Dreams and expectations also have the very dark flipside of disappointment, broken dreams.

I don't have many hobbies. If I think of hobbies, maybe ping pong. But I don't have a desire to get a ping pong medal.

Did you ever see Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke? That's what happens if you really smoke weed and make a movie. You get two guys and no plot and it's basically like, 'Yeah! Let's drive a van made of weed!' And that's pretty much the movie.

I always see nice images like that but I don't know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.

There is actually a huge suicide problem in Palo Alto schools, so obviously not all is well in paradise. High expectations, and the pressure to achieve in a highly competitive world are too much for a lot of very promising young people. There have been something like ten youth suicides in Palo Alto in the past ten years. They usually step in front of the train that runs by the high school.

I've decided I can't really control people's perceptions of me. All I can do is decide on what I work on and how hard I work on it.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.