When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.
We were a family that made our Halloween costumes. Or, more accurately, my mother made them. She took no suggestions or advice. Halloween costumes were her territory. She was the brain behind my brother’s winning girl costume, stuffing her own bra with newspapers for him to wear under a cashmere sweater and smearing red lipstick on his lips.
I’ve discovered that Motown and Broadway have a lot in common – a family of wonderfully talented, passionate, hardworking young people, fiercely competitive but also full of love and appreciation for the work, for each other and for the people in the audience.
Growing up, I had a lot of family members who worked in the Dallas Independent School District, and they shared stories firsthand with me about kids stepping into the cafeteria hungry before practice, or waiting for the school building to open the next morning just so they could get a meal.
Neighbor is no longer confined to the vocabulary of the individual. It is a national word. Modern inventions have annihilated distance. Commercial relations have broken down barriers of race and religion, and the family of nations is a recognized fact.
I am of the view that the Affordable Care Act will be a transformative piece of legislation that can lower the cost of health care in the United States – perhaps our greatest fiscal obstacle – and help all Americans lead healthy and productive lives, free from worry that a single illness could mean ruin for an entire family.
You have to respect your parents. They are giving you an at-bat. If you’re an entrepreneur and go into the family business, you want to grow fast. Patience is important. But respect the other party… My dad and I pulled it off because we really respect each other.
Early in my career, I didn’t want to disappoint my colleagues, clients, or family. So I said yes to everything. This ended up raising my stress level and shortchanging everyone else – including myself – because I couldn’t give anyone 100 percent of my time, nor could I pay close attention.
I did grow up in a military family but lacked the perspective to grasp the cognitive dissonance carried by most people who serve in the armed forces or the circumstances that push lots of folks into the military. I don’t blame G.I. Joe or Rambo for that atmosphere, but they certainly reflected the final stage of a two generation cultural myth.
When my family goes to sleep, I start clicking, combing through digitized phone books, school yearbooks, and Google Earth views of crime scenes: a bottomless pit of potential leads for the laptop investigator who now exists in the virtual world.
I believe that we are missing a great opportunity. We as Republicans are not really emphasizing what brings us together, and that’s conservative values: love of the country. Love of family. Personal responsibility. Hard work. Optimism. Those are the things that we should be communicating to Latinos, and we’re doing that very poorly.
Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.
He’s a family man and a businessman. He spent his career building successful companies. Then, he saved the 2002 Olympics and brought pride to our nation. As governor, he balanced the budget, cut taxes, and created jobs. The president America needs is Mitt Romney!
My dad’s family were political and he was always a theatrical creature, whereas my mum is really musical and her father was the touring pianist with Nat King Cole. My family was an explosive mixture of politics, religion and music – no wonder I turned out how I did.
When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s going to work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it’s copied. I have to be honest: the first thing I can think, all those weekends that I could have at home with my family but didn’t. I think it’s theft, and it’s lazy.
I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.
When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‘I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.’ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.
Nobody wants to be on food stamps, but when my family lost everything, we were grateful for it. I was grateful the program was there so I could concentrate on my schoolwork and not on my empty belly. We were grateful that we had the support we needed to roll up our sleeves and rebuild our lives.
We’re all biased, right, in many different ways – politically, religiously, ideologically, the way our family raised us – and that’s fine. Nobody wants to live in a world where everybody thinks exactly the same. The key, though, is to try to figure out where your biases are holding you back from solving problems.
I was born into a very religious family where everything was about setting the right example for the community and having to obey orders blindly. I felt that everyone was growing up in the world, except me. This is probably one of the reasons why I had such a rebellious attitude towards any form of authority.
When my cousin sister got married to a Muslim boy, my family was baffled. All the brothers had abandoned her. But I said there is nothing wrong in it. We have not lost our sister. In fact, we got another family member in the form of that boy.
Artemis women often have difficult childhoods. She’s the kid who seeks comfort in the woods, or animals, or books. If trapped in an authoritarian family, she blends in to get by – but keeps a fierce autonomy inside her head and heart, looking to the day she breaks free.
Earlier, my priority was only work. I worked like a dog before I got married. After marriage, once you have a baby, time management is difficult. Your responsibilities change, your priorities change. And you have to concentrate on them if you have to work out your life. Your career is just a part of your life. For me, my family is my life.
Anthropomorphism is such an interesting concept. It means projecting human thoughts and emotions onto an animal. Which implies that thoughts and feelings belong to humans alone. Of course, if you believe in evolution, or if you believe in the Bible, that’s not so. Both evolution and the Bible tell us that we’re part of a family.
