To me, what defines a New Yorker is the edge that one develops from having actually lived here. Once you have it, it doesn't go away, and everywhere else in the world feels like it is in slow motion.
I'm a former hippie, so clothes are important to me - your clothes defined you in that period. I guess clothes still defines people. But, I change a lot. I'm in my Brooks Brothers period now.
I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
What defines greatness is when you hold all the records and what you mean to your fans, on and off the field, because that is who ranks you as the greatest receiver of all-time. The guy that holds all the records, the guy that has set the stage for all of us, you have to give it to Jerry Rice.
It's very important that we keep these special, wild places. It defines the United States. Imagine our country without our national parks and our monuments. Here in California, imagine if you didn't have in Southern Cal the Channel Islands or the great Highway 1, Big Sur up to Point Reyes up to the Redwood country.
'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.
Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.
It's a little difficult when something goes from being an utter obsession - a thing where your skill defines you as a person - to it just being a thing you occasionally do.
There's so many things that people do on a daily basis that they do as a way of defining who they are. But really, what defines who you are is when circumstances push you to the edge.
