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[Courtney]

I have a client that just turned 13 and was trying to think of what age-appropriate activities I could be encouraging him to do, that aren't electronics. But, I thought it'd be fun to remember what we were all doing at that age, appropriate or not.

When I was 13, I smoked weed for the first time, had my first kiss, and was suuuuper into Incubus. I was finally allowed to walk up to the local grocery store (it was across a really busy road), so my neighbor and I would do that pretty regularly for a while to get candy and stuff. My "boyfriend" would walk over from his neighborhood sometimes and we'd hang out on my front porch. I don't really remember doing much else, really.

[amanda]

I lived out in the middle of nowhere, listened to blink-182, and sulked a lot.  Sometimes I would take books out into the woods and read.

[Milpool]

I mostly used the internet to post on punk message boards. I was way into indie rock and No Idea Records and the only Plan It X bands I listened to were This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb and Against Me!  I saw my first show, Bright Eyes with Her Space Holiday and the Arab Strap, a little after my 13th birthday.  I also got to see Alkaline Trio and Pretty Girls Make Graves that year.  I went to the record store on the first Tuesday of every month because they had 20% off everything and my mom would buy me 3 or 4 CDs at a time.  I think she did that because I didn't really have any friends so I never went to birthday parties or even go out to the movies or the park or the beach with anyone on weekends or during the summer, but she knew I liked listening to music so that was decent substitute for having friends.  I was probably at the peak of my skills as a bassist at that point, too, because I would actually put effort into practicing (I started playing bass when I was 11).  I was obsessed with the Independent Film Channel and the Sundance Channel so I'd stay up all night watching movies like Pi, Funny Ha Ha, City of God, Amelie, the Royal Tenenbaums, pretty much the standard mainstream indie movies.

[Rapture Ready Blowhard]

I guess this was when I was in the 7th grade?  Because my family moved across the county one year and redistricting another, I went to a different middle school every year from sixth through eighth grade.  I was super into band class, but the program at my 6th grade school sucked, and the music program at my 7th grade school was the best in the county; I went from being last chair to first in the low brass section in the course of a year.  Besides that, life sucked.  I was depressed all the time, didn't listen to rock music, was super into going to church, and some of my classmates knew me as "the kid who never smiles."  I think by the end of 8th grade some of the other band geeks were getting into punk and so was I, and I started to really make friends, question religion, and read more challenging stuff.

[lindsey]

blink 182 was suuuuper my jam too! i think i was 13 in 8th grade? i started to get into punk in 7th grade so by 8th grade i THOUGHT i was punk as fuck. I had a huge crush on this boy named Roy and spend the entire year trying to impress him, i got into a bunch of bands because they were his favorite bands, some of which i still like (ani difranco!) and some i'm kind of embarassed by (thursday!), we traded mix cds and flirted all year, and then on the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL i finally got up the nerve to ask him to be my boyfriend hahaha. he said yes, and my response was, "you don't have to say yes if you don't want to" or something like that. my self confidence was NOT GOOD (i was a fat tom boy wannabe punk girl with bad hygiene basically). anyway, he said "i wouldn't say yes if i didn't want to". at the beginning of the summer we "went out" a few times, only kissed once, and never really even talked about being boyfriend and girlfriend, then he went back home to nashville until the end of the summer and when he got back we didn't talk about it at all ever again. it was weird!

i can't remember much else about being 13. this is when i started to skip class and make shitty grades even though i was really smart. i left my group of "smart kid" friends and started hanging out with trouble makers. had ISS (in-school suspension!) for the first time. my best friend cut herself reeeeeally intensely and it was a whole drama. my other best friend left school one day and everyone thought she went missing and it was a whole drama. turns out she just left and walked home. i started to gain more confidence in my personality at least and wasn't as shy as before, and became kind of the class clown.  i tried to learn how to skateboard but i was really bad at it.

[jer]

Killing cops and reading Kerouac.

But mostly, it was like 1997 so the internet was starting to become a real, widely-used thing and not just by nerds like me, so I was doing geeky computer things and being a part of budding online communities and learning how to make webpages and junk.

I was probably listening to the entire Fat Wreck Chords back catalog by the point, but I'm years off from finding out about cooler lesser known punk stuff (for example, PIX was only 3 years old and had no web presence). Skatepunk was hip and I got my first skateboard and started wearing "skater" clothes and had bleached spiked hair which was all the fucking rage back in the day.

like lindsey, this is when i started hanging out with "the troublemakers," meaning basically things starting to be fun. I vaguely remember my first kiss being around this time. We all had pagers/beepers back then and that was cool as fuck.

I don't know, I don't remember much to be honest. Too long ago and I'm old.


Lindsey:

never really even talked about being boyfriend and girlfriend, then he went back home to nashville until the end of the summer and when he got back we didn't talk about it at all ever again. it was weird!

So what you're saying is, you still have a boyfriend to break up with.

[dakotafloyd]

When I was 13 I played rec. league baseball (all-star centerfielder, hot dang!), started getting into punk (Fat Wreck, Epitaph stuff), and read a lot of books.  That's pretty much it.

[amanda]

When I was 13 I played rec. league baseball (all-star centerfielder, hot dang!), started getting into punk (Fat Wreck, Epitaph stuff), and read a lot of books.  That's pretty much it.

This reminds me that I also played softball.  I also think that 13 might have been when I went through my archery phase.

[pronetoaccidents]

listening to the live blink album, wrestling on the middle school team, enjoying the semi-new discovery of masterbaution and being stupid

[flopkins]

i was living in a wilderness program on the application around ashville back then, i picked up spinning fire poi around this age & a little later i took to studding iado "a form of bushido',  both served a good deal in self meditation.

[momitsnowme]

The summer I turned 13, the guy I had had a huge crush on for the last year finally kissed me. That fall, we would hang out in his garage, which was separate from his house and all done up. We would make out and he would finger me (lol...remember when that was a THING?). I remember one time it was while watching Varsity Blues, haha. My dad died that fall. I started hanging out with the "popular" kids, I think because they felt bad for me about my dad. I started hanging out with my (still) best friend. Later the kid started dating a sophomore and dumped me and I was pretty devastated.  I was into Dave Matthews Band and Blink 182 (I didn't really get into punk stuff til 14 or 15.) I went to a lot of parties that involved bon fires in someone's yard. I was pretty serious about ballet.

[rory]

When I was 13 it was 2002-2003 and I was in 8th grade at a catholic school, where I had maybe 29 classmates (who had been my only classmates, more or less, for the previous 9 years). I was friends with the weird reject girls, but we pretty much didn't hang out outside of school, except that I had started going to see local punk shows, and two of my friends tagged along a couple of times (my other two friends thought we were out of our minds for going to such a dangerous activity). I found out about local punk stuff because a family friend started playing bass in what turned out to be a pretty decent ska band. I went to every show they played I could possibly go to, and it exposed me to mosh pits and weirdos outside of my small school. I was too shy to make friends there, but I felt good being around people like that, and in my vivid imagination world, I felt an unspoken camaraderie with the kids there. Also, I went to every one of these shows chaperoned by my parents.

The year before I was super depressed and awful and freaking out, and a lot of the school administration had it out for me, and wanted me to go to some intensive therapy, as well as get held back. I also had to take a literacy test because they thought they I couldn't read (which I could read, I just hated reading out loud because I had no self-esteem and was filled with anxiety). The only thing good that happened when I was 12 was that I started playing bass.

8th grade though I had kind of gotten my footing. My super confident friend that I looked up to helped me feel more confident, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel - I was going to a school away from all of these people who hated me, I could meet new people.

At home I listened to a lot of really weird music, pretty much any band related to the band The Residents, as well as Zappa and some other Avant-Garde nonsense I loved because of my weird parents. I downloaded music a lot. My brother and I spent hours on music forums talking to strangers about weird music and downloading stuff. I got into Sigur Ros as the first band I sought out on my own. I played bass along to tabs all the time, and pretty much never plugged my bass in. I had a paper route and saved all my tips to buy myself a digital camera and my own ibanez, so I could stop playing my dad's gibson with flipped strings (I am left handed).

In short, things were terrible but I could see how they might get better so I kind of held on to see what a new school and what punk could offer me. As usual, music saved my life or whatever.

[lindsey]

Lindsey:

never really even talked about being boyfriend and girlfriend, then he went back home to nashville until the end of the summer and when he got back we didn't talk about it at all ever again. it was weird!

So what you're saying is, you still have a boyfriend to break up with.

haha, yeah i guess that's true!

i've been cheating on him a loooottttt oops

[BlakeK]

When I was 13 I was obsessed with Kurt Cobain/Nirvana, Green Day, grunge music in general, as well as discovering punk bands via 120 minutes on MTV, and pamphlets that came in Lookout! Records, and Epitaph Records/Fat Wreck releases. This was before the internet was prevalant. I also discovered bands via t-shirts that members of my favorite bands would wear. I would buy albums based on this.

I had my first real girlfriend along with my first real kiss along with playing around in other various ways short of sex.

I was very depressed, socially awkward, and anxious. I was dressing a mix between goth and punk and would do any substance my cousin and my older friends (who I met through my cousin) would put in front of me in order to prove myself.

Most of my time was spent cruising around with friends doing dumb things that would get me in trouble while smoking a lot of weed and drinking.

I also played a lot of bass guitar and would learn songs via tabliture found in various guitar magazines. I did well in school and went to my first concert at 13 (the Smashing Pumpkins).

If I had more positive things to do, I probably could have avoided over a decade of drug abuse. That's one of the reason that I try so hard to get my teenage clients involved with things in the community or with positive people. It's hard to find in a small community but can be done. There are always things available nowadays if you look. I would do some research as to what is available in your area for that age group and push them to experiment with these positive things to see which ones they enjoy. I usually try to have them find a hobby involving music, art, or other creative outlets. Sports also seem to have a very positive effect on the kids I see so I would explore that with them, as well.

[jer]

Lindsey:

never really even talked about being boyfriend and girlfriend, then he went back home to nashville until the end of the summer and when he got back we didn't talk about it at all ever again. it was weird!

So what you're saying is, you still have a boyfriend to break up with.

haha, yeah i guess that's true!

i've been cheating on him a loooottttt oops

You really should track him down on Facebook and send a long winded confession and apology and make it all dramatic and see how he responds.

[RankResistance]

...sigh...stuff like this.

https://soundcloud.com/rankresistance/false-alarm

[Semi]

I listened to a lot of local crust and hardcore and thought I was the shit.

Now I listen to a lot of local crust and hardcore and think I'm the anti-shit.

[Graphix]

When I was 13 I was:
-Playing BBall with my best friend while waiting for Linux CDs to come in the mail from eBay
-Playing LORD and Tradewars 2002 on a local BBS
-Walking through the woods and along the stream to find cool looking rocks
-Cutting flowers/plants open to see what they looked like inside
-Just starting to get into pop punk (Dookie was my first album quickly followed by Blink 182 stuff)
-Had a GF in 6th grade, so I was prob around 13 or so when that happened?
-Spent a lot of time fingering Becca

[lindsey]

Lindsey:

never really even talked about being boyfriend and girlfriend, then he went back home to nashville until the end of the summer and when he got back we didn't talk about it at all ever again. it was weird!

So what you're saying is, you still have a boyfriend to break up with.

haha, yeah i guess that's true!

i've been cheating on him a loooottttt oops

You really should track him down on Facebook and send a long winded confession and apology and make it all dramatic and see how he responds.

we are actually friends on fb, and we were friends all through high school until he eventually moved permanently to nashville, we just never brought up our "relationship" after that. weird! his younger sister lives in portland now too and i once sent her a message to see if she wanted to get together some time, and she never responded. it's weird because she always thought i was really rad when we would run into each other in asheville?

[jer]

Cool now it'll be easier to break up with him

[jer]

He deserves some closure.

[bee]

i had some pretty intense family issues around the age of 13 and was an incredibly unhappy young teenager. my grades at school started to drop around that time and i didn't really have any friends. yay!

[Aegir]

When I was 13 I had no friends and spent most of my free time playing The Sims.

[pronetoaccidents]

\ I started hanging out with the "popular" kids

you were one of THEM? you had to be a fake one, like a regular kid but more like an undercover agent doing an operative mission to see what those self obsessed little assholes did all day when they weren't dictating what was "cool" amongst barely pubscent micropeople.

[pronetoaccidents]

going to a ridiculous amount of bar/bat mitzvahs