I went to an all-girls boarding school in Maryland. I used to laugh at the girls in the theater program - I was pre-med, National Honors Society; I was on that track.
Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.
When I was 12, I went to boarding school, where I discovered the computer, which meant I no longer had to write something down and get someone to play it, I could just type it into the computer and hear it back.
Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.
I loved my boarding school, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't have a career.
I remember joining a boarding school in the sixth grade. I was lazy, complacent, and fat. Suddenly, I realised that I had to fend for myself. That's when I discovered this drive within myself. For the first time, I ranked first in class, which was a miracle in itself. However, it didn't matter to my family.
The only thing I wanted when I left school was independence. I had been at boarding school for many years. When you're boarding, nothing is your own and your whole day is scheduled. You're told when to sleep, what to eat and when. You have zero independence.
I went to boarding school, and what that teaches you is to cope emotionally at a young age and to suppress a lot of emotion. Being in the army is, in a way, similar.
I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called - appropriately enough - Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.
Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
One thing I cannot understand - and people are probably going to be upset about this - is why local school boards have control over educational content.
We didn't have the phrase 'style icon' when I was young, but I have to say, I really copied Bob Dylan when I was younger: a little bit of Bob Dylan or a lot of Bob Dylan and the French symbolist poets - I liked how they dressed - and Catholic school boys.
Mostly, I was into powerlifting when I was in high school. And I just continued to train the same way I was taught - to powerlift. Once I started doing bodybuilding, there were no real differences, just different exercises. A different way of training with more repetitions, but it was still the same lifting of very heavy weights to get stronger.
I was actually going to school to be a chiropractor but was also succeeding at bodybuilding - I did well in a few national contests.
When I was a kid I really loved Humphrey Bogart. But when I was in theater school, Robert DeNiro was my go-to guy.
Cardinal Raymond Burke is a 66-year-old guy who lives in Rome, dresses like Queen Elizabeth, and talks like someone who majored in misogyny at some bogus, backwoods, Bible-banging tent school.
My father came from a country called Bolivia. He was of Spanish descent. I never went to Bolivia until I was 60 years old, but apparently when he was 17, he had already planned his entire academic curriculum so that he could graduate high school and enter college in the United States. That's how much he wanted to come to this country.
I was taken out of school by my dad when I was 11 and lived in Mexico City, then later in Paris. I went with him to excavate in Bolivia and Peru. I never finished high school. I was a straight F student anyway. My father admitted to me later that he'd thought I would come to no good.
As children we were bombarded by competing answers. Church says one thing, school another. Now as adults it's no surprise that if we discuss the nature of it all, we generally spout some combination of the two, depending on our individual inclination and mood.
