Mom gets Warped

I took my teens to the Warped Tour today. It's a multi-band, multi-tent, Lollapalooza-type event. It was swarming with teenagers who cared desperately about their images; they dressed in black and were pierced, tattooed, dyed and trying very hard to look scary. There was, however, one boy, in particular, that I noticed. He wore sprayed-on-tight black pants with a metal-spike belt buckled firmly below his crotch and riding under his butt. As I watched him, I thought to myself, Someday he'll look at a picture of himself now and realize that, while the tight pants were cool, the choice of where and how to fasten his belt was not. And he'll wonder "What was I thinking?" But then, even worse, he'll see a teenager defiantly wearing his belt below his ass and he'll want to stop this teenager and tell him, "You don't need to do this. I already did it for you and I learned that it was stupid." But he won't. I know all this because I once wore platform shoes.