From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.
I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.
When I was 12, I forgot the keys to my parent's apartment. So I simply climbed up seven floors to get in.
I used to play snooker in millionaires' mansions with marble floors and eat at the best places, but that's all over now.
A nice quick workout is the stairs; it takes me five minutes to do 24 floors.
Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.
Sometimes, there is a long gap between the time the script was written and when it went on the floors. Being on the sets can be refreshing, as you can revive the script in some ways.
Twitter has become a group conversation of that type that used to take place on trading floors.
For most of Wall Street's history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: buyers and sellers gathered on exchange floors and dickered until they struck a deal.
I love to come home and work on one of my other jobs. Just to remember that the floors gotta be mopped, and that everything isn't centered around what you fought about in Washington last week.
