My uncles and other relatives are against encouraging girls in every aspect, and that includes sports. I hardly interact with them. My parents are more open. They back me all the way.
My grandmother did not come to see me till a month after my birth. I was born seven years after my only sister and my birth was a big disappointment for her. In it there is a message that I understand very well now about the discrimination against the girl child. My uncles and other relatives are against encouraging girls. My parents are more open. They back me all the way.
When I told my parents that I wanted to be an actor, they were like, 'How can you be an actor? You have to go out and interact with people! You hardly talk to our relatives!'
I'm actually not making fun of my real parents. I've taken stereotypical traits of my real parents, my aunts, my uncles and parents of every race and put them into these two characters, who are just over-the-top ridiculous and super-alpha parents about everything.
Both of my parents are teachers. One is in the Waldorf school system in Louisville, Ky., and the other runs a music school. I grew up with loving, supportive, encouraging parents that let me make my own world, and I wish that for every single child.
Prostitution thrives in the United States. We focus in this country on punishing the girls. For every brothel owner or pimp or male customer, there are 50 girls who are arrested for being prostitutes. Other countries have tried the other way around, and it works beautifully...they bring the charges against the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers, and they do not prosecute the girls, who quite often are brought into that trade involuntarily. It works quite well, by the way.
The good thing about Twitter is that theres not so much of a wall between you and your fan base. They can interact with you, and it makes them more endeared to you when you interact with them. Its really fun in that way.
If you've ever had to recall your past in some way and you open a drawer of old photographs that your parents kept, there are always pictures of you smiling and charming, and then a bunch of people you don't know who they are. Could be aunts, uncles, could be the postman for all you know. Who are these people? Your parents are never in the picture, because they are the ones taking them. So you've got these unrelated images that are disconnected from your memories.
Today, if you listen to sports talk radio, they are not talking the right way about most women's sports. Those people will retire, or frankly a lot of them are getting fired or laid off - and we'll get younger people into key media positions who are more egalitarian, more open minded, more respectful.
I find inspiration in each and every person that I cross paths with. Every human being I interact with offers me a significant insight on some aspect of life.
I think country needs to have a sporting culture. I think if sports were taken as curriculum in school and are encouraged in right way like government of Maharashtra and Haryana have done given Marks for Sports and encouraging them with good jobs.
[Everybody Loves Somebody] one really loves both cultures, represents them in a very accurate, genuine, authentic, fun, fresh way, and it includes so many more people because it has that language aspect to it.
My parents' names were Florian and Mabel Smith. My mother's maiden name was Dersam. They were of German heritage and were part of a family community with my grandparents and uncles and relatives. I was an only child.
If people are looking at me in my hometown, then every woman that races against me in the peloton is as well. I can tell you, every one of them now believes that they can do it. When I go to a Cascade or Nature Valley and they race against me, the girls that are say 30 seconds from me at the races are all of a sudden saying 'I'm 30 seconds from gold I mean why can't I do this.'
When parents ask why there are still so few girls in advanced science and math classes in high school, I tell them, because girls still need way more encouragement than boys to take those courses.
Sports is so hard for me to wrap my head around. I never played any sports, I don't watch any sports, I hardly know the rules to any sporting event. Really, I'm borderline mentally damaged when it comes to sports.
I've had a lot of really influential people in my life, like my grandmother M. J., who have helped me along the way. But there are so many of us girls in my family, and even though they're all so open and honest, who I seek advice from depends on what aspect of life I'm dealing with.