by Jen Logan | Sep 11, 2017 | Being Awesome, Punk Rock
Coffee and punk rock is all I need to get things done today!
Since I left my nine to five job in January I have become pretty carefree. So much in fact that my husband has been calling me “The Dude“. I can’t really blame him. I have taken up wearing a uniform of sorts which consists of pajama pants and a CBGB tank top with a sweater that looks like a homeless man was wearing for years before handing it over to me. When I leave the house I throw on a pair of workout pants to “dress it up a little”. It usually stops people from trying to hand me dollar bills at the grocery store. I’m not going to lie though, on occasion I just throw on yesterday’s pajama pants. Don’t judge me! (more…)
by Jen Logan | Mar 31, 2025 | Being Awesome, Lemonade out of Lemons
I grew up with plants in my house. My mom always had a variety ranging from African violets to hanging spider plants. One of my chores as a kid was watering the plants, so apparently at one point in my life I knew what to do. Somewhere along the road I lost this skill completely.
Shortly after I married my husband, I became interested in plants again, focusing mostly on my rose garden and flower beds in the summer. We even had a vegetable garden for several years that flourished. Sometimes I bought house plants but could never remember to water them, or over watered them when I finally remembered. I became known as a plant killer, but I would like to think those plants took their own lives, even if it was just to get away from me.
It wasn’t until my daughter was a toddler that I finally became responsible enough to start caring for other living things in the house outside of the humans I cared for daily. I started buying more plants at that time and found that shamrock plants were very forgiving. They literally cannot be killed. I had several instances where my shamrocks were knocked over and the dirt and roots were thrown back into the pot and they came right back to life. At one point I had both purple and green shamrock plants, and I threw all of their roots into one pot and crossbred them into plants with green centers and purple outlines on the leaves.
Today I have a variety of plants all over my house, mostly spiky things that look scary or punk rock. The cats chew on some of my palms, but most of the others are thriving. I have peace lilies and cactuses, succulents and a bonsai tree. But what I am most proud of is my orchid, which was gifted to me by a counseling client. It died shortly after I received it due to it being handed off in the middle of a snow storm. I read what to do and was informed that the plant itself was not dead, just the flowers. I tended to the roots and the stalks. It has been over a year, but flowers are once again blooming. I guess Orchids are just as forgiving as shamrocks.
I have been watering my plants myself every weekend, but I think it’s time to put this task on my daughter’s chore list. She loves plants, and it will be a good way to give her a little more responsibility. Maybe she will be the next plant killer in the family, but she will also learn that just like family, plants are also pretty forgiving.
**I wrote this post while listening to some pretty epic girl punk rock – VIAL**
by Jen Logan | Feb 15, 2025 | Being Awesome, Punk Rock
I had the most amusing conversation with a man in the parking lot of a strip mall last week. I was walking out of Michael’s carrying a bag of crafts I probably don’t need and a black and white checkered pot when a man approached me in the parking lot with his hands full of electronics. “Where’s the UPS store?” he asked as he propped up what looked like a stereo on his knee. I must have looked like I had all the answers in the world with my Misfits hoodie and reading glasses perched on top of my unwashed hair. “There isn’t a UPS store in this plaza.” I said as I walked closer to my car. “Well why did Google maps send me here then?” he asked. Clearly this man DID think I had all the answers in the world, so I told him “I don’t know. Probably the same reason it’s now calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about.” to which he replied “Oh come on, it is the Gulf of America!” At that point I knew I was dealing with an asshat so I told him “there are three UPS stores around here. I’m sure you can figure it out smart guy” and got in my car. I watched him waddle back to his truck with his hands full and try to open the door with one hand while balancing the load with his other arm. I was reminded of something my mom has said – “you can’t fix stupid” and I agree, but sometimes you can play with it.
I have been approached in parking lots multiple times by people asking for directions and I always stop and help them, because they normally begin with something like “excuse me” or “sorry to bother you”. I have also stopped in parking lots to help people who couldn’t load their groceries into their car due to a disability, or taken a cart back to the return when I saw a woman with a baby was trying to decide if she could leave the child alone for those ten seconds because I have been there too. I like to think that my judge of character is pretty spot on and it was in this case. My guess is this guy was trying to make an Amazon return and Google maps was sending him to the Kohl’s where there is an Amazon drop off. Who knows, he may still be driving around, stopping random strangers and demanding they fix his problem, or maybe he called his wife at home and asked for her to help. Not my monkeys, not my circus. I did get a really cool planter out of the trip and a little amusement as well. You really can’t fix stupid.
**Of course I was listening to some fabulous female punk rock while I drove away from Mr. directionally challenged. Check out VIAL if you haven’t already.**
by Jen Logan | Jan 25, 2025 | Being Awesome, Life, Punk Rock
This has been a hard week. Since the inauguration on Monday the majority of my therapy clients have been struggling with increased depression and anxiety, afraid for their future and the future of our country. Although working in mental health has been the most rewarding career I have had in my life, weeks like these can be challenging.
It doesn’t help that I wanted to see the news coverage of the inauguration events and as I watched, my daughter walked in while our newly elected president was speaking about his predecessor like a schoolyard bully behind the podium. In the three minutes that she watched he had said he was going to bring down the prices of everything and then talked about placing tariffs on products and my thirteen year old said “wait, he said he’s lowering the cost of goods but is setting up tariffs. Won’t that make the cost of goods go up?” I’m simultaneously proud of my daughter for her grasp of economics and horrified that she is watching the president stand before an audience and spit out words that his actions clearly contradict. I’m happy to say I turned it off before Elon Musk sieg heiled the audience. Don’t even get me started about that little demonstration where the world’s richest man tried to blame the media for misrepresenting him while hate groups spread the clip announcing their new hero. If his intention was not in fact a to make a racist gesture, why not just say so instead of igniting the flames of speculation? It’s probably a little harder to deny once you look up countless antisemitic statements he has made in the past.
When 1,500 terrorists were released back onto the street I started looking up names. Can we get some kind of registry for these guys like the sex offender registry? I’m guessing since the man who let them out is trying to ignore the fact that they are violent criminals, and turn them into victims makes me think this is not gong to be something that happens. We used to have our government keeping an eye on terrorist groups like the proud boys and oath keepers, but now they are being pardoned by our president and sent home as heroes. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with our country? The man who is in charge of the Pentagon has a giant racist tattoo on his chest, has been fired from multiple jobs for financial mismanagement and showing up to work drunk, has a history of violence against women, and served in the army reserve, but is somehow qualified to run our military.
I’m watching executive orders roll out and trying to remind myself that these are the same kinds of promises I get from my daughter when she promises to clean her bathroom or empty the dishwasher. Apparently the government can now say there are two sexes when we all know that just isn’t the case. I had to laugh when I saw Caitlin Jenner’s congratulations to the president. I wonder what she’ll think when people start calling her Bruce and forcing her to use the men’s room at restaurants. I would like to keep the MAGAs out of my public restrooms since they seem to be awfully concerned about my genitals. Next time I see a woman in the public restroom at the mall with her little red hat I’m going to ask that security makes sure she is a woman first before letting her in.
I have to wonder what kind of president orders the Constitution of the United States of America to be removed from the White House website and sends ICE with CIA agents to an elementary school to scare small children. He’s already attaching strings to federal relief funds to help with the wildfires because their governor has different political views, and trying to remove the 14th Amendment from the Constitution. Can you imagine if a liberal president took office and issued an order that contradicted the 2nd Amendment? He’s been screaming “FAKE NEWS” forever and I kind of have to agree with him at this point after multiple interviews have gone on the air with all of his false claims being unchecked. I remember having parental warnings for “mature content” on television as a kid and I think at this point they should probably be on the news channels. I stopped watching anything Donny was on when he made fun of a handicapped reporter, and it’s viewed in my house pretty infrequently, but I’m afraid to have my kid see it at my parents’ house where Fox News is a household staple. I have a vivid memory of going to a Christmas party where I saw my racist grandfather and joking we could rile him up by telling him I had a black boyfriend. The thought of telling my kid to do the same thing but with a girlfriend breaks my heart.
I’m seeing a lot of posts about learning who your neighbors are, and I can tell you I am doing just that. We have the kind of patriots around the corner with a flagpole in their front yard where the flag was never at half mast after Jimmy Carter’s death, and I can see deer heads through the window so I’ll be sure to see if they were just pardoned and released from a federal prison. I was thinking about putting a flagpole in our front yard to fly a pride flag because I think you could see it from the freeway, but my husband thinks it might be a wasted effort since the view isn’t as clear as I think it is. My thought is we’ll not know until we try it, so maybe that will be a good summer project.
I have turned off the news for the sake of my own sanity, but still stay plugged in to NPR and Politico. I have a new book to read and am listening to lots of punk rock music while writing client notes so at least the weekend should be good!
by Jen Logan | Jan 15, 2025 | Being Awesome, Chick Stuff
When we moved into our house a year ago, we had about triple the wall space to decorate as our last house. My husband has been slowly filling the walls with his artwork. We had a handful of his pieces at our old house, but his last job kept him so overworked, he had little time to create for the last ten years. In the fifteen months we have lived here, he has created at least a dozen pieces to hang around our house. Strangely enough, two of my favorite pieces are in bathrooms. 
At some point in the last year, I decided our bathrooms needed a theme. Don’t ask me why. It’s probably because I kept calling the two bathrooms on the main floor “the front bathroom” and the “back bathroom” and they are both technically near the front of the house. The “front” bathroom then became the “gold” bathroom since it has gold fixtures, but calling the other bathroom the “black” bathroom due to it’s fixture color seemed a little racist. I had visions of my kid’s friends being in the house and me telling them to use the “black bathroom” after getting out of the pool.
The front/gold bathroom has become the “skull” bathroom when I bought a gold skull last Halloween that never left the counter. I like skulls and have a lot of artwork and decor that include them in the house. I even have skull nightlight/fragrance plug ins around the house. I was over the moon when my husband created a piece of art to hang that fit the theme perfectly. Once the skull bathroom was complete I started thinking about a theme for the back/black bathroom. I kept seeing a rug with serpents on it that I loved and decided a snake theme would be a perfect counterpart for the skull theme. I started looking for snake decor, but was not finding much that I liked, or that fit the space. Then at Christmas, my husband asked for a bunch of tools and art supplies and by the New Year he was showing me a snake he had sculpted. I came home from work one night and when I dropped my bag at the door, he told me if I had to pee I better use the back bathroom. I knew he had been working on making the sculpture into a piece to hang and had seen it during the process, but I had no idea how beautiful it was going to look hanging on the wall. My husband has some serious skills. So now I have my two themed bathrooms, and the serpent is hanging directly above the toilet, There’s no jokes to be made or make people feel creeped out, right?
*A little Tim Timebomb who also loves skulls and snakes was heard while writing this post.
by Jen Logan | Nov 13, 2023 | Being Awesome, Parenting
I love when you walk into a space and find your people. I do it a lot at punk shows, church basements and a little book store that sells mental health books. My kid did it last night at a restaurant in town. We sat down at our table and our waitress immediately asked her about a shirt she was wearing and then started speaking a language that my therapist/mom brain could not comprehend. It was apparently Japanese because they were talking about 7,000 anime shows and manga graphic novels that they were both familiar with. Every time the waitress came back to our table she stopped and chatted with my daughter for a few minutes.
During the dinner my daughter mentioned what a great waitress she was and when she stopped back my mother-in-law made her stay with us for a few more minutes so my daughter could tell her what a fantastic server she was and how enjoyable she made our dinner. You would have to know my mother-in-law to understand just how common it is for her to strike up a conversation with a server or cashier, but she is a people person and she makes friends everywhere she goes. If there was an extra chair at the table she probably would have asked the waitress to sit down and she would have finished her shift while she chatted with my kiddo. I actually would have found this very entertaining to watch my socially awkward husband try to manage that interaction. As it turns out, the waitress also has social anxiety and she told us this after she received the compliment about her serving skills. She also showed my daughter photos of her in multiple cosplay costumes which about sent my daughter over the edge since my daughter spends much of her time cosplaying and making videos in her bedroom.
When the waitress showed her a photo of herself dressed as Velma from Scooby Doo at a cosplay convention I thought I was going to have to clean out the guest room for this young woman to move in. My daughter dressed like Velma for a full year between the ages of 3 and 4, including the glasses. She wouldn’t answer to anything but her stage name and chose a Christmas ornament with the name Velma that still hangs on our tree 8 years later. I guess I should have seen this whole cosplay thing coming way back then. While other girls dressed as princesses, my child wanted to be the nerdy girls and villains. By the time she was 5, she was wearing her Hogwarts uniform to the grocery store and casting spells on shoppers in the produce department.
When you are the cosplaying, artsy punk rock kid it’s not easy to find your people at school. Especially when you attend a small Catholic girls school. She has a friend in 10th grade that cosplays and the two occasionally go to the local roller rink where they are treated like royalty for being their freaky little selves, but I hear about how this older friend is literally tortured by half of the school for her individuality, including girls much younger than her. A few weeks ago a couple of 8th grade bullies had the poor girl in tears while they ridiculed her and a group of the girls in my daughter’s class chased her down the hall videotaping her for “fun”. These are the same girls who keep walking up to my kid asking her to show them some dance that she did in a cosplay video. I told her she needed to tell them to watch her YouTube video if they wanted to see it again and when she did she got the satisfaction of watching their jaws hit the floor while they questioned how she had 17,000 views on a video. It’s kind of ironic that the same girls are begging people to like their photos and videos and my kid doesn’t want kids from school to even see her photos, but they all follow her. She likes what she likes, and she does what she wants without much thought about what other people think. She blows my mind with her DIY spirit. I think we have a new punk rock queen in the house.
**In honor of my little riottt girl, I listened to Bikini Kill.
by Jen Logan | Jul 13, 2023 | Being Awesome, Punk Rock
Multiple day music festivals are more common than crop tops on pre-teens these days, but when I was a young music fan, there was no such thing. The first time I went to a show with more than three bands and one stage was Lollapalooza in 1991. My memories are limited, but include being among the 100 people actually stoked to see Henry Rollins before breakfast and a girl getting hit in the head with a lime and barfing next to me on a blanket. I do remember that Butthole Surfers and Jane’s Addiction both played and had stellar sets. From there, I went on to many more Lollapaloozas, Warped Tours and Tibetan Freedom Concerts (thanks Aunt Sue). Multiple Day music festivals became one of the highlights of my summers and sometimes whole years. Somewhere along the line I got too old or too lame to spend three days in the sun trying to soak up boob sweat while keeping my hair from gluing itself to my face. I’m going to blame this on my husband since the last festival I attended was Milwaukee Metalfest a few years before we got married where a guy in my party stole King Diamond’s hat and wore it in the van on the way home. Granted, I was working at that show manning a merch booth and babysitting a bunch of drunk musicians, so that could have been why I quit going to festivals, but it took until my daughter was 5 to get back to one. My little punk rock girl went to her first true festival to see one band play – The Interrupters at Warped Tour 2016.
I had been trying to get my husband to take me to Punk Rock Bowling since my kiddo’s first punk show, but his idea of a good vacation does not include standing in the sun with sweaty dudes, while avoiding drunk 20 year old girls spilling beer on our shoes for three days. Sometimes I have to ask – who did I marry?!? When I saw the lineup for 2023 and knew we weren’t going to see the Interrupters in Detroit this year I talked him into getting tickets since I knew it was the one band that would get him to go. So we jumped on a plane with a suitcase full of band Ts and Chuck Taylors to stay in the most degenerate buttcrack of the US in Downtown Las Vegas. You heard me, not the strip, the old, lawless, anything goes, Freemont Street, Las Vegas.
We arrived at the Golden Nugget just in time to see some showgirls try to get a skinny kid with a pink mohawk to take some photos with them and a man who looked like he just crawled out of a sewer get dragged out of the casino across the street. My daughter had her first viewing of a homeless man on PCP getting talked down by the police on the street, roving bachelorette party girls with glowing dick highball glasses and boas, and the entire cast of Chippendales dancers all in one evening. We had a lot of nice chats that night about how the police were doing good work at handling hard situations, how people make money dancing half naked, how bad choices and bad luck sometimes come together in a perfect storm and people end up asking for money in the streets, and how half our country is worried about something so innocent as drag queens reading books to their kids. We also got to see an old punk smoking weed outside of our hotel and being a dick to a nice family walking by, and I had to point out that even old punks can be assholes. We’re not all perfect.
But on to the music… Day one highlights were seeing the Interrupters and Bad Religion. I also got to see Fishbone whom I have not seen in 25 years and Me First & the Gimme Gimmes who are both hilarious and talented. Although we didn’t get as close to the stage as I would normally get, we were able to get up close and personal with Greg Gaffin earlier in the day while he was doing book signings and we were picking up merch that I pre-ordered. I have to say, for me watching the Interrupters is always amazing but watching my kid see them from her first time as a five year old with only about 20 people watching to now with a huge crowd singing all of their songs along with them is one of my favorite things to watch. She no longer lets me film her singing along like she did at five years old, but I did manage to get a stealthy little clip which I promised not to share with anyone publicly ever. My kid has grown up with this band as they have grown, so they will always be something special for me.
Day two was a later start for us since we didn’t care about seeing most of the early line up, so we swam with sharks at the hotel pool for a bit before doing some damage at the vendor booths and food trucks. I’m pretty sure my husband ate his body weight in dumplings and my kid drank about 400 watermelon slushies while I bought a few more band Ts and punk rock crew socks. We did manage to catch Face to Face, GBH, the Damned and of course Rancid. I’m pretty sure my kid has a crush on Tim Armstrong and she never even saw him in his prime. The girl has good taste though. He is a talented musician, artist and all around good human for doing all he does to help young bands grow and keep punk rock alive. The kids got so excited up front that they caved in the barricade and Rancid had to take a break while security got it fixed. The good thing about this is we got to do a little single along acoustic with Tim and make friends with our neighbors in the crowd, who were all fun and respectful of each other. My daughter and an intoxicated 30 year old made fast friends singing and dancing all night. There was even a little mini punk rocker in the pit with his dad having fun. This was also the night that we stopped by the Punk Rock Saves Lives booth to chat about their organization. They were swabbing people to donate bone marrow, which I am already on the list for, but it was great to learn more about their organization and how they help in their community. Mental health is one of their platforms and as a mental health professional, working with adolescents struggling with self-esteem, peer pressure, drug and alcohol exposure, social media and hormones, I wanted to hear how they are helping. They are a great organization, making positive changes in communities, and I couldn’t agree more with the statement that punk rock saves lives. It saved mine for sure.
Day three was a lot of me dragging my family around to see bands they didn’t care about seeing, like L7 and Agnostic Front until Dropkick Murphys played and brought the house down. I did get to show my daughter the difference between a punk rock pit that’s fun and safe and a hardcore pit full of dudes with anger issues that she should avoid getting close to during Agnostic Front’s set. I had not seen Dropkick Murphys live, and they blew me away. Ken Casey is a force to be reconned with and the band is full of talent from bagpipes to strings. Ken does a lot of talking between songs which I love and we learned that he was going to be a special ed teacher before punk rock sucked him in full time. We were lucky enough to get a view of some of the artwork being auctioned off by their Claddagh Fund earlier in the day and he shared that over $14,000 was raised to help addicts make their way to treatment centers that weekend. You gotta love that a bunch of people passed up the beer tent to buy art and help someone in need. Another great example of punk rock saving lives.
I was surprised at how well my kid held up over the four days in Vegas. She didn’t complain much or get herself worked into a little anxious ball like she tends to do with new things. She rolled with the punches and had a good time. She met new weirdos who accepted her with open arms, with all her awkward tweeness, and she danced and sang along with abandon. I expect in a few years I’ll have to drag her out of the pit when it’s time to leave, but I was happy she wanted to hang out with us and that she still stole my shoes to wear herself instead of being embarrassed by them. She even asked if we could come back next year. I told her as long as the Interrupters are playing….
**It took me over a month to write this because in that month we lost a cat, gained a cat and sold our house. It’s been a month, but I’ve been listening to a lot of punk rock to keep me sane – mostly this:
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