I’m having a fun morning. I’m searching on what movies are appropriate for a 12-year-old’s sleepover.

Up until now it’s been pretty easy to pick movies to show when our girls have friends over. But now that M is up on the verge of being a teenager, you can’t throw in a Barbie movie or even a good animated flick like Inside Out. She needs something that is a little more grown up for her and her friends who are sleeping over tonight to watch.

I’ve been reading the the Common Sense Media site, which has some good suggestions. It’s kind of funny how many of their recommendations are from the 80s. Think the girls will let me watch Footloose with them?

Speaking of being young, for this week’s video I’m repeating something I posted on Facebook earlier this week. Monday was the 10th anniversary of the release of The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls In America album. Although I prefer their previous release, Separation Sunday slightly, Boys and Girls had a bigger impact on me when it was first released. That’s the fall that C was a baby and I was taking grad classes downtown. I’m pretty sure I discovered several songs off B&G thanks to the old woxy.com, and when the album came out I grabbed a copy off of iTunes. It became my soundtrack for that October.

I remember feeling then how much the album made me wish I was 22 again. Not because I wanted to be young and free and poor, or because I wanted to relive all the things I went through back in 1993. But rather because I wanted this album to speak for my experiences. I could listen to it as a 35-year-old and appreciate how freaking great it was. But it wasn’t an album about what I was going through at that point in my life. What would the album mean to me if I was of the generation it was speaking for?[1]

Despite any barriers in age, experience, and use of pharmaceuticals, B&G remains a great album. And this song, “Stuck Between Stations,” remains one of my favorites not only of the ‘00s, but of all-time.[2] Crank it up, and have a great weekend!


  1. The irony is that Craig Finn, THS’ lead singer, is exactly my age. So although his characters were a little younger, he was writing/singing about them from the same point in his life I was. So, perhaps, I could have related more to his stories that I realized at the time.  ↩
  2. It looks like I’m two years away from needing to update my 20 favorite songs of all-time list.  ↩