When I was 7, I went to school in Switzerland because everyone on my mom's side of the family lives there. Then we were back in Australia, in Queensland. That's where we had the chance to have lots of different animals. I spent a lot of time living in nature and building cubby houses in big old trees by the ocean.
Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school […]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. […]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.
It seemed from the media that we were being told that all Haitians had AIDS. At the time, I had just come from Haiti. I was twelve years old, and the building I was living in had primarily Haitians. A lot of people got fired from their jobs. At school, sometimes in gym class, we'd be separated because teachers were worried about what would happen if we bled. So there was really this intense discrimination.
The storm was really giving it everything it had. This was its big chance. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates.
Coming to Australia, it was just really magical for me. It just had the wow factor of a different sort of place and, more so, just being with a family that wanted to love me and to have me, because I knew back then, before coming to Australia, there was no way of getting back home or finding my real family.
My mom is Italian, and her whole family still lives in Italy. My dad is Australian, and his family lives in Australia, so we were raised there.
I spent a lot of time hacking, doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which.
Because by the time I went to the village school in Switzerland, we're talking about September 1965, she was finishing 'Wait Until Dark' which was released in '66. That's when she gave up being an actress to be a full-time mom - in a farmhouse with fruit trees.
I spent a lot of time alone; I left school to be tutored. So, most of my companions were animals. It's as simple as that. I knew more animals than I did people.
I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in China. And then I spent three years in Vermont before moving down to Nashville.
I was born and raised in Southall; we had two houses which we made into one big one because there were 12 of us living there: me and my bro, my parents, my grandparents, and my dad's brother's family.
My family came to Australia on the First Fleet. My family’s been in that country for a long time, over 100 years. If your family’s lived in Australia for a long time, everyone has a little bit of [Aborigine blood]. I know my family does because we have an eye condition that only Aboriginal people have.
Big lots,' I said, seeing the eighty-year-old oaks and shady lawns. The houses were set way back and had iron fences and stone drives. The harder to hear your neighbors scream, my dear,' was David’s answer, and I sent my head up and down in agreement.
My mom brought me up by herself, so I was a latchkey kid. I would walk myself back from school and spent a lot of time at home alone, watching TV. There weren't a lot of Latinas - or any women of color. And the ones I saw were usually presented as stereotypes or treated like jokes.
I was close to John simply because I liked him as a person. He liked me as a person. We spent a lot of times at one another's houses back in Liverpool. We spent a lot of time together in Germany.
We had a chance to see a lot of different styles of play and you had to adapt to the different style each team plays. That?s going to help us come tournament time because the game in the Pac-10 is different from the Big East and we know how to adapt to the different styles. I?m glad I had that opportunity.
It was life under the Soviet system - we were struggling with every big problem. Publicly, my parents had to queue up to buy food, but were able to live secret lives in their private rooms. With the TV set in the living room, we were able to see Western pop culture -a different reality from what we were living. For me, it was like two different universes existed at the same time, and we got used to being in these parallel universes.