This is why...

This is why I cannot mop my kitchen floor.

Bleacher Butt

My kids play sports. And over the years I have learned that high school bleachers are not designed for adult butts! Bleachers are especially hard on me after an all-day wrestling meet that started at 9 a.m. and ended at 7:30 p.m.

I officially have "bleacher butt."

Don't Guess My Age!

OK, I have few illusions about myself. From looking in the mirror I am aware that I no longer look 30ish, though sometimes can pass for 40ish in the right blue jeans. I'm OK with it.

So today while out at a bar throwing darts with my husband, I met a nice younger man throwing on the next board and we started talking about our kids. Because he looks really young, the conversation turned to age. (He looks a good 5 years younger than his age.)

He turned to me and said, "I won't even try to guess your age. I'm not good at that."

I said, "Don't even try -- regardless it is a lose-lose situation for you."

I didn't explain it to him, but here are the facts. When you guess the age of a woman who is over 45, you can never win! Here's why.

If you guess too young, then the woman is offended thinking you are pitying her. (If she is smart she is offended. If her hair is bleached too blond and she wears Ugg boots, with a really short skirt, you are safe.)

If you guess too old, then she is mad because you think she is old. If you guess exactly right, well, that is bad, too. No woman ever wants to look her age.

The best thing is to do is what this guy did -- refuse to guess.

I never told him my age. Though people "say" I look younger than 49, and I probably do look younger than the average woman my age, I don't look remarkably younger and I was not fishing for a compliment. No sober person will ever mistaken me for 39 or less.

The truth is, I thought I was OK with it. I have never lied about my age and I have never felt the need to... until now. I think it was Gloria Swanson who said something like: if you add 10 years to your age, then everyone will marvel at how young you look.

Not a bad idea -- I look pretty damn good for 59!
__________

I could not find the exact Swanson quote I was looking for above, but I did find a couple of others that are interesting:

• "Because I take care of my body, it doesn't look like the body of a woman of my years."
• "I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944."
• "I consider anybody who weighs over 200 pounds fat, and time was when I could not refrain from telling such people so." (Wow! Could you imagine being so bold?)
• "I entered the cosmetics industry because I wanted more women to use cosmetics made with safe, healthful ingredients."
• "Your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as what you don't eat. "

Losing my Mind

Have you ever been driving somewhere and suddenly you can't remember how to get there? You've been there a million times, you can picture where you want to be, but you can't remember which street it is on?

That happened to me today. Gary and I were going out for lunch and I offered to drive. We were halfway to the restaurant I chose, that we've been to several times and my mind went blank. "OK, I forgot where this place is again," I said. Luckily, Gary is used to my frequent brain fades, he reminded me and didn't think a thing about it.

Everyone experiences events like this once in a while. But I seem to be having "brain fades" much more often. I'll be talking to someone I've known for years and suddenly blank on their name. I'll be in the grocery store for just a few items and forget the most important one. I'll be upstairs to get something, but cannot remember what I went to get. Sometimes, I'll be in the middle of doing something, get distracted, and forget to go back to the original activity!

But the one that concerns me the most is driving. I have visions of me driving along and completely forgetting how to get back home.

My mom said it was caused by stress. When I'm stressed these events do seem to occur more often. But I have also noticed that they happen much more often the OLDER I get, not matter how much stress I'm under.

Not sure what I will do about this. Eat better? Do that. Exercise? Do that. Freak out? Well, I've been doing that, too. Maybe I'll have to bring it up to my doctor. (New Year's Resolution?)

With any luck, it isn't anything permanent and I'll just end up healthier because of the exercise and healthier foods. And if that doesn't work, I probably won't remember anyway.

Obsession

My friend Gary is almost exactly one year younger than I am. OK, I'm actually 13 months older, but who is counting that precisely.

Since we are both approaching 50, he and I talk about age quite a bit. (The other friends in our little group are at least 8 years younger than us so the majority of our "real" age discussions are with each other.) Though most of the time when we talk we are laughing and making light of it, every once in a while I think we have an obsession. Here is Gary's:

As I got into my mid-40s I developed an obsession with checking celebrity ages to gauge my own. It was usually when they'd appear in a movie or on TV I'd get the itch to look them up so I could convince myself that, for example, if Pacino and De Niro were pretty damn cool in Heat, and already into their early 50s, then I still had some virile time left — a nice fat slice of it.

I'd started handing the data to my parents, too, who were in their 70s and lamenting the slide. I'd try to assuage them with "Hey, Ronald Reagan was barely into his first term at your age. Think of that!" Of course it didn't make them feel better, so terrifying was the idea of moving from the comfy sofa and its fleece throw to the studded straight-backed chairs of the White House for a 14-hour round of meetings. They couldn’t relate at all to the now-deceased Reagan who was energetic in his 70s.

I reached a point where I began to feel ridiculous about gauging age this way. Too clinical, I guess. Putting too precise a measure on things. Establishing that you are still youngish is also beginning the countdown to when you are not. And even though it was coming from a probably normal anxiety about getting older, it was turning me into the kind of simple-minded fool I'd always hated. "Ha, I'm younger than you," etc.

Of course, I don't think Gary is ridiculous.

Let's have lunch soon so I can vent about how beautiful everyone said Demi Moore was when she turned 40 though she worked out 8 hrs a day with a personal trainer and denies plastic surgery. Oh, and by the way, she is only 2 years younger than I am.

[You all didn't really think I was going to include a photo of Demi from the movie Charlie's Angels where she is running on the beach in a bikini. That would just be cruel, though it would prove my point.]

New Year's Resolutions

Today, in honor of the new year, I walked over 3 miles, ate a Wendy's Bacon Blue Cheese Burger, finished off the Chex mix and the remaining potato chips and French onion dip. Luckily my dog ate most of the remaining Christmas cookies and I'll be giving away the leftover candy tomorrow.

It is time for me to get serious about my New Year's Resolutions.

Though I knew January 1 was coming for an entire year, I just could not get motivated to write down my thoughts. And, to tell the truth, I knew none of my healthy eating and exercise resolutions would go into effect until Monday anyway, so what was the rush?

The list seems pretty long to me, but at the same time, I couldn't justify deleting any of them. And aside from my hair color issues, not many of them are quantifiable. Not sure how you determine success in a case like that.

So, all of those qualifiers said, here are my 2010 New Year's Resolutions:

• Lose that pesky 10 lbs I’ve been fighting for a while.
• Purge clothes I don’t wear and get rid of stuff I don’t need. Buy clothes that fit.
• File stuff.
• Have my hair professionally colored all year long to avoid the orange brassy color I am known for. Do it more often to avoid the skunk look.
• Stop procrastinating – like waiting until January 3 to write a list of resolutions.
• Follow through with all of the physicals and medical checkups I should be doing every year.
• Work harder to meet deadlines and work when I'm at work.
• Take out the trash. (I don’t know why, but I can let a trash can overflow for days!)
• Try to spend a few minutes in silence every day.
• Be more patient, less judgmental and say fewer negative things. Be friendlier.
• Have more fun. Play with my dogs more often.
  
• Be more generous with my time and money.
• Sleep more. Eat better. Exercise more.
  
• Read for fun.
• Have a good beer once in a while.
• Make it to church more often
• Plant daffodils.
  
• Reduce stress – especially about turning 50 at the end of the year.
• Starting... now!
  

So, what are your resolutions?

The Basic Rules of Life

While watching a Monty Python movie the other day, I was amazed at how deep the ending to the movie was:

"Now, here's the meaning of life. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

Wow, does it get any clearer than that?