When I first started making music, for about the first 10 years, I was always the young kid. Everyone referred to me as such in any band.
I've never been a huge prog fan. My background is punk. My background is learning how to play a bar chord and listen to Discharge records when I was a kid.
I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.
If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt - at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt - was almost total. They were not part of society; no one thought they were cool.
When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.
For me I was always a smart nerdy kid. I wasn't the smartest and I wasn't the nerdiest, but I was a smart nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I definitely wanted to be somehow involved with reading the rest of my life, and I came from a community, I lived in a community, I was part of a community where reading was considered completely alien.
I'm really into the rights of immigrants, the rights of the working poor. I'm one of those little activist types. I probably would have just gone to law school. And the scary part is that I was one of those kids who always tested really well. You put a test in front of me, and I would have been like do-do-do-do-do. I probably would have been some community lawyer somewhere - if anything, that's probably what I would have been doing.
I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.
I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.
I never sleep in. By the way, when we're like, "We alternate waking up for the kids," the other person's waking up at 7 a.m. It's not like you're waking up at 10. It's like, "I'm really going to give you a treat and you're gonna get your ass up at 7 instead of 5:59." Which is when our son wakes up.
Research has convincingly demonstrated that using the "rod" creates children who are not more obedient but who are instead simplymore angry and aggressive than other kids. Parents who routinely slap or strike their children are actually handing them a model of violence to imitate--and many do indeed grow to be abusive, some even murderously so.
As a kid, I played a lot of one-on-none.
I don't think I'm a perfect mother. I think I'm trying my best. I think it's complicated, it's difficult. I think I'm learning from my kids so much to be their mother. I don't think you're born a mother, I think you become a mother.
I think in that context, when a generation of kids is that ignorant of their recent history, it does a good job of showing what the Pistols were standing for. It's current and it's in the air, partly because I think nothing contemporary is as extreme or as strongly stated as what The Sex Pistols were able to do in their time, in the '70s. I think the reason to [make the film] is that their ideas are still alive: the defense of the right to be an individual, and questioning everything you read, and questioning all the information that's bombarded increasingly at you.
As soon as I gave birth, it was as if you understand them. They become people, not kids. You start to identify with them. You see yourself in them.
The benefits kids get from watching "Sesame Street" can be as powerful as the ones children get from preschool.
When I was a kid I would get upset when people laughed at me when I didn't mean to be funny. I would always hear,'We're not laughing at you. We're laughing with you.' But I would say, 'I'm not laughing.
Me? Robin Goodfellow, a family man? He, not likely, ice-boy. I mean, think of what that would do to my reputation. Glamour shimmered around him, and he gave us a wink. Later, lovebirds. Gimme a heads up when the kid arrives. 'Uncle Puck' will be waiting.
I was a huge bookworm as a kid, and you could usually find me reading something with a dragon on its cover.
It seems that one moment I was this little kid only caring about animals and flowers and stuff, and then the next minute I was this raging stew of hormones. I don't know if you've ever been a raging stew of anything, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it.
As a kid, I grew to define what I didn't want my life to be like by sitting behind moaning women on the bus, hearing them bang on about their aches and pains, both real and imagined.
I have three kids. I should know how to take care of them.
At restaurants, I carry paper and markers and tell everyone to draw a picture with a unicorn, an octopus and an explosion. That keeps kids still for a minute.