I strive to be my best every time I go out, and that's very stressful. After a while of doing that... it's nice to just take a deep breath, sit on a tractor.
The first few years I was competing, I'd ride so well in practice, then choke and fall in competition. Now I take a deep breath and say, 'Look at me. I'm outside. I'm doing what I love.' Still, nothing's matched the pressure I felt standing at the top of the halfpipe for the first time at the Olympics.
Before I step in the Octagon, I pray one last time and take a huge deep breath, and then I'm home.
I really didn't even have time to get that many lessons, to be honest, because I was suddenly on the road. I was kind of thrown in the deep end. But that wasn't a bad thing when I look back at it.
Being called ugly and fat and disgusting to look at from the time I could barely understand what the words meant has scarred me so deep inside that I have learned to hunt, stalk, claim, own and defend my own loveliness.
It's a funny thing, my relationship with Deep Purple. I already felt the pain and confusion of trying to replace Ritchie Blackmore, which is a difficult thing to have in your head - since the time when you were a kid, that guitar sound and approach is what you associate with Deep Purple.
I loved my time in Deep South Wrestling. We trained so hard and I got a crash course into the world of sports entertainment and pro wrestling.
Kofi Kingston has always been one of my favorite opponents to wrestle. He and I started back in McDonough, Georgia in 2006 in developmental at Deep South together. So, our careers have come along at the same time. He's incredible.
Sure, there's a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It's an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans.
When the time comes to start building deep space transports and refueling rocket tankers, it will be the commercial industry that steps up, not another government-owned, government-managed enterprise.
When we shot the pilot for 'Voyager,' Armin Shimmerman, who played Quark on 'Deep Space Nine,' was very gracious and outgoing about preparing us for these personal appearances. Still, nothing really can prepare you for the first time when you walk out on stage and 2,000 people in a room stand up and applaud simply because you're there.
Here's the thing: I did one episode of Deep Space Nine, and I loved everybody that I worked with. People couldn't have been kinder... But I had a really, really difficult time with the prosthetics.
It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species.
People quote lines to me all the time. I'm always surprised - everybody has a favorite movie, and they're always different. I'm always shocked. People stop me on the street and throw lines at me from 'Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight' and 'Deep Space Nine.' 'Shawshank' happens a lot because they play it so much on TV.
My father wasn't around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, 'Why me? Why don't I have a father? Why isn't he around? Why did he leave my mother?' But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, 'I don't know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?'
On a deeper level, there's a level of privacy that I need in order to work, and if there's been a time when there's been a lot of publicness in my life, it can be a little bit difficult to sort of rebuild that private space.
Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.
I grew up in New Hampshire. My closest neighbor was a mile away. The deer and the raccoons were my friends. So I would spend time walking through the woods, looking for the most beautiful tropical thing that can survive the winter in the woods in New Hampshire.
I'm not really out in the world all that much. I mean, I live with no phone signal, in the hills surrounded by trees, and I have, like, a mom and two baby deer that come by all the time, and my dogs and the squirrels are in a full-on feud every morning.
To describe my scarce leisure time in today's terms, I always default to reading.
