life experience — blog

I did my first “talk” when my daughter turned 10, which you can read about HERE. I wasn’t sure if I was gonna do another talk since my younger one is a boy and I felt like that was his father’s domain.

Then I realized that maybe that is the problem.

That boys don’t get women’s perspective. Maybe lack of that knowledge is one of the reasons for the sexual misunderstandings and frustrations. Maybe my son can benefit greatly from a woman’s perspective: a perspective of someone who went through trials and errors and awkwardness and embarrassment and any and everything terrible in a process of coming into her own sexually; a perspective of someone who struggled with boy’s/men’s lack of understanding of how this/our body/our mind works. I can also possibly improve intimate experiences for a few (or many?? lol) girls and women whom my son would encounter throughout his life.

My son just turned 14 when the talk happened. This is my general observation from having both a daughter and a son; boys (or maybe it’s just my son?) are (my son is) way slower than girls (my daughter). I knew that if I tried having the talk with my son when he was 10, he’d be too uncomfortable and too ignorant to really understand everything I want to communicate with him.

I didn’t really plan on having the talk that day. I found myself alone with my son in a restaurant having lunch, which happened totally spontaneously. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in NYC and we were sitting at one of the outside tables at this taco place. We could see neon signs for the Museum of Sex from where we were sitting. My son made a comment about how when he was little, he didn’t know what the museum was about and he used to wonder. I said, “oh you know now?” He was like, yeah I know what sex is.

If you want to really get good at something, then you have to do it in front of people and be willing to fall on your face repeatedly and suffer some serious humiliation. It’s particularly true for Jazz but I think it applies to any kind of profession, be that cooking, writing (ahem), or whatever. But particularly Jazz. This is not an art form you perfect before you bring it out in the public. This is an art form that can function much like a language and “social skills” comes into play; just as you can’t rehearse and practice the art of conversation by yourself, you can’t get good at this form of communication if you don’t get out into the real world, i.e. gigs, sessions, and try it out.

Yes, it is necessary to spend hours alone to master your craft. Definitely. But that would not take you to the next level. (This is why I think the current model of Jazz funding, which is a classical model, is problematic but I’ll write about that at a later date.) You can also flip that and say this: if you are willing to put yourself out there and endure public embarrassment and truly open to learn from these experiences, you’ll get so much better so much faster. When it gets real, you really have to bring your A game and use your creativity and gust to figure it out how to do it.

EAT WELL PART II

JUST DOING IT

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