| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | I have too many to recount, but if I had to pick one I guess I'd say the trips to my grandparents' house during which grandma would spoil us rotten. Root Beer floats every night, the most delicious spaghetti you can imagine, and mostimportantly, those summer evenings spent with my large extended family playing games like "Ghost in the Graveyard" late into the night. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | A few years ago I'd say my father; I look up to him and he's the model of what I consider to be a "good man." But more recently I've gotten closer with my mom, and I think I've begun to understand her thought processes and who she is as a person more. My dad was a dentist, my mom was a social worker, and if you take the hard sciences of dentistry and the humanitarian aspect of social work and mix them, you get something like a psychiatrist, which is my career. They're both brilliant, kind, giving people. They role-modeled what it means to live a life of honor and integrity and demonstrated from an early age the importance of hard work. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | Self-respect, honesty, integrity, a strong work ethic, independence, thoughtfulness, empathy, a warm and giving heart, the capacity for forgiveness, for humility, for love, and a stubborn devotion to one's family and value system. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | A story that gets retold often among my family members is when I was young, I was playing in our backyard with a water hose, when it suddenly stopped running. I at first looked inside, curiously, to figure out what was wrong, then, for some reason, put the hose in my mouth, when the water burst back on, knocking me back spluttering onto the ground! |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | My home and my heart are in the Midwest,, and I don't really have any aspirations to travel elsewhere. I've lived in California, lived in Washington DC, I've travelled to China, to Spain, to the Dominican Republic, and taken road trips across the entire United States with close friends. But there's really no place like home. I guess if I'm forced to answer this question seriously, I'd pick Mars. It's time for humanity to become an interplanetary species. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I'd want my children to value reading and learning more generally, and to value the character traits I described above. I'd want them to be individualistic, loving, kind, hard-working, passionate, purposeful, humble, warm, honest, self-respecting, integrous. I'd want them to be loyal, to enjoy being alive, to value family and friends, to have the capacity for forgiveness, for leadership, and to value the freedoms and liberties this country embodies. |
