Tag: behaviour

I Love Getting Old

time-and-oldI’ve said “I love getting old” so many times that people think I’m being ironic.  Folks, do I even look like a hipster?  Don’t get me wrong: being young was fun.  Wine, women and song: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll — whatever you want to call it, being a young man in the 20th century was worth the price of puberty.  However, there are some seriously cool perks available when you’ve lasted long enough to get north of 60, ’cause if you do it right, old people are just pre-schoolers with porno and alcohol privileges.  Here’s what I mean:

1 — You get to complain.  It’s not only allowed: it’s expected.  It still doesn’t change anything, but damn it feels good!

2 — You get to wear comfortable clothes.  I don’t know why (and this goes double for women) but fashionable clothes are always uncomfortable.  They grab ya in the wrong place, hold things way too tightly and sneak into areas that really should remain private.  I don’t have any personal experience, but a push-up bra and stiletto heels have got to be the worst.

3 — You’re never lazy.  You can lie around all weekend in your (comfortable) sweat pants, eating pizza, drinking Pepsi, binge-watching Luther on Netflix — and nobody calls you on it!  In fact, you get loads of sympathy. “Poor old fella!  He’s got nothing to do.  Awww!”  Yeah, life’s a bitch.  Pass the pepperoni.”

4 — People do things for you.  They move out of the way, give you a seat on the bus, reach for the tall stuff, lift your heavy crap and set up your technology.  It’s great!  But use this power judiciously or young people will start avoiding you and, believe me, lonely and bitter is not a good way to go.

5 — You get a vocabulary.  Luckily, even though life remains cool, brilliant, far out, awesome and amazing, you get better ways to describe it.

6 — Cool is a temperature.  I have no idea how many Kardashians there are, who sings what song, where the Marvel Universe is at, what any of this year’s Must-See-TV programs are, or what what’s-her-name said about the evils of capitalism.  When you’re young, if Jennifer Lawrence gets a boil on her bum, it’s big news.  When you’re my age, you’ve seen enough boils and bums not to worry about it.

But the very best thing about getting old is:

7 — You finally understand the connection between elegant and sexy — and it’s got nothing to do with sex.

We’re All In This Together

There’s been a lot of yipping lately about how divided our society has become.  These days,  everyone is painfully aware of what this particular group thinks or that particular group does or how some other group will react or get pissed off or … on and on and on.  Bullshit!  I don’t care how people identify themselves or what they think makes them different from everybody else, because the bottom line is — they aren’t — and I can prove it.

together

Here’s a simple test.

If you’ve done any one of these 10 things (11 if you’re female) you’re living proof that, way down deep in the human psyche, we’re all the same — just a bunch of ordinary folk, trying to get by.

1 — You hear a recording of your voice and think, “Wow, that is so-o-o weird.  Do I really sound like that?”

2 — You see someone you kinda know but not very well, and you pretend you don’t recognize them so you don’t have to make conversation.

3 — When you’re alone and a popular old song comes on the radio, you mumble most of the words until the chorus comes along and then you sing really loud.

4 — At a party with varying degrees of background noise, you smile a lot and “ha-ha-ha” laugh because you can’t actually hear what the other person is saying.

5 — Somebody says, “That was 10 years ago” and you’re thinking the 1990s, not 2006.

6 — You silently pronounce Wednesday as Wed-Ness-Day and February as Feb-Brew-Airy when you write them.

7 — You spend $20.00 extra at Amazon, for something you don’t really want, just to avoid paying the $8.00 shipping charge.

8 — You remember a stupid thing you did —  like — 12 years ago and get embarrassed all over again.

9 — You get out of the shower, see yourself naked in the mirror and go Supermodel for a nanosecond.

10 — When James Bond says, “My name is Bond, James Bond.” — you just read that in his voice, didn’t you?

And finally, for women only:

11 — At some point in your life, you’ve laughed so hard you peed your pants.

Avoidance Behaviour

behaviourTo everybody but me, my life right now looks like lazy.  However, in actual fact, I’m quite busy — engaging in that age-old tradition — Avoidance Behaviour.  As any practicing procrastinator will tell you, Avoidance Behaviour is an essential part of getting anything done.  It’s all the dickin’ around you do between the time you decide on a task and the night before the deadline.  However, Avoidance Behaviour is not simply wasting time there are three very important standards which govern the practice.

1 — Avoidance Behaviour must not be connected in any way to the task at hand.  For example, if your task is building a garden shed, you should first clean out the refrigerator, or organize the silverware, or in extreme cases, pull everything out from underneath the kitchen sink, see what’s been hiding there, sort it and then put it all back for another time when you have more time to deal with it.

2 — The best Avoidance Behaviour is useless stuff that nobody in their right mind would ever think of doing.  Alphabetizing all those CDs you’ve got left over from the 80s is an incredible piece of Avoidance Behaviour.  Colour coding your closet is another one or searching Social Media for that bitch from high school (what’s-her-name?) who ran the Yearbook and put the dorky picture of you picking your nose under “Student Activities.”  (Wait a minute — I’ve done that.)  Anyway, to further clarify, here are some excellent examples of Avoidance Behaviour:

Watching old Brendan Fraser movies.
Surfing YouTube for that 70s song that goes “Da, da, da, da, dum, dee, dum, dum, something, something, dee, dee, dum.”
Making a list of all the members of the Legion of Super Heroes– with their corresponding powers — just in case you might need it someday.
Driving across town for that particular pastrami sandwich you remember from university.  (This works especially well if, once you get there, you discover the deli closed 12 years ago and is now a Yoga Centre.)

And finally:

3 — Avoidance Behaviour is time sensitive.  To get the most benefit out of Avoidance Behaviour, it should begin immediately after you’ve got a rough idea of what you going to do, continue (off and on) throughout the rest of the process, and end in a frenzy the day before the deadline, preferably in the late afternoon.  This produces the maximum amount of panic which, in turn, releases the optimal amount of adrenaline, Norepinephine and Cortisol — all needed to complete any task in the nick of time.

So for all those people who think I will never get my book of short stories published — think again.  The only problem I have is that, when you’re doing nothing, you kinda never really know when you’re done.