(This was originally written in 2003, which was the year half of the Pagan Horde was headed off to jr. high. I was inspired to go find it by my neighbor's return from shopping with her brood, and her query as to whether her daughter bought a particular pair of shorts from Build-A-Bear.  I don't miss these days....)

The dreaded First Day of School fast approaches. We must arm ourselves for the dread tasks that lie ahead. First, a trial of strength and endurance of epic proportions as we set off on our quest: School Shopping.

Seriously, we aren't going to pull a sword out of anything. We just have to pick up a few things. Come on! It'll be fun! Based on our previous experiences I took the time to write up a few things, just so you know the schedule and we are all on the same page. Take a look.

1. $16 for a pair of socks is right out. Especially since their only feature is a green line at the toe and some incomprehensible piece of corporate graffiti on the ankle. And doubly especially since you tuck these things down into your logo-drenched sneakers so people can't tell you are wearing socks and won't see the stupid graffiti anyways. Besides, for $16 a pair they had better include the answers to your first math test, and the package says these don't.



2. You do have opinions about these things. Exercise them. If you say "Whatever..." in THAT tone of voice when I ask you to choose between two items, I can guarantee that I will take whatever steps I can to pick the most heinous of the two.



3. I am NOT buying anything Harry-Knowles-brown. I know all about your friends telling you that naturals are the "hot" color, but they are idiots. You do realize that color plus denim blue makes you look like a geeky website. If you don't believe me, go to http://www.aintitcoolnews.com. This is most definately not a "hot" look. Besides, you're 12! "Hot" is not the adjective we're looking for here.



4. Off to Starbucks for a round of Midol and a quad latte for Mom.



5. Gentlemen, if you are that bored with this we can go home, and you can find something in your current mountain of clothes to wear that first day. That's all you will wear the rest of the year, anyways. If you continue to work my nerves, I will drag you through the ladies lingerie section again on our way back to the shoe department. And I mean the granny end of it. And I will smile and wave at the girls from your school that are stuck there with their moms just in case they might have missed you hiding under that display.



6. Ladies, if you are that bored with this we can go home, and you can find something in your current mountain of clothes to wear that first day. If you continue to work my nerves, I will drag you through the little girl's clothing section again, making sure to pretend that we are shopping there. Can you say Barbie underpants? I knew that you could.



7. Young man, you will only wear one of each kind of garment that first day, so put back the color-coordinated selection of boxers you were planning on graduating down your backside. Showing the top of one set of underwear is bad enough. Showing the tops of four pairs is ridiculous. Besides, you would have to walk your pants on a leash if you did that. And yes, right and left socks count as separate kinds, smartalec. And your shoes do, too, so you have to wear both.



8. Young lady, if the care tag is the largest piece of fabric on the underwear, you can forget it. Fugly colors are fine, it's your funeral. However, please remember that you just picked out a pair of white capri pants, and that chartreuse will show through those like a lighthouse on a foggy morning. No, that doesn't mean you can pick out that loud pattern so it will look cool when it shows through!



9. Genuflect when you pass through the door to the shrine of caffeine! Another quad latte for Mom.



10. If the heels of the shoes are so high they have their own weather pattern, you can forget it. If they are a color that doesn't occur in nature, you can forget it. No, they don't even have that one on the Discovery Channel. I don't care if they are the coolest thing ever, they are still too small. No. I don't care if they coordinate with your technicolor-painted toenails (particularly once your toes turn that lovely shade of purple due to obstructed blood flow).



11. If they are hobnailed or have steel spikes sticking out of them anywhere Mom may buy a pair just for the rest of our shopping excursions, but you sure aren't. If they are a color that could be used as construction traffic control or if they are lighted so they can be used to signal the mothership, it ain't happening. If they cost more than the gross national product of the European Union, you can forget it.



12. Young lady, you are NOT leaving the house in that shirt. Heck, you aren't even leaving your bedroom in that thing. Put it back. Here, try this mumu, uh, I mean chic new blouse.



13. Young man, there is a skimpily-dressed female draped all over that skateboard on that t-shirt. Not in this lifetime! Here, look at this one with the vaguely satanic symbols all over it. Maybe the vice-principal will think they're cool, too....



14. Let's try Tully's this time. They're closer. Another quad for me, and sedatives for the rest of the posse.



15. We will only be buying the stuff that is on the list they sent us. And no, those pens with the feathers sticking out of the backside are not on the list. Neither is that huge AC/DC sticker. What! They can't have dredged those guys out from under a rock. Can they?!



16. It says college rule on the list. Why do we have four cases of wide rule in this cart? Sorry gang, that trick was old when I was in school; they can see the difference. Nice try, though. Just type it and print it out in 13 pt. font. Duh!



17. They want HOW MUCH for that binder? You're joking! Besides, it's puke green. You're girlfriend will laugh and you won't bring it to school for the rest of the year.



18. No, Mr. Harry Potter isn't showing up on anything we're walking out the door with, young lady. Neither is SpongeBob. Would you like to rephrase that while you still have your health?



19. Sorry gang. We will only be going to seventeen stores per day. And that means 24 hours, smartalec. I know this cramps your style, but any more than that would strain the fabric of space-time. The dilithium crystals just can't take much more of this...

I have a hard time with a lot of these "meme" photos out there. Instead of laughing, I end up frustrated at people's lack of understanding of what's really going on there.

Today's example: The World's Most Useless Cat  (stuff like this)

There are a bunch of these types of pictures out there, but the general theme is a cat who is just hanging out with a mouse instead of killing it.

Well, duh. Most housecats were never taught how to cat  Hunting isn't just an instinct. It's also knowledge. In the wild (or in the case of a household who is keeping them) they're taught by their mothers, starting from the time when they're weaned.  That's about the time they're usually sold/given away.

The training they get as they're raised by humans is to be gentle, to only damage things like their scratching post and their squeaky toys. So why would you expect them to go hog-wild on an actual fuzzy living creature?

That's not to say many of them can't pick things up fast if you let them outside and give them some time/motivation to figure it out. Many of their "play" behaviors in the house are limited or unfocused pieces of the art of the stalk. The instincts are still there, and hunger is a sharp sauce.

But you don't take a kitten who comes from a line of probably generations who have been born of mothers who never have left a house and were never taught themselves what to do and who has been taken from that mother just when it's time she should start showing them the ropes and expect it to act like a slavering beast just because it's shown something from the order Rodentia.

I had written a thing (and it is an awesome thing). However, it sort of turned into a possible GWJ article. So I ran it up the flagpole on that side of things and we'll see how that goes. ;)

Been cleaning out my closet and dresser, and organizing things to get ready for packing for PAX Prime. Back in a deep corner of a drawer I ran into a little piece of family history -- a certain pair of white denim jeans. These things bring back memories, but it requires a bit of story-time to explain.

When a kid misbehaves, people judge the kid. But they also judge their parents. And being a single-mom, you start off with a double-handicap. I used to get so much crap from all sides. I was too strict. I wasn't strict enough. If I'd punish them more, then they'd not act out. They were acting out because I punished them for anything at all. Why are you hanging out with kids so much? Why did you just drop them off and abandon them at this other place? Between the kids' need to push the boundaries and grow and the world's expectations for how a mother is supposed to act, everything I did was a careful negotiation through a minefield.

Dealing with a situation when a kid is acting out in public and you don't feel safe rounding on them for it is difficult. Adding my personal approach of trying to frame everything as a natural consequence without actually just giving them enough rope to hang themselves and it gets doubly complicated.

But one day I accidentally found an equivalency I could express that gave them just enough of an idea of how I was feeling about a given situation and put them on notice they were headed outside the lines, while being framed just weirdly enough it could be used anywhere.

And it all started with these white jeans.

Back in the day, the Gang liked to go to our local roller rink every Friday night. And one time I wasn't thinking and wore this certain pair of white denim jeans and a white t-shirt. I'd forgotten it was "Black-out Night"; they turned on a set of black lights on the floor so everything was this eerie purple and clothes glowed. To top it off, I decided to skate too.

Under black light, that outfit glowed like a good deed in a naughty world. The dye in them is really phosphorescent. Then to top it off, Oh... My... Gawd, Becky. "Baby Got Back" rolled up, and I was grooving along, not even realizing that I was basically Casper the Unfriendly Ghost, public-image-wise.

I was a known quantity anyways; the regulars around there knew I was weird as chicken mittens. No one actually said a word. But after I got off the floor I realized that, socially speaking, that might have been a tactical failure on the scale of Napoleon calling a rain-day at Waterloo. So I stayed off of the rink for the rest of the night.

A few weeks later, some of the yahoos were acting like dorks in a store and some random "concerned" citizen had just given me a bunch of crap for my "permissive" parenting style. I was really upset. On the way home in the car I pointed out to the kids that the way they were acting made me feel embarrassed in public, just like they might have felt when I was skating in those jeans. They remembered. And they then told me that I'd made the rounds of the school rumor mill again. Not bad, just at the titter-and-eyeroll level. That made me feel even worse.

But now we had common ground. We talked about it then and at various other times, and the code-word "White Jeans" came to mean, "Hey, you're acting like a putz in a way that's going to cause problems. Quit it."  It went both ways. They could use it on me when I'd rolled the geek-o-meter up in the high 8's in public.  I could use it when they were headed to Brat Alley.

The point of it wasn't to actually do it. I never did wear those (or a white t-shirt) to Skate King again. The point of it was to be able to communicate how we were feeling about what was going on and ask the other to quit it without going into specifics we weren't comfortable with in public.

We used that tool all through the rest of their growing years.

The infamous jeans are laid across the bed while I finish this up. The girls will be here in a while to help me to sort through more of my mom's things that have been sent down to me in an attempt to get this house in some semblance of order.  I'm considering meeting them at the door wearing them, to see if they remember.  ;)