CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Stand Up Helped Me Be a Good Parent

Thursday, February 20, 2014

this entry brought to you by glados, "want you gone"


I asked my oldest daughter Celest how her day was, and she told me she was very frustrated. She was standing up in front of the class giving a report, and she was upset that people weren't paying attention, not even her friends.

Of course, any parent can give advice about when they were a kid going through the exact same thing, but I realized that there was something I could relate to from my adult life, and I feel like whenever you can relate to a kid that the exact same thing happens to adults, that it helps.

I said, "You know, when I am doing stand up, I'm doing it in a bar attached to a hockey rink. Some people aren't there for the stand up, they're there to watch a hockey game. People are drinking. There's talking. There's glasses clinking. And honestly, it does suck when you get up there and nobody pays attention. And you have to do two things. One, you can't let it bother you, because the people that are paying attention, even if its half attention, you're going to lose them if you let it bother you. But the other thing is, you have to have presence. If you have presence, the people that aren't paying attention will. You will make them pay attention to you just through sheer will. And obviously being in the sixth grade isn't the best place to be an over the top presence, but there's still room for personality, and it's really easy to stand out when everybody else is just a sixth grader and not, say, other stand ups."

This seemed to work. She seemed to brighten up. She asked a lot of questions about how I dealt with a disinterested audience, because I totally have. It was nice. Stand up helped me feel like a good parent.
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with love from CRS @ 8:43 AM 

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