High school football started for my oldest today.
HIGH SCHOOL.
Am I even old enough to have a high schooler?! 🤔 I digress.
Though the season has “officially” started the team has been doing a summer lifting / endurance training program. The program also provided the kids with Ranger workout gear consisting of shorts, long & short sleeve shirts with the teams motto #WORK on the back of the shirts.
Last Thursday, the Head coach held a preseason meeting explaining all of the things we can look forward to this year. Coach’s entire presentation was based around putting in the #Work.
”WORK is our program motto. We always control how hard we WORK in everything we do. On the field, in the classroom, in the weight room, in our home life, in our relationships, in everything we do we focus on the WORK.”
I didn’t realize it until after the meeting that my son, sitting toward the front of the auditorium had a pretty inappropriate shirt on.
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Last Tuesday my bestie and I took our kids to the Blink 182 show. We decided her eldest and my men should DEFINITELY go to the One More Time tour. The tour did NOT disappoint! I was mildly concerned because a friend of mine said he went to a show and you could tell the band had AGED. He said their voices weren’t the same and the experience was just different.
I was lucky enough to see Blink 182, 2000 at the old Saint’s baseball stadium before they built their new stadium. It was a summer day in June, Bad Religion opened for them and it was perfect. Obviously outdoor concerts are a little risky but that day was phenomenal. I remember the sounds of these helicopters flying so low and so loud that the crowd and I checked the sky but it was just Bad Religion taking the stage intro.
I spent the better part of a decade attending shows. All genre’s, all the time. Punk shows have always held a VERY special place in my heart. There really isn’t anything like the energy and freedom to express yourself that you get at a punk show. When my kid started playing Blink songs my bestie and I knew we had to take them to see the show.
The show had all these extra effects that I haven’t seen in YEARS. Pyrotechnics, fireworks, stage rotation, confetti, streamers, suspended drum set… it was better than I expected! It made my little guy’s jaw drop and he was so impressed with Travis that he’s thinking of ditching his left handed guitar for the drum set again.
Before Blink went on I was talking to my men about merch. We’ve been to quite a few shows this year and only recently started getting concert t-shirts. (That Avenged Sevenfold line was TOO insane.) I figured on one of the bathroom trips, if the merch lines were short enough I’d get them shirts. The little guy told me he liked the one with all of their faces on it and the older one told me he wanted the one that only Blink fans would get.
A shirt that says across the front in bold letters “WORK SUCKS” and on the back it says, “I KNOW”.
That would be the shirt he would wear to the football meeting. The football meeting where the Head Varsity Coach would talk about how important WORK is. My kid, wanting to retire his football career after this season, is wearing a WORK SUCKS shirt. I couldn’t help but laugh and realize he might not like blue hair but he’s pretty punk rock!
Namaste,
Jes xoxo