I grew up poor and white. While my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not. In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism.
I thought I was gonna get a doctorate in composition or be a composer and be at a university for the rest of my life, mostly because my parents are academics, and that was the logical thing to do.
Sometimes it feels like my life is just one long day.
My first game, I played the first play of the game and called a timeout and got sat down, got benched for the rest of the game, and we won the game. It was the longest day of my life. Long day. Very embarrassing.
Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?
The three greatest people in my life were white, OK. My high school coach, my high school superintendent and my mentor in Manhasset, Long Island.
I have lived a long life, and I am proud that I spend the whole of my life in the service of my people. I am only proud of this and nothing else. I shall continue to serve until my last breath, and when I die, I can say, that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.
I sensed that my life was better when I focused on things that were working as opposed to focusing on the long list that goes wrong, but I wanted to know if there was any validity to that.
My life! That's a long story, too. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, like half of the world, I think.
It's not for me to determine what a country artist has in common with a hip-hop artist. You go for those with long-lasting careers. And that's what I've had as my target all my life.
I had a long-lasting love affair with the flavors from Japan and the hustling New York street vendors. And, of course, a life-changing return to Ethiopia has made huge impacts on my life in food.
If I only had 12 years left to live, I'd want to live it as a member of Congress because that was the 12 longest years of my life.
I enjoy looking back on my life. I'm thinking seriously about starting to write about it.
I feel there is this looming cloud over my life.
I know I'm appreciated by how fans treat me, and the best way to treat them is play every day, hard. I sign autographs, but if I'm with someone I don't know who doesn't start the conversation, there won't be a conversation. That's just me, living my life. But I'll loosen up after baseball.
About the most exciting thing a baby can do is burp - I've spent hours of my life holding a baby on my shoulder and patting its back, trying to loosen up a burp. Burping was probably invented to give the father something positive to do, since our chests are not equipped to allow us to do much else.
There was a combination of not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, but also really not wanting to be stuck in Lord of the Rings for the rest of my life, and being desperate to kind of make sure that I could do something else with my life.
I don't want to use the word 'instinct,' but when something good happens - something big or good in my life - I have this sensation that it was inevitable. Anything careerwise, 'Lord of the Rings,' 'Rudy,' or getting married. Which is weird, because you don't ever want to be ungrateful for what you have.
I've never been with a losing team in my life, and I don't think I'll start now.
Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.
