Liz cleared her throat. "Isn't there a more polite term we're supposed to use nowadays? Like....little person, or vertically challenged,or-" "I'm not going to call myself the god of vertically challenged people," Bes grumbled. "I'm a dwarf!
I believe God wants you to have money to pay your bills, send your kids to college and do charity work and build orphanages. There's the teaching that we're supposed to be poor to show that we're humble. I don't buy that. I think we're supposed to be leaders. We're supposed to excel.
I went to college because I felt like I was supposed to. I graduated from public high school and I did all the things that I was supposed to do.
I was a first-generation college student. This was supposed to be the ticket to prosperity. But it wasn't. I left college with a mountain of debt and no practical skills.
The Barefoot College is supposed to be a sparking off process. People are adopting it and owning it, which is really the story behind the college.
People may call what happens at midlife 'a crisis,' but it's not. It's an unraveling - a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're 'supposed' to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.
In fact, black students with college degrees are twice as likely to be unemployed as white students with college degrees. So, to say there there is not an issue for black Americans and Latinos in terms of the opportunity that college is supposed to create would be wrong.
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.
I know you think that a quarter-life crisis is thought to happen when you finish college. Well, mine started around the time I was supposed to finish college.
Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation.
In college, I was a fiercely committed Democrat - a meeting with Jack Kemp, then Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, challenged my blind partisanship.
I felt like that character in Flowers for Algernon. Not Charlie, the lady teacher from the college who realizes, 'I've got to stop dry-humping this mentally challenged guy!
I think, as an artist, it's very important to continue to be challenged and feel challenged all the time.
Some people are physically or mentally challenged. I'm emotionally challenged!
I really wanted to be a doctor, until my freshman year of college when I realized that while I was good at chemistry and biology, I really wasn't feeling challenged by it.
I started reading all these men's magazines, trying to follow all the tips: what you're supposed to wear, what you're supposed to have, things you're supposed to say, and all the exercises you're supposed to do.