Well, let me tell you, if you're 45, had three children and are post-menopausal, you're not going to weigh what you did the day you graduated from high school. Get that out of your head. That's a media-driven ideal that you're never going to healthfully obtain.
As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain: Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In most situations the correct response to where did you go to school is, "School? Why, I never had much in the way of book learnin' and such." Then, get in your BMW and get the hell out of there.
After I graduated high school and came out to do 'Buffy,' I was enrolled at my mom's university, and I was going to go get a real job. I never thought of acting and never really wanted to be an actor.
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.
Nobody is going to tell me that I can't do three games in a week. No one is going to tell me that I can't do it well. I'm going to work really hard at it. I get bored if I don't have 10,000 things on my plate.
My doctor said, 'If you can weigh what you weighed in high school, you'll essentially be healthy and not have Type 2 diabetes.' Well, I'm gonna have Type 2 diabetes, because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.
...for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head:'You have no power over what happens in your life. Drugs dictate exactly what you're going to do. You've taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you're going wherever the drug world takes you.' That had never changed. The feeling would well up inside of me, and no matter how much I loved my girl or my band or my friends or my family, when that siren song 'Go get high now' started playing in my head, I was off.
I ended up dropping out of high school. I'm a high school dropout, which I'm not proud to say, ... I had some teachers that I still think of fondly and were amazing to me. But I had other teachers who said, 'You know what? This dream of yours is a hobby. When are you going to give it up?' I had teachers who I could tell didn't want to be there. And I just couldn't get inspired by someone who didn't want to be there
I knew what I wanted to do when I was 13 and I had to go through four years of high school to get out. That's a blessing, because I never had to lay on my bed staring up at the ceiling going, 'What am I going to do with my life?'
I didn't have drama in high school. So when I graduated high school and started at Wayne State in Detroit, I told my parents I was going to major in theater. And they were like, 'OK. Why? You've never done it.' But, it was just what I wanted, and they came to see my very first show and, from then, completely supported me.
I thought, oh, I'm going to be a painter. And eventually my family had moved near Chicago, and when I graduated from high school, I went to the Chicago Art Institute, and it was there that I thought, well, now I'm going to be a painter.
When I was younger, I was an avid science girl. I was all about, 'I'm going to be a doctor.' Even when I graduated, I was like, 'I'm going to be a doctor.' Even though I did acting and I was in plays and drama clubs in high school and college, I still didn't think I was going to take it on as a career.
I tell a person, "If I could go home with you tomorrow and you and I could spend the day together from maybe 8:00 to 6:00, and we went out to a restaurant at 6:30, I could tell you with a high degree of accuracy how successful you're going to be." That's huge because I'm just going to look and see, what kind of attitude do you have, how do you relate to people, how well do you prioritize your life? I'm going to see all of those things in the process of a day.
There's a point in everyone's career where they're not going to be playing as well as they should be. You just have to keep you confidence and not hang your head and realize that you're going to figure it out and that you're going to get better and that you're going to learn. Learn from all your mistakes.
People tell me if I don't eat vegetables, I'm going to get scurvy. Well, what the hell. But I was never overweight as a player. There was a clause in my contract that said I had to weigh in at 270 every Friday morning. I always made it. I'd have dinner on Monday, and then I wouldn't eat until Friday.
Tell me what's going on here. Why can I hear your voice inside my head and why did you say you came to school for me?" "I was tired of admiring your legs from a distance.
If I were advising President Obama, since he's the one running, I would have made his campaign very simple. I promise that in four years, I will get more Americans, as many as I possibly can, the opportunity and access to some form of post-secondary education. I want more of them to graduate high school with the skill-set of post-secondary education and I want more of them to be able to obtain that post-secondary education. This is the only way we are going to close the income gap.