I went out to California; I was pursuing my degree in genetic engineering and civil law at U.C. Berkeley, and I had to pay my way through school. I eventually got a scholarship, which was great, but in the beginning, it was very hard.
My dad was a Muslim and would pray five times a day. I would pray with him as much as I could, in the morning before school. Sometimes he would tell us moralistic tales about genies, magic carpets and wondrous lands. My mother is not religious - she's just English.
The high point of my entire junior high school career was going backstage to meet George Harrison. I was simply awestruck.
I'm not a big fan of the George Lucas school of meddling and tinkering. That's a slippery slope.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
By the time I got to George Washington University, I had been a straight-A student in high school.
When I was in high school at the age of 17 - I graduated from high school in Decatur, Georgia, as valedictorian of my high school - I was very proud of myself.
Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?
What was nice for me was that when I got to secondary school - like high school - I met many other Ghanaian schoolgirls whose parents were also born in Ghana and were raising them here. We automatically had a huge kinship that was amazing.
Given the choice, the majority of children wouldn't go to school at all. The whole thing's ghastly.
I have people come up to me who love 'The Other Sister,' or 'Old School,' or 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape.'
This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.
My childhood was really comfortable and secure, but school was a nightmare. I was a lot taller than the other girls and they called me Gitte the giraffe.
I don't usually leave the house with makeup on. I wear it only for special occasions; I'm too lazy to get up in the morning before school and get glam.
I wore makeup when I was at school, and I wore makeup when glam started. I started wearing it again when punk started. I've always been drawn to wearing it. It's partly ritualistic, partly theatrical and partly just because I think I look better with it on.
I try to shield my children as far as possible from the public glare. I want them to have a normal childhood like we had. We went to school by the school bus, had school food... There was no special treatment given to us. The same applies to my children as well.
But my main thing that I would love to see as a fan of 'Glee,' like I said, is to really get into the character and who they are and what they do outside of school. I think that that's interesting. And then of course the themed stuff and the album episodes are all really cool too.
I always felt like an outsider growing up. In school, I felt like I never fit in. But it didn't help when my mother, instead of buying me glue for school projects, would tell me to just use rice.
'Savage' is a trait that might get you into business school or retweeted 10,000 times. It's what a kid might say after somebody does something awesome or gnarly or fierce: 'Oh, that's savage!' It's the skate park. It's the high-school cafeteria. It's the YouTube comments section.
At my high school, there were always kids carrying acoustic guitars around, which is why I named my band the Mountain Goats. I didn't want to seem like one of those guys who brought his guitar to the party whether you asked him to or not.
