhone camera roll with no end in sight.  So why not do what many other narcissistic millenials who have fast WiFi speeds and too much time on their hands? Blog about it. 

The blog name seemed like a good choice for the obvious reason that I’ll be posting a lot of banana pics, but also because I am fully aware of the double entendre it facilitates.  In the last year I moved to plunge head first into the thriving start up world in the one and only Bae Area. On good days I do bioinformatics research to develop a diagnostic assay for cancer.  On bad days I slam my head on my desk and write shitty blog posts like this one.  I’ve met a ton of really smart people, seen really cool things and eaten meals that cost more than the sum total of my wardrobe (which is maybe not as much as you think, hello old navy clearance!).  I can say I am the co-founder of a company? wtf?  But despite all that, I, like many others my age, suffer from that always-present nagging doubt that what I’m doing just isn’t quite right.  I have all these #blessings: cool experiences, my health, friendz&fam, a job, a sick place to live, the financial ability to buy the mid-level price coffee, yet I am still on this personal quest to figure it all out.  If that doesn’t sound crazy, ridiculous, silly aka absolutely bananas, I don’t know what is.   

So, this blog is going to be a couple things: 

• 1: Me going bananas.  Whether that’s snapping pics of peels on sidewalks because I can’t override the compulsion not to, or me rambling about something probably pretty trivial, but hopefully interesting, in real life.  Could be start up life, SF life, personal life, or life in which Donald Trump could realistically be our next president (Nah, that can't be real life).   
• 2: Me showing what you can do with a fast WPM typing speed and a **flexible** work schedule.
• 2.5: Me using bizarre grammatical sentence structures for the sake of repetitiveness.  
• 3: Me showing that when you look for something, you can find it.  Over and over again. Even when there’s dirty trash in the way. 

Banana @ Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco: October, 2015.