By the time I turned 12, I was a 5-foot 10-inch social disaster. Towering over my friends was the bane of my adolescence.
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.
Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels.
My friends have named me the person they least want to do extreme adventures with, because I always seem to be very close to being part of a disaster. If a cat has nine lives, I think I've used a few.
As a young person growing up in Washington, D.C., summers were hot, humid and relentless. My friends and I grew more restless and adventurous with every passing year.
Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it's a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats.
The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.
When I was a struggling actor, I worked for a party company. One of my friends from school was working for an advertising agency, and I turned up to one of his company's parties dressed as an alien to collect tickets on the door.
My friends like to remind me that I have relatively weak fingers. Aerobic strength and general endurance have come easy, but finger strength has always been my biggest weakness.
My friends once told me I remind them of the main character from the American comedy series 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.' I thought they must mean a sunny, affable girl-next-door, but instead I was confronted with Larry David! Crabby, moody, perversely neurotic Larry David. And the thing is, my friends were right.
We easily forgive our friends those faults that do no affect us ourselves.
We are easily comforted for the misfortunes of our friends, when those misfortunes give us an occasion of expressing our affection and solicitude.
I've always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl.
When the founder of World Energy Solutions Inc. assembled his first board in 2000, it consisted of nine investors and friends. The group met quarterly, generally affirming Domaleski's every action. But the Worcester, Mass., company, which auctions electricity and gas credits, lacked customers and financing. It needed more from its board to survive.
I am not a foodie, thank goodness. I will eat pretty much anything. A lot of my friends are getting incredibly fussy about food and I see it as a bit of an affliction.
In affluent communities, where each member is keenly aware of his or her place within the Byzantine order, attracting the right friends is a blood sport. Chumming up to influential figures who are in a position to help can determine the course of an entire life.
I wasn't as big a comic book aficionado as some of my friends, but I definitely had some Batman comics.
I have been able to help my friends and people that I believe in pay their bills and stay afloat in L.A. while following their dreams.
There are lots of things about me that aren't like the rest of my friends. But I try to learn as much about millennials as I can so I can stay afloat among them.