We also talked a little bit about "branding". B said he was learning a lot about branding himself as a musician in New York, and I asked if that made him sad. (I was thinking of branding as sort of artificial self-presentation). He said that actually he was learning it was possible to present anything inside himself as a desireable strength. He also shared his reflections on bungling opportunities to communicate about who he is when he meets new people...like how recently someone asked him, "what are you doing?" and he responded, "well, I'm in a quartet, I do some bluegrass..." and later felt really foolish because he didn't make himself sound exciting, but that was actually because he didn't feel excited in that moment about anything he was doing. But at other moments when someone asks him the same question he'll respond, "everything has been so amazing since I've moved to new york!!!!!!" (slightly hard to hear, considering that's when our connection began to disintegrate).
I thought about my own attitude towards branding and said I felt really comfortable with branding myself for my tutoring business, and that I've realized that my "product" actually has nothing to do with math, it has to do with giving each student my undivided attention and re-adjusting to them in every nanosecond to help them learn. But that I felt really uncomfortable with branding myself as a musician. And I told him how the night before, an old friend had introduced me to a friend of his as "This is Transformer, and she is EVERYTHING!" How I felt really flattered by that definition, which I knew to the old friend meant cellist-composer-balinese gamelan player-traveler-etc-etc but actually, to someone who didn't know me, it conveyed no meaning whatsoever, so it was actually a useless way to describe myself!
