I went to Queen's - a fine university with the proudly stupidest frosh week in the country. This was, when I was there, supposed to be somehow evidence of a higher social class.
When I was growing up, I always knew I'd be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.
I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.
Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.
Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.
I still take acting, singing, and dance classes. I think no matter where you go in your career, you can always learn more and better yourself.
Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.
And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society.
When runaway inflation and bank failures struck in Germany in the 1920s, the middle class was destroyed, which led directly to the rise of the Nazis.
A cardio-funk class - I should have at least taken one of those. But it's always terrified me. I'm never one to be a dancer on the dance floor, even at a bar or a club.
My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.
When I moved to Seattle in fourth grade, I joined the Seattle Girls' Choir. It's a world-class choir, and we competed, toured Europe, and went and sang at the Vatican, so it was a really awesome experience to have that young.
I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
I like people-watching and getting inspiration from the unique people who don't follow any fashion tides. From 12-year-olds who have full freedom, to 86-year-old ladies with a ton of class.
Being in Loyola College exposed me to other options and gave me confidence, apart from the freedom to bunk classes. I became a merchandiser and then a garment manufacturer, and interacting with foreign buyers and manufacturing foreign brands in India...
Learning to accept failure on multiple levels is, to my way of thinking, the key to become a world-class therapist. But that means humility, and setting your ego aside, while you develop superb new technical skills.
In our tabulation of psychoanalytic results, we have classed those who stopped treatment together with those not improved. This appears to be reasonable; a patient who fails to finish his treatment, and is not improved, is surely a therapeutic failur...
In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.
I have a great advantage over many of my colleagues inasmuch as my students bring with them to class their own personal knowledge of national, regional, religious, ethnic, occupational, and family folklore traditions.
I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.
