"How Not to Act Old"

For the life of me, I don't know how I've missed Pamela Redmond Safran's How Not to Act Old, but - thanks to my (younger) sister Trish - I now know that there are little things we need to avoid doing if we don't want to appear (yuck!) old.

And we're not talking just the obvious ones like getting your hair kinked, fried, and sprayed weekly at Al's Golden Chateau. Or  sitting on the subway with your arms clutched, Heimlich Maneuver tight, around your pocketbook. Or reacting with pinched-faced disapproval whenever the name Kanye West is mentioned.

We're talking about things that I hadn't (yet) realized signified geezerhood.

I first learned about Safran from a WBZ TV link to a post by Kate Merrill that Trish sent me on the topic, and here's the handful of must avoids:

• Wearing a watch Forget that cool looking Skagen you're sporting, let alone Lady Bulova you got for your high school graduation. You need to know what time it is? What do you think your iPhone's for.
• Leaving a voice mail. I had pretty much figured out that leaving a voice mail for anyone under 30 was a waste of breath. I guess it's still okay to leave a voice mail for a fellow traveler. Unless you want to demonstrate that you've joined the vanguard of those who know that it's such a waste of precious time to listen to a tedious voice message, let alone respond to it. We live in the moment - and that moment is shouting TXT.
• Cosmos.  Even though I never saw "Sex and The City", a cosmo - or some variation on the martini theme: Appletini, Lemon Drop, whatever - has always made me feel, along with the light attendant buzz,  kippy and cool. According to Safran, the cosmo is "the official drink of menopausal women." Of course, I'm now of an age when it's flattering to be thought of as a menopausal woman. We're not told what's the beverage in today's fountain of youth - Hendrick's gin? - but I think I'll stick with the occasional cosmo. I tend to be drinking one in the company of fellow geez-ettes, in a decidedly non-hip venue, where a kindly and aging bartender is looking out for us.

Sure, all this is good for a laugh or two, but we also know that folks of a certain age hit big time age discrimination in the job market, so Merrill includes a couple of "must avoid" tips from career counselor Kathy Robinson.

• Don't use long, formal e-mails as part of your job search. Keep it cas, bro. Nothing screams oldster like formal, stilted language. A while back, a friend of mine (roughly my age) was told by her 20-something manager that she shouldn't use words like "picayune" or "recapitulate" because no one would know what she was talking about. (I posted about this here.)
• Don't use an AOL or Hotmail address. These just holler out of it. You need to be on gmail, verizon.net, or comcast.net. I'm so hip, I have two gmail addresses, and a comcast.net one. But who needs them to begin with, since no one wants to read e-mails anyway. Especially the long, boring ones from old timers who use words like picayune and recapitulate.

Hey, I'm no different from the next aging Baby Boomer. I don't want to get old, look old, feel old, or act old.

On the other hand, as I grow old, I become more and more convinced that not wanting to deal with all the new-fangled everythings that never really seem to make things any better than they used to be, is part of nature's way of making us feel that it's gonna be okay to fall into the Big Sleep.

I'm nowhere near ready to put my head on the pillow yet. Still...do I really want to live in a world where wearing a watch is the equivalent of carrying an hourglass or a sundial around?

Bleccchhhh.