Seriously, listen to anything except the Top 40 stuff your friends are listening to. I’m not telling you to never listen to it, but you should cultivate a taste for other kinds of music for lots of good reasons you probably wouldn’t think.

My musical taste varied wildly as a teenager. I grew up in the ‘90s, and about halfway through that decade, some of the best music of all time was made. But only for a period of a couple of years, and then music on the radio sucked again. I didn’t know then that there was a such thing as independent music (i.e., music not played on mainstream radio), so I went backwards in time looking for music I liked.

My search led me initially to classic rock, mostly of the Southern rock persuasion, thanks to my childhood and my parents’ tastes. In my early teen years, I discovered jazz thanks to the iconic teenage movie Clueless, in which one of the characters references Billie Holiday. I started listening to her, which led me to Ella Fitzgerald, who in turn led to Louie Armstrong, and on to Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and through most of the iconic jazz musicians and singers.

At some point in high school, the cool people I had become friends with (thanks to my taste in jazz) introduced me to independent music, like Belle & Sebastian and Braid.

Music might seem like a trivial thing for me to be giving you advice on, but music has been a huge part of my life. It’s soothed me when I was sad, calmed me when I was near the edge, propelled me through long nights of studying as well as countless miles of road, and lifted my spirits when I felt the most alone. Your taste in music is critical to your growth as a person.

Older People Will Respect You

My taste in jazz had an interesting side effect: When adults found out I listened to jazz music voluntarily and that I actually enjoyed it, they looked at me in a different light. Simply by branching out into a different kind of music, it was implied that I wasn’t like other teenagers, that I was somehow more mature. It was as if it hadn’t dawned on them that a teenager could like the same kind of music that they did. They started swapping CDs with me and recommending new artists for me to check out. It was pretty cool to have conversations with people older than me and to feel like I was telling them new things.

You Become More Interesting

Having a varied taste in music gives you a layer of complexity that your friends who only listen to the popular stuff on the radio won’t have. And that complexity makes you more interested to other people. “Oh, you listen to _______? I’ve never heard of them. What are they like?” Knowing about things that other people don’t know about makes you more interesting also.

It Gives You Something in Common With Other Cool, Interesting People

If someone else does listen to the same music you do, it’s like instant friendship. The more esoteric the music, the more instant the friendship. Even being interested in learning more about different kinds of music will draw you into a new circle of friends. The people from my teenage years who were most influential in molding me as a person, were people who either shared a common love of music or introduced me to a new band or type of music.

As an example, one of my fondest is memories is of the first time I heard Chet Baker. I was in a small bookstore when “My Funny Valentine” came on. His voice sliced through the air like a hot knife through butter. I asked the bookstore owner who it was, and we became friends. He guided me to the books who would shape my adventures through my early twenties, and who I am today. By hanging out in the bookstore, I met the people who would become some of my best friends.

It Opens the Doors to Opportunities

When I started listening to jazz, I began to pick out the sounds of the bass and fell in love with it. I quit my guitar lessons, and started bass guitar lessons. The next year I ended up in my high school’s jazz band, playing bass, which might sound dorky but it wasn’t. Playing the bass on stage and jamming out with the other kids on the weekends gave me some serious street cred, and continues to impress even today. I mean, it sounds cool, right? I used to play jazz bass. Cool.

When I got to college, even my limited knowledge of independent music landed me an opportunity that would turn out to shape my entire life’s career. I became a DJ and staff director at my college’s radio station. Thanks to good music, I got to run a radio station, DJ at clubs, and hang out with touring bands all through college. When I graduated, my degree didn’t mean much to employers. My experience at the radio station, however, landed me a job at a magazine, which led me to a job at a newspaper, which led me to marketing and owning my social media business today. Who knew?

So much of life is about who you know, and that ‘whole good music leading to hanging with cool people’ thing will lead you to some pretty cool opportunities.

You Will Be More Creative & Motivated

Good music should inspire you to be better, go faster, dream bigger, keep going, trust yourself, love deeper, be happier. You should be able to put on a pair of headphones, find the right song, and feel whatever you need to feel at that moment. Good music does that. Having that tool can help you get through hard times, train harder physically, concentrate better on studying, and sort through confusing thoughts. Being able to do those things will put light-years ahead of your peers, and heck, most adults too.

Music Gives Your Life a Soundtrack

Here’s another cool thing about getting into cool music as a teenager: you can turn on a song when you’re older, and instantly be transported back to the time period in your life when you were listening to it. Chet Baker takes me back to that bookstore and the days when I was discovering who I was, and Braid takes me back to the cafe I loved where the barista gave me a mixed tape with them on it. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be able to listen to a song, and remember what I was feeling when I first listened to it. I feel so strongly about creating a soundtrack to your life, I wrote about it here.

Good music gives your life scope and context. I can guarantee your life will be better in ways you never thought. Keep an open mind and listen to some new things. You’ll thank me.

This post is part of a series called Letters to a Teenage Girl. Read the intro and other posts from the series here.

I can’t remember the first time I threw my mom under the bus, but try as I might, I can’t forget the worst time. I was 17 and thought I was the hardest working, most put-upon high school girl on the planet. I went off-campus to college for all but one class, worked a weekend job in catering, and volunteered in an at-risk classroom every week. I was pretty self-sufficient.

So when my mom got onto me about something one day, in a fit of self-righteousness, I threw her personal life history in her face. I yelled something along the lines of, “Yeah, well when you were my age you had a baby.”

Real mature. If you want to be treated like an adult and think of yourself as an adult, this is not the way to go, FYI.

The ironic thing is that I’ll bet my mom forgot about that after a few weeks. Having raised two daughters through their teenage years, I’m guessing my mom grew some tough skin. But me? I’ve never forgotten those words and what saying them took away from me. I’ll remember those bitter words for the rest of my life.

The Longer You Live, the More Mistakes You’ll Make

What changed between the me I was when I said those words to my mom and the me that regrets them today (although, to be honest, I regretted them instantly) is a whole heckuva lot of life experience.

You’re mom isn’t perfect; no mother is. So if you’re already at the stage of your life where you’re measuring her up against a stick of what you think a mother “ought to be” – stop it. All you’re going to achieve with that is a lot of resentment from unmet expectations. I’ll write about the pitfalls of expectations in another letter. Those are generally no good anyway.

You’re not going to be perfect when you’re your mom’s age either. And that’s a good thing. Life provides us with plenty of opportunities for “mistakes” and the older you get, the more “mistakes” you’re going to accumulate.

Mistakes Make Us Smarter

Mistakes are what make us grow into better people. If your mom never made a mistake, then she would never learn how to be a better person. And none of us are born “better” than others. Some people just choose to turn their mistakes into growth opportunities, while others will wonder why the same mistake keeps happening to them over and over again.

Socrates said that the truly intelligent man knows that he knows nothing. There’s so much that life is going to teach you through mistakes, that maybe it’s impossible for you to understand that kind of intelligence right now.

There’s No Satisfaction in Being Better Than Anyone

Just know this: the satisfaction you think you’ll feel by belittling your mom doesn’t exist. The impulse to yell at her or throw her faults in her face is momentary and unfulfilling. Putting people down because you feel superior (or because you think it will make you superior) never works. It’s like quicksand; quicksand pulls you in further every time you try to climb out. That’s how putting people down works, too. You’ll actually only feel smaller, less superior.

That’s what I lost the moment I uttered (or rather, yelled) those words that day. I felt a sinking in my stomach that I recognize today as disappointment in myself, because I had attempted to make my mother feel small because I thought I was so much bigger than the person she was at my age. What really sucks is now that I’m an adult, I realize what my mom sacrificed at my age to give me the kind of life that allowed me to be in a better situation than she was in.

You’re not better than your mom right now. You simply haven’t had the opportunity to make your mistakes. And you will make them. It’s not a bad thing as long as you choose to grow.

Maybe one of your mistakes will be taking out your frustrations on your mom. That’s OK too. You’ll get to learn how to apologize, find out how good an honest apology can feel, and discover a new way to communicate when you’re hurt or upset. That’s how it’s worked for me, anyway.

This post is part of a series called Letters to a Teenage Girl. Read the intro and other posts from the series here.

That dynamic duo over at HoneyAndLance invited me to a roundtable on virginity, and who am I to deny that kind of combined sexual magnitude? So here’s the WorkLoveLife treatment of virginity.

Personally, I lost my v-card at 17. It was my junior year of high school and my high school boyfriend and I had been together for something like 8 months. That’s a serious relationship there. I knew he was the one I would lose it with, based on timing and all, but I wanted to wait until I was 17. The national average at the time for females losing their virginity was 16 and dammit, I wasn’t going to be some statistic. We went to a Brian Setzer/Bob Dylan concert, and didn’t stick around for Bob Dylan. Instead, we did it.

Eh. I literally remember counting ceiling tiles with that particular boyfriend. High school sex doesn’t have much to do with actual gratification in my experience, at least not for women.

The coolest part about my experience? My mom allowed me the space to be completely honest with her without judgment. She had my sister at 17 and me at 22. She also lost a kidney due to a urinary tract infection that spread because she was too afraid to tell her mother that she had been screwing around as a teenager.

She wanted both my sister and I to be as open as possible with her when we were “ready.” A few months before I lost it, I told my mom that I might be getting close. She took me a gynecologist and I got on the Pill. She never judged me or pried.

She asked me a few months later had I done it. I hesitated, “Yeah.” I furrowed my brow. “What?” she asked. “It just, um, wasn’t what I expected,” I said. She laughed, “It gets better.”

I’ve been a vocal advocate for women’s reproductive rights and against abstinence-only education for this reason. The way some politicians endorse ignorance is beyond me. Clearly, young women are having sex. Even if they weren’t, why wouldn’t you teach them? Hell, when my mom explained to me the downsides of a guy ejaculating inside you, I steered clear of that for years. And probably avoided a lot of nasty side effects in the process.

I also have a claim most women don’t get in this day and age. I deflowered my first three boyfriends. There was junior year boyfriend (see above), senior year boyfriend, and freshman/sophomore year of college boyfriend. And let me just say, virgin sex was lacking. While it might sound fun to get to “train” them, it’s not. Sometimes you just want someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. Once I finally did with my first non-virgin guy, I’m happy to say I’ve never done another virgin. Besides, age-wise it just would’ve been improbable at that point.

All of this said, I don’t think virginity is something to be taken lightly. Thanks to my mom’s openness with her experiences and having an actual sex education class, I really weighed my decision before I did it. I’m glad that I wasn’t drunk or with someone who didn’t care about me. I’m glad that I got to do it with someone who was doing it for the first time too. I didn’t feel intimidated or pressured. I didn’t feel ashamed or wish I had waited longer. I’m grateful for that.

As to this new rash of women selling it off, I’m disturbed by it. I’m not sure how I feel about the commoditization of sex. It’s nothing new, though. When a geisha came out of her apprenticeship period, her mizuage was auctioned off to the highest bidder. Really, that’s all these girls are doing. Of course, geishas were an important part of Japanese culture and this portion of it was conducted with a certain amount of respect and ritual. All in all, why would you want your first time to be with some guy who’s willing to spend upwards of $250,000 on deflowering a girl? Gross.

I figure the experience is difficult enough as it is – it’s emotional – at least it was for me – and it signals a new phase of life. Why would you want to bring any more pressure to bear on it?

Happy National Coffee Day (Sept. 29)! I’m not really sure who or what association has dubbed it thus, but I don’t need a whole lot of convincing to give over a whole day of celebration to my beverage of choice.

Most of my readers are aware of my obsession with coffee and my lifelong dream to one day own a café. What I’ve been thinking about lately is why I love coffee so much. There are a lot of reasons, but when you get down to the core of it, coffee has plain made my life better. I’m not even being melodramatic. Allow me to explain.

It was hard growing up in my house. I love both my folks to death, but when I was in high school my dad was addicted. My mom worked later than he did, so that meant that when I came straight home from school, it was just he and I. I was never afraid of my dad, but it wasn’t always pleasant to be around him without a buffer, like my mom. I got a car my junior year of high school and a weekend job. I no longer had to be at home right after school.

Enter the coffee house.

There is one place where a high school kid can go and remain for hours on end for only a few bucks. I found solace in cafés. All I needed was enough to buy an Americano and a bagel. I would sit for hours immersed in homework, SAT prep and whatever Truman Capote or Heidegger book I was reading at the time. I didn’t have to go home. I didn’t have to face uncertainty. Over time, everyone knew me, and they were happy to see me. They knew what I would order. Baristas became my friends and the hours I spent there stretched out. I belonged.

I truly believe that’s one reason I feel so at home in cafés and coffee shops. No matter what city or country I’m in, the local coffee shop welcomes me. It is familiar and it is safe and it is in my soul. I’m pretty sure that’s also why I want to open my own café. I love the idea of providing a haven that was so generously given to me.

The other way coffee has genuinely made my life better is the way it brings me into the present. I have a hard time staying in the moment. I don’t think that’s unique to me; I imagine a lot of people have trouble with it. Otherwise, Zen Buddhism wouldn’t exist, right?

Coffee is to me what wine is to oenophiles. I can tell you what the best origins are, what the acidity level is and how it affects the flavor, and my favorite extraction method. I drink it black so I can taste the different notes of the bean – bright, fruity, nutty, robust, bold, etc. I like to add flavors that play up those notes. My favorite is a soy almond latte. The almond and soy bring out the nutty quality of the espresso. Or adding cinnamon to an Americano. It brings out the spice.

My point is that when I’m paying attention to the flavors, my senses are sharpened. I take in everything around me – the air, the light, what’s going on in my life, my surroundings, how I feel. For example, this past Christmas was my first sober Christmas. And it was the first time I was spending it away from my immediate family or a boyfriend’s family. I woke up that morning alone in my apartment with my little Christmas tree, brewed some coffee and took my mug to the stairs outside my door. As I sipped, I let the moment set in. The air was crisp and cool. I was sober; I was employed, and I was single and happy. I knew I might never be there again – alone on Christmas, that is. And I savored it as I drank my coffee.

As silly as it sounds, coffee is a part of my soul for these reasons. I’ve stopped at different points in my life, but I always come back to it because it comforts me and it feels right. Besides, I was told caffeine was the only drug I could do in sobriety. Har har.

Anybody else got some good coffee stories?

What is it that I loved about college? I’ve been trying to figure it out because I’ve been thinking about grad school again. I think about grad school about once a year (I think it’s the school-supply air of fall that does it), and wonder if I ought to revive my collegiate goal of becoming a professor. It still appeals to me, and my latest variation includes a marriage of my two fantasies – adjunct professor and business owner.

But really, I think I just want to be in college again, to be a student again. I was a good student. I mean, I was really good at it. I’d really like to give my senior year another shot though. I used to brag about the fact that I was drunk when I wrote the majority of my 83-page thesis in just one month. I got an A-. Imagine what I could’ve done sober.

I did love being a student. I loved to read and extract the ideas, put them in a historical context, spin them together with something new. I could write a 12-to-15-page paper on almost anything in 3.4 hours and consistently earn high marks. One professor like my ideas on Kurt Vonnegut and Thorstein Veblen so much, he invited me to do an independent study with him.

None of that matters in my job, and it doesn’t matter in the majority of the business world. I’m sure there are companies and positions where it does matter, but the reality is that once you leave college, nobody is asking you to make a business of having an informed mind, questioning the way your mind works, or finding an outlet for your creativity. That’s been the truth I’ve found anyway.

And that’s fine for a lot of people. But four years after graduation, I find myself craving it again. I’d left college with the idea that I needed a year or two of “life” before going to grad school, so I didn’t burn out, so I could be sure. I sure have lived, that’s certain.

All day they’ve been playing Marlon Brando movies. I can’t believe how hot he was. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed him before. It’s not just that he’s attractive – it’s that he’s my ideal. My type to say the least. Hotter even than Paul Newman, because he’s got brown eyes. No, if I’m honest it’s because he looks just like him, like Paul.

Before happening upon “Julius Caesar” as I channel-surfed, it’d been months since I thought of Paul. It’d been ages since I uttered the name of the man I judged all other men against. Until he was there. On the screen, except it was Marlon Brando. Is he objectively my ideal or is it that he’s the spitting image of my first love, my first romantic admiration?

Paul was the embodiment of everything I thought I could ever want in a man. I was 17 maybe, when I first walked into his bookstore. He was so cute that my shy bookworm self could barely lift my eyes to meet his whenever I came in to buy whatever Truman Capote book I hadn’t yet read. I became a regular and he finally drew me out. At some point, I even stopped blushing the entire time I was around him.

He had big warm brown eyes (I’ve been a sucker for them ever since) and short, blond hair that had a bit of a curl, not unlike Brando as Mark Antony. And though he had a small fame, he had an athletic build from years of soccer. He wore V-neck sweaters with a white T-shirt peeking out from underneath, something I’ve also been a sucker for ever since. (For some odd, odd reason every guy I’ve ever dated since has refused to wear a V-neck sweater. I wonder if they knew how much play it would get them, if that would make a difference. But I digress…)

He wrote, on an old Underwood typewriter no less, painted, and played wonderful records. He is responsible for cultivating my love for Chet Baker, jazz, and various indie pop bands. Best of all, he owned a bookstore, his dream… a dream he’s left a six-figure accounting job for in Atlanta. That made him almost untouchable in my 17-year-old lexicon.

When I visited home from college, his shop was one of the first places I went and I was always guaranteed a cup of coffee and great conversation. At some point, I think I was in my junior year, we hooked up. It was like fornicating with a god. Whenever I was between relationships, I knew I could hook up with Paul. Really it only happened a handful of times, but how many people get to do it with someone they idolized? I’m not sure there’s been a more perfect morning in my life than one cool Florida winter morning, air streaming through the window, in Paul’s bed, having coffee. He touched me the way I always wanted to be touched, and saw me the way I’d always wanted to be seen. He had a way of stripping everything away.

I’ve never dated a man who could hold a candle to Paul, and most people would probably say they couldn’t because of the pedestal I placed him on. There’s truth in that, and five or six years later, I can see his faults. He was emotionally unavailable and closed off, unable to commit. And let’s face it: he was willing to sleep with a 20-year-old when he himself was 32.

Still, I’m not so sure that’s all of it. I wonder now, though, whether I more admired him so much as I wanted to be him. I myself was an artist, a book lover, a dreamer, a soccer player, and later, I could find, a writer. I admired the courage it took to leave that kind of security, knowing that he came from the same alcoholic, working class background as I had, to pursue his dream of owning his own business.

I identified with his vivacity and openness in thought. He was so much stronger than me it seemed. He was so confident in who he was, and he seemed genuinely at ease in his solitude. I guess I still do admire Paul, though he’s closed his bookstore and moved on. While I say that I judge all men against him, perhaps it’s really myself that I’m measuring.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of my parents’ record collection. I would sit in front of our stereo with the records spread over the living room carpet, balancing the much-too-large headphones over my ears. I would close my eyes and listen with delight, awe and sadness to The Kinks, Peter Frampton, Janis Joplin, Cream, Chicago, and the Allman Brothers. What I heard affected me.

It’s a wonder my parents didn’t guess I would be a DJ and run a radio station one day.

Music can move me in a way nothing else can. When people ask me about my spirituality, I tell them that it’s one part music, one part night sky and one part ocean (gawd, I sound like a hippie). Nothing gets at my soul as quickly and profoundly as music does. I can still spend an evening happily with my headphones on lying on my own living room floor, just in front of my computer now instead of a hi-fi.

After spending this past Saturday night hanging out with GIWS listening to music and talking for a few hours, he pointed out a habit I’ve known about for a while. “You and your kicks,” he said. “You get on these kicks with certain albums.” It’s true. I tend to take an album, whether it just came out or I suddenly get the urge to revisit it, and I listen to it over and over and over. For like weeks, usually months at a time, until I’m absolutely sick of it and can’t stand to hear it for another 6 months or so.

The really amazing thing about my little habit, which has annoyed the crap out of almost every boyfriend I’ve had who doesn’t understand my relationship to music, is that it creates an aural memory-inducer. In layman’s terms, later in life when I hear a song from that “kick” it takes me instantly back to that few weeks or months of my life.

It’s fantastic.

When I hear Death Cab For Cutie’s “The Photo Album,” I am swept instantly back to my sophomore year of college. I was playing it non-stop in the fall of that year, and it reminds me of my best friend Amanda, trying to repress my shouted requests when they toured through Orlando that year, and making out with a cute, cute boy to track #3.

When I hear Coldplay’s “Parachutes,” I am instantly sitting on the shared upstairs porch with my dorm mate Heeral, drunkenly shouting the lyrics after sauntering back to campus as a freshman who somehow didn’t get carded at a British pub. It always reminds me of the way you could tell she was drunk because she’d start speaking with a British accent.

When I hear Neil Halstead’s “Sleeping on Roads,” I can vividly remember my first apartment in Orlando and how gorgeous the spring was that year, my junior year of college. I would put it on while doing little things, like putting clean, hot pink sheets on my bed or sitting in my favorite chair (a hideous green wool La-Z-Boy I bought for $5 at a garage sale) overlooking second-story trees in bloom while reading. It reminds me of much simpler times.

What I’ve done with my play-the-crap-out-of-it habit is create a soundtrack to my life. The Verve is what I listened to my first month of sobriety, and “Lucky Man” is the official song of my sober life. Pete Yorn is what I listened to as I fell for GIWS. And now, as I go through what I can only describe as a new painful period of growth, I am stuck on Radiohead’s “The Bends.”

I don’t fight it because I know that it will help me get through today and that one day in the future I’ll hear it and be swept back to these days, fondly remembering how I didn’t know yet what was in store for me. Maybe that’s the fun part of making the memory – realizing that this will be the past one day and that I might as well enjoy where I’m at.