Strange Pulse

My employers do this really cool thing. They give everyone in the company two extra days off during the summer, two Fridays, and they call them summer Fridays.

My boss is especially cool because he let me take my summer Friday on the same day we have a huge deadline for a website to go live. Normally, he probably wouldn’t have allowed it, but I’d already requested it and planned my daughter’s birthday party around it, before the deadline got moved back to today. And since I’m so great at my job, I had everything pretty much wrapped up way in advance. Ha. Actually I’m going in tomorrow (Saturday) to go over everything one last time (the site goes live on Monday). But he’s going to give me Tuesday or Thursday off next week to make up for working on a Saturday.

Of course everything has to converge on me at once. A huge deadline at work, my daughter’s slumber party, her birthday, and then my husband comes home Wednesday to tell me he has to go to Vegas for two days. I’ve had a crazy week.

But we survived the sleepover, and my daughter had a bunch of gift cards as gifts, so we went to the mall this afternoon to go spend them. I posted a little bit about going to the mall last weekend. Well I was anxious to show my kids the Hot Topic store (I know, I’m lame! How could I not know about Hot Topic before now? I know the name from hearing it mentioned, usually derogatorily, but seriously, I never step foot in a mall except to eat at the food court with the kids, because they’re all such picky eaters, it’s the only place we can go where everyone will eat–I say “they” but I’m just as bad), and all the Napoleon Dynamite goodies they had there. And the huge punk rock boots. And the gothic jackets. I would totally be dressing like that if I weren’t old and fat.

Cat used her mall gift card to get a Napoleon Dynamite bobblehead (I know, can you believe it? I told her she has to hold onto it, because in 10 or 20 years she’ll be wishing she still had it) and I ended up getting the boys tshirts, because Elijah wanted a Dukes of Hazard shirt. Because we just rented a dvd of the old tv series and he loves it. And Nathaniel got a Slayer tshirt.

I got myself a Siouxsie and the Banshees sticker, just like the picture of Siouxsie my husband drew in black marker on my dad’s old men’s shirt that I used to wear kind of like a jacket when we were teenagers:

I think I’ll put it on our minivan bumper.

Then we left the mall to drive over to Barnes and Noble, which Cat also had gift cards for, and I had the Indigo Girls playing, a mix I’d just made of their stuff–haven’t listened to them in years! But Nathaniel asked if we could listen to something else and started digging through my purse, which I basically only carry as something to hold cds, and found Converge, a really abrasive hardcore band that I love. So we went from the Indigo Girls to Converge, and I love it that my kids didn’t even bat an eye. And I thought about the music they’d been playing at Hot Topic that was supposed to be so punk rock (Hole) and had to laugh. I said, “You don’t hear Hot Topic playing Converge! I’m way more hardcore than Hot Topic!”

I was thinking though about what I’m doing to my kids. What’s it like to have a mom who’s more hardcore than Hot Topic? Poor things.

I love that I really like my kids though. It’s fun to hang out with them. I’ve just noticed lately that what me and their dad thinks is cool really sets a tone for them. They think stuff is cool that we think is cool. Maybe that just makes us cool parents, I don’t know. I keep waiting for my kids to start hating everything we like and rebelling, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Edit: I just posted a Converge song to the radio.blog. Enjoy!