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It's refreshing going from getting picked on in middle school to getting my name screamed out across the street.

I don't get upset if people think I'm crazy. If you go to a mental hospital and someone calls you a name, would you get upset? Of course not. Well, that's the way I think about the world. They don't know any better.

It's so funny how my name has always been such a big deal. When I was growing up, my family was always moving. I had to meet new people all the time. And they'd laugh.

Maybe sometimes, when I see some kids, you know, with their families. It's making me cry. You know, maybe when I ask them, sometimes, like, 'How does it feel to have a dad?' And, you know, they tell me this great answers, and sometimes I wish my dad was here.

When I was in first grade, everyone made fun of my name, of course. I think it's kind of a big name to hold up when you're nine years old. It seemed goofy. I used to tell people I wanted to change the world and they used to think, 'This kid's really weird'.

What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read.

When I had a child, everyone was telling me that I was going to see the world through her eyes, and everything was going to get this nice gloss to it. I kept waiting for that to happen, and thought there was a real problem with me that it wasn't.

When my twin grandchildren, Linda and Lyeke, were born two years ago, it changed me. I felt it was the essence of what life is about, and I cried all day. When my son Pierre, their father, was born I didn't cry like that.

I had these experiences as a kid; I remember certain things happening in school that were horrifying that I would see, certain things of violence or certain things of cruelty, but around that, something might happen afterwards to cause everyone to laugh, and that always blew me away.

Everyone in my family has seen me cry before.