With adoption, there is a whole range of experiences, and a lot of it goes under the radar. There is too much icky stuff about it - all this stuff about people reunited, a sickly sentimentality about blood lines. For me, at least, life is much more ambiguous than that.
Basically there's just so much stuff flowing past on the internet now, you have to let most of it go. And I've grown accustomed to the process of not worrying too much about the stuff I'm not getting to, because the important stuff will come back around.
In the old days gigging was everything. The whole of life was about gigs. Everything was about waiting for the gig and then doing the gig and going nuts and then afterwards the party and all the stuff that goes with it. And then that party continues through your twenties and thirties. I'm now 51, and it's still very much in my blood, but I'm really hard pushed... the gig is the party for me now.
I write so much and I release so much music that I think I'm less precious about that stuff than a lot of people.
My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about - having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.
I don't like to wonder about it-I just like to do it. That's what I mean about the image stuff and all that. There's far too much emphasis being placed on that kind of stuff... the whole emphasis on what does it mean? Everybody has their own particular vision.
Having a child as a single mother was a crucible - maybe this is true for all parents. I got rid of so much stuff that didn't really matter in the scheme of things-like throwing stuff out of an airplane that kept me flying too low. What was left was essential, i.e. not a lot of extraneous stuff that had kept me busy and people-pleasing. I just didn't have the luxury of wasting my life force on so much stupidity and distraction. That made me strong.
I co-taught a seminar called Small Group Processes with my professor. I learned so much from it, so much about myself, about groups, how this stuff works. I bring all that stuff to teaching now.
The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.
When I'm doing the Justice League stuff, my point of view is always coming through Buddy. And he's a dad, and there's stuff about his life that I relate to with my life, and I can also take the abilities of animals, which a lot of people don't know about me.
We ask for way too much stuff - way too much stuff. You got a job making $100 a year and bought a house for $3 million. Talking about, 'I don't know what happened with the payment.'
I sit around too much, waiting for other people to do stuff and angsting about stuff they've done, without doing anything myself.
I never really got on my own case about my own acting. I know a lot of other people have, and probably very justifiably. But I don't worry about stuff like that too much.
It's become such a cultural norm that people brag about it: "Oh yeah, you did that? I did this." Keeping up with the Joneses used to be about "I have the bigger house and car," and now it's much more about how much stuff you can cram into your calendar.
My mother goes crazy over babies. Some people just do. They love 'em! I never have. Babies scare me more than anything. They're tiny and fragile and impressionable - and someone else's! As much as I hate borrowing stuff, that is how much I hate holding other people's babies. It's too much responsibility.
People didn't feel so much shame around it and that they didn't feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about - something I'm very excited about - is all the stuff around chemo as an "empathetic warrior."
I don't worry too much about learning lines per se. The memorization is the easy part for me, usually. For me, it's more about working on the context, back story, intention, motivation, etc. Once that's in place, the lines come pretty naturally.