Lesson in Rocking Hard

My daughter had a sleepover tonight with her best friend. The game plan was to take them to Alice in Wonderland - which is my knee jerk response - when Tim Burton does almost anything I will go watch it. But we played paper scissors rock at the restaurant and my daughter's best friend won.

In alot of ways, she's like my best friend: she will not watch film. I gave my best friend a film called 'Saint Ralph' about 3 years ago. Maybe 4. He's been putting off watching it that long. It's there on his desk but he hasn't watch I think - a single DVD in almost two years. He just doesn't like film.

What she wanted to do was to learn to play the guitar. So this young girl went up and sat on my bed and then proceeded to play four bar blues with almost perfect rhythm. She knew a few riffs of Blackbird, by the Beatles. I taught her a few ways to play both songs a little better - and noticeably improved, a good scale to practice and a Czerny technique for speed. Then I played Black Dog. So she could have something to aim for. Her goal is to play a good riff. Black Dog seemed to work. She'll get there.

What she wanted to do was go sk8 and so we dropped into Lamb and headed over to the school hallways and she worked on her technique. After sk8ing there for about a half hour, maybe an hour we took off to a long, smooth mallway that had some good rails. The cops were sitting there across the parking lot waiting to pounce so we took off and found this government building that had a really good flat run and we skated for about another hour. It was great.

Then we trekked home after getting some shakes and I was going to default to loading a movie but she said no. She's not into it. And so we ran Pandora , and their favorite bands started playing. One of which was Breaking Benjamin. And suddenly I remembered what it was like to hang out with friends.

My son does things to draw attention to himself. He says things like. Hey I have a million dollars and now I'm going to eat it. He gets left out when everyone goes skateboarding and he gets uneasy - he is really insecure sometimes and so I just take him aside and say. Its ok , bra.

He called me the best dad in the world tonight. Glad weak ollies don't count against the score or I'd have to say no. But overall. We were all rocking hard tonight. I have been schooled.