My first job, I worked at 'YM' and I had an extremely tough boss who made me cry every single day. But what I took away from that was how I would never be.
So it wasn't actually that bad, it took a couple of weeks to sort of get used to uh, you know, standing around and pretending to have ice shoot out of your hand, but once you got used to that it uh, it was actually not that hard.
I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.
There's no doubt that when the Republican Party took over in 1994, the 'Contract with America' was an opportunity to implement some things - like welfare reform and some of the other initiatives. Then, it kind of lost its steam.
Being Peruvian means to come from the farthest place possible to get to Europe. Peru is the land of the Incas. It was the capital of South America; it was where the Spanish founded their empire and took over the Inca Empire and made it into a colony ...
If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine.
I was so low that I wanted to exit. And I took a bunch of pills, and they were sleeping pills. And at least they would put me to sleep, and maybe I wouldn't wake up, and that was fine.
I took Latin and Spanish. I can speak a very small amount of Spanish, but Latin has sort of gone away! Unless I was joining the Catholic Church, there would be no need to learn Latin.
In the summer after sixth grade, I took a class at St. Robert Bellarmine. My first role, I was the villain in a play, and I forgot all my lines. I think I cried my way through the performance.
My first website went up in 1995. On it I ran a feature called Ask Nicola. Readers would email me questions, I'd answer whichever took my fancy.
The global policy shift toward neo-liberalism that took place during the 1980s and 1990s was supposed, according to its proponents, to bring a convergence of living standards of richer and poorer nations. This never actually happened.
As I said, when we needed to move over to rock'n'roll, Sam and Vernon couldn't quite make the shift. So that's when Larry took over on drums, and we needed a bass player.
I'm very grateful and proud of the progress Yahoo! has made over the past year. When I took the position as chairman, I told the board that my intention was to serve for one year in order to help Yahoo! during a critical time of transformation.
Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.
The only concept or experience or core belief that I can attribute my other-ness to is that I just started out a weirdo and I stayed a weirdo. And it took me a long time to embrace my outsidership and see it as a strength rather than a weakness.
You dream about the Olympics for so long and you have that one day, then it's over, and when you don't run well there is this huge letdown. It took me years to deal with that. I feel like I almost had to cleanse myself of that experience.
I started doing radio commercials for Kmart when I was 4. They had to splice all my consonants together because I couldn't talk very well. But these jobs helped my mother and me put food on the table. It took the two of us working.
Anyway, I lived on the streets and did pretty good until I got caught stealing, what was it? I kicked in a restaurant window, went in and took all the food that I wanted, and while coming out I was grabbed.
I know my husband really loves me because he takes me to have ribs. He says I'm the only girl he ever took out who actually ate anything on her plate, as opposed to pushing it around.
I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.