L.A. can be a little bit daunting. It is great, but it is a very cutthroat area and industry to be in, so London feels a bit more homely for me.
Some of the best presents I get from my children for Mother's Day are homemade. It makes me so happy to see the time and effort they put into each gift.
I love getting anything homemade - anything that's from the heart. If you can make or craft your own something, that always goes above and beyond, like, a candle - which is great, but if it's homemade, that's so much better for me.
I love being a wife and homemaker - because it's my choice. My husband doesn't expect me to do it. I don't mind doing things for him because he does so much for me; we both feel that way so there is no power struggle.
I'm the homemaker, and that's fine with me because I really like that.
The guy who started on third base and gets home and acts like he hit a homer - that guy doesn't impress me.
When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.
You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.
I'm homesick everywhere I go, but England has a negative effect on my spirit to a profound degree. That trip from Heathrow into London is worse than the flight over there. It's just so grey, and I'm not a pub person, and the traffic in London gives me a heart attack. It's not a comforting place, on any level, to me.
I get homesick - I could be in the sunniest place, but I need to see normality, and normal, for me, is London.
'Hiraeth' means homesickness to a home to which you cannot return: the grief of the lost places of your past. I fell in love with the word and instantly connected to it. It reminded me of the days when I had left my home in Gwalior, and I had that strange pull in my stomach, and now I can so relate to this word.
For me, having a gender identity that was different from my sex assigned at birth and that wasn't seen by society felt like a constant feeling of homesickness - that unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach.
I think it's really difficult for folks that aren't transgender to really wrap their mind around the feeling of having a gender identity that differs from their sex assigned at birth. But for me, it felt like a constant feeling of homesickness.
As supportive as my hometown is, in my high school, there are people who would probably walk up to me and punch me in the face. There's a select few that will never like me. They don't like what I stand for. They don't like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy. They're going to be negative no matter what.
I'm a hometown girl, and my personality at home is the opposite of the performer in me. But then, when I'm home and haven't done anything for a while, I get really itchy and nervous and weird-feeling.
Homework's hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, 'Okay.' And then I sit down and they say, 'It's math.' 'No! Not math! English, history, anything!'
As for my studies in school, I was a solid student. I was strong in English and Latin, but I got lost anytime the subject included math. I wish I had paid more attention to biology and science in general, subjects that came to interest me as an adult. I could have gotten better marks, but I never took a book home, never did homework.
I grew up in Maryland on the East Coast - you know, close to D.C. but sort of in the suburban, rural area - and Nashville felt very, very homey to me.
As a result of being on 'SVU' and 'Homicide' all these years, there's a lot of people who don't know I used to do stand-up. When they see me onstage, it's a surprise, and it's revelatory. I'm happy because I can do my old material, so everybody wins.
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.
