I didn't have a childhood, really, because I worked my whole life and... other reasons. So when I had some success, I went ballistic. That was my childhood, and the party kept going on.
I thought I was grounded. I thought from my kinda blue-collar outlook on life that I would call myself a grounded person. I was not. I was like a balloon flying around in the air. And as soon as our first child was born, boom - my feet came right down to the ground.
Then I became a mother and it just fills every space, that isn't filled with something else important. It's just like this incredible balloon that blows up and fills life up.
The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.
All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.
When my life is stressful, my favorite game is called 'Pop It,' where you pop balloons and prizes fall out. It's a five-minute game that focuses my mind and gives me extra attention when I'm stressed.
The only thing I'd ever wanted in my life was to be a major-league ballplayer, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn't good enough. It broke my heart.
It's a blessing that I have my family in my life and they were supportive, but there were times when I needed to find an outlet for me to understand my people and my own journey, and I found that through my chosen family, which was the ballroom community.
There's so much you can say about the ballroom scene. But, simply, it's just a way of life. It's a place you can live out a fantasy you never lived before.
When you gather up all the balls of life that you try to juggle, it is a very difficult thing to try to focus in on taking good care of yourself. But that's why God invented me - so I can come and teach and preach and make people laugh and give them some education so they can start liking themselves better.
Humor has been the balm of my life, but it's been reserved for those close to me, not part of the public Lana.
The Baltic Sea is becoming more and more polluted. Not everybody living near the shore of the Baltic Sea is protecting it. It is the water of life for countries like Finland and Sweden.
When I am president, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally and protected equally. Every action I take, I will ask myself, 'Does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson, who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America?'
I could have ended up a casualty of a broken family, like so many of the kids around me in inner city Baltimore. But my life was forever changed the year I turned 10. That was the year my dad turned to Jesus.
My dad got a job as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches biology and genetics. My dad has been obsessed with science his whole life. Both my paternal grandparents were illiterate bamboo farmers, so he really worked his way up and then got a Ph.D., full ride and everything, from universities in America.
To play someone who is who they are because of the happiness and contentedness that they've known in their life is interesting because of sort of how banal it is.
'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.
My life is short. I can't listen to banality.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
Singing is my life, and I have to do it, or I'm going to go totally bananas.
