Half of my family is in Los Angeles, so my cousin was the first person to play me, like, Snoop Dogg, and I would always feel like, 'OMG, I shouldn't be listening to this,' and my other cousin was the first to introduce me to Aaliyah, so every time I'd go to the West Coast, I'd get those West Coast vibes.
I wasn't a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.
The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.
My favorite sport is baseball; my cousin is pitcher Heath Bell.
I remember one time my cousin telling me - she's got four kids - she would pour the milk down the drain so she could drive to the Dairy Barn just to get out of the house.
I have a cousin called Flirta D who was big in the grime world, which made me really cool at school. 'Flirta D's your cousin?' 'Yeah, buddy.' 'He must be a millionaire!'
When I was in fact a child, six and seven and eight years old, I was utterly baffled by the enthusiasm with which my cousin Brenda, a year and a half younger, accepted her mother's definition of her as someone who needed to go to bed at six-thirty and finish every bite of three vegetables, one of them yellow, with every meal.
My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.
I bumped into my cousin after she'd shaved her hair very short, and she looked incredible. She seemed so effortless and cool, and I wanted that. And, I've had it like that ever since.