School
(page 5)
Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.
Music was a way of rebelling against the whole rah-rah high school thing.
I wasn't the brightest kid in school. I was a backbencher troubling the frontbencher, and eventually I failed in my 10th grade. But then in higher secondary, there were only three people who got first division in arts, and I was one of them. So this tells you, where you put your mind and heart into, that's where you go.
I've been wearing lipstick since I was in 7th grade. That was our form of daring self-expression, because we had to wear uniforms in school. It made our teachers so angry.
I am pretty geeky, yes. I like odd sub-culture activities, I am often socially inept, I wore glasses in high school. But I am a modern geek.
In Kenya, I met wonderful girls; girls who wanted to help their communities. I was with them in their school, listening to their dreams. They still have hope. They want to be doctor and teachers and engineers.
It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.
The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
At school I pretended I had a normal life, but I felt lonely all the time and different from everyone else. I never felt like I fit in, and I wasn't allowed to participate in after-school activities, go to sports events or parties or date boys. Many times I had to make up stories about why I couldn't do anything with my classmates.
When I was 18, I was moving to New York to start college at The New School. I had done a year of college in Toronto and wasn't happy there. I didn't have any friends in New York City, but I applied and got in. It was pretty overwhelming, but everyone in New York is so ambitious and creative.
I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge — which is mathematical, essentially — can have a playful visual element to it.
My family moved to Aspen, Colorado, where we had 'Avalanche Danger' days that kept us from going to school, climbed 14,000-foot peaks as part of my education, and I learned to snowboard.
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