Aging - Tumblr Posts
āWomen have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this societyās double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier ā and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.ā
ā Susan Sontag, āThe Double Standard of Agingā (1972)
if you are lucky you will love someone and their hair will thin and their breasts will sag and you will kiss them everywhere over and over again
Today marks my birthday (yippee) and although Iām not revealing my exact age on here, I will say that turning [redacted] has been nerve racking, which is unusual for me. Iāve always been excited and happy to celebrate my birthday but this year feels different. Itās sort of uncomfortable and I canāt help but look back on that one South Park episode (Youāre Getting Old) and think, āwowā. Because I knew I kin Stan but this is a whole new level. Thatās not what the whole post is about but I just need to get that out there. Itās like a mid-life crisis, except Iām nowhere near middle aged. I often write and talk like Iām some wise old boomer and it really throws people off when they see me in real life. Iām young; a lot younger than most people would expect [again, not specifying for now] based on my language, and I really wish it wasnāt that way. You could guess my age right here and youād most likely get it wrong. Iām at a time in my life right now where Iām supposed to be relatively care-free and enjoy myself, but Iām constantly wrapped up in my own often philosophical and existential thoughts that nobody in my age group seems to understand. I have this problem where I get way too impatient with my friends and family who donāt think as efficiently as I do. Iām confidently more mature than any one of my friends in many aspects, which might seem like a brag, but I envy them so much. I wish I could live my life without all the baggage I carry from life experiences and knowledge I just really shouldnāt need in the stage Iām at in my life. I try to stay positive but holy crap, I never realized how blissful ignorance really is. Iām dead serious when I say being knowledgeable hurts, I get physical headaches, no joke. So I guess the takeaway from this rant/journal entry is happy birthday to me, iām mentally sixty.
Anyway, Iām gonna see the new Puss in Boots movie with my bestie and itāll be a blast :]
again, tryna stay positive
The Mash
It seems that this is the month of looking backward, with a sense of nostalgia. I must say that childhood just isnāt quite what it used to be, and I see that every year at halloween where it makes me just a little bit sad. It was an old song, but a favorite of mine. It was out of date, and a vit corny, but the idea of a bunch of monsters dancing in Dr. Frankensteins lab always amused me. Theā¦
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Arm Day
Hello Hello and welcome to this weekās six sentence story based on the work PUMP.Ā This one follows our narrator as she regrets her vacation choices, as off grid isnāt exactly as easy as she expected it to beā¦ Her arms felt like they were on fire, and for what felt like the 100th time that day, she wondered why she had wanted to do this, āthe old fashioned way,ā because this was no less modernā¦
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me as a 10 y/o:
Wow, high schoolers must me so intelligent and mature
me as a high school student:
'eVeRYbOdY wAs kUNg fU fiGhTiNg'
....I had my world rocked. Rolling In The Deep (Adele) came out in 2011...
12 years ago.
*walks out*
judĆo por elecciĆ³n (part 1)
(TW: aging, death, brief description of dead body and the effects of death)
We were stopped on the street two years ago by a small gray-haired lady who was thrilled to hear us speaking English. She herself was a Londoner who transplanted to our small Andalusian village with her husband almost twenty years ago. She was thrilled to hear people speaking in her mother tongue and invited my wife and I in for coffee anytime.
We started taking her up on it. The pandemic was still On, but not Lockdown On. We wore masks, sat on their broad terrace over six feet apart, and shouted conversation at each other. She always gave us tons of cookies and coffee from her once-white, now-brown-from-use plastic electric kettle. I get nervous about plastic kettles, but drank it anyway. And here was where we met her husband, E.
E was stooped and frail where his wife, S, was merely beginning to run down a little. When you get to E's age, the skeleton starts to come out in your features. Even then, we had no idea how old E really was until he casually mentioned that he remembered his father coming back from the war.
The War, he said, and I told my wife afterwards this must be WW2, and later, we asked enough questions to validate that guess. So in his 80s.
E forgot a lot of things. He acting like being Jewish was a secret because he'd forgotten how he'd hung up a Passover plate on one wall, and how he'd marked the eastern wall of the house with a plaque of the Tablets of the Law. We decided to make him feel safer by talking about my Jewish stepfamily and my wife's experiences of being mistaken for Jewish. He talked about learning Hebrew before he learned English, a little about growing up Orthodox in England in the fifties. Then he made us swear we'd never tell anyone in the village that he was Jewish.
We swore.
He wasn't an easy person to be around. Part of aging sometimes is feeling the weight of all your seemingly-innocent choices along the way dragging your body down into oblivion. Throughout his life, E smoked and E was a jeweler who did woodworking and home repair and almost never wore a mask. E when I knew him was tied to an oxygen tank and sounded like he breathed underwater. Throughout his life, E was strong and able to exert gentle control over others; when I knew him, his reedy voice rose to sharply criticize anyone around him.
He complained of how things were different now in the village; I saw his fear of the last great big change behind his words.
That was how my wife and I treated these visits: we were seeing an old man at the end of his life far away from his family trying to cope. He told the same set of stories over and over again; we took it as him needing certainty that somebody would know and tell those stories. (One of them: E worked on set design for the show "Merlin", kept the molds, and utilized them in his home design... so some of his walls had little archways with Merlin's star or the throne's symbol impressed upon them.) He went back and forth between taxing S with unreasonable requests and trying to ratchet them back when he saw he went too far.
Early in the summer of 2023, E started repainting and cleaning off his terrace and rooftop. S would cry and beg and plead for him not to, it was too hot, he'd go without oxygen too long (she was right). E ignored her. I drank my coffee and thought about how he must know the end was near and how he wanted to leave the house in a nice condition for S to live in, or sell, afterward.
The last thing he tried to do was repaint part of the ceiling which had collapsed and decorate it with stars, galaxies, and black holes. "It takes a great deal of time to reproduce the universe," he'd say, and my wife would laugh and say "Of course, it took G-d six days but we're not G-d", and then E'd laugh, every time.
Toward the end of an obscenely hot June, S called me in shrieking tears and told me "I think E has died!"
I was in the middle of six chores when I got that phone call, none of which were done that day. My wife and I ran for S's house. E had been mostly bed-bound for the past two weeks. He had gotten out of bed, walked into the foyer, and collapsed. He was almost certainly dead immediately. S had to do CPR on him while weeping and talking to the emergency workers in broken Spanish.
Never seen a dead body before.
After the workers finally arrived, it went more quickly. They picked his body up and wrapped him in a sheet and laid him on the marital bed. My wife, who speaks Spanish natively, spoke to all the different workers. I didn't, so I ended up finding a mop and cleaning up the urine that coated the entire foyer. (The next day I'd bring by a steam cleaner, run it through the whole foyer, and then I steam cleaned her kitchen so we could all pretend I hadn't brought it over to cleanse the last of E from the house.)
(When I learned that you kasher a microwave by steaming water in it, I immediately thought of that day.)
I led S into the room where E's body lay. I pulled out my phone while she cried. I didn't yet understand how an ethnoreligion worked, but I still had a sense that while E wasn't passionately religious, he would want certain things for himself. If he didn't, then S needed something that would help her move into grief. And I knew that it'd help me. So I pulled up an English language version of a mourning prayer and guided S through it.
This calmed her a little, and after touching his outline, she left the room. Alone, not sure if he said it or if I believed it, I recited the Shema on his behalf. (Which I had learned, to my goyim embarrassment, from "The Sandman".)
After E's passing, none of his remaining family were Jewish, and nobody wanted his Judaica. Once S started cleaning all the remnants out of her house, she went hard on purging the Judaica. I don't blame her for this, exactly. She was grieving and she had no concept of how important some of those objects could be. My wife told her to give us any books or items that were about Judaism instead of throwing them away. When she did, S lit up and immediately gave us his mezuzahs. One was empty. One had a tatty old prayer sheet inside it.
My wife and I looked for hours on how to dispose of the prayer (we still haven't, we're working on it). I looked up whether or not it was okay for non-Jews to hang mezuzah. As I shared the results, my wife laughed and said they'd feel weird about it, like they were cosplaying Judaism.
"I'd like to be Jewish," they said, as they had for the past fifteen years on and off, "only I can't."
This time, for the first time, I said: "Why not?"
I spent the majority of my childhood thinking I would die very young, and despite what little me thought I now get to be an adult. And I am SO excited to AGE now.
Ten-year-old me thought I'd be dead by now, so every sign of aging is a celebration that I'm not. Aging is cool because it means you are ALIVE.
So many versions of me never thought this one would get to exist. I find it superbly wonderful that those versions of me were wrong.
The social attitude regarding age is consistently getting weirder. Youāre not āpushing 30ā youāre just in your late 20s. 30 is not old and neither is 40 while Iām at it. Growing older is an enormous privilege and displaying that age is a gorgeous component of life. Spending your days trying to reverse that grace breeds an eternally wasted life.
whenever I tell anyone within a 3 year age gap of me that I want to desperately run away and go to a small country in the mountains with a small village and live an isolated life they freak out but everyone within a 3 year age distance from me is just like "yea makes sense, I might do the same." are 10-16 yr olds ok?
THIS ā¤ļø
One thing that helps me is that most of the hot actors in the movies I grew up with were in their 30s... yeah, they played people in their 20s... but were dripping hot at 30 š
I will forget.
Nauseous, I roll over. My mind turns with me, terrible thoughts dragging their talons across the backs of my eyes. I feel sick, though I most certainly am not, I think to myself.
You will forget.
You will forget.
You will forget.
My sheets are damp with sweat. It's been a hot summer, full of days that would have been better spent at a pool or a beach. I hate the sand.
Doomed.
Doomed to forget.
You will forget.
A hot summer packed full of the gloom that Death oh-so-generously leaves in its wake. Two funerals, both for grandparents dear to me. Lives quickly broken down into dust by the silent destruction brought by Alzheimer's.
Unavoidable.
Unpreventable.
Carved in stone.
I know my fate matches theirs. It's in my blood. I can do things to try and extend my time before I become burdened with it, but ultimately it will claim me as well. It will tear little chunks of my life from my hands that clutch them so desperately. It will take away everything I know.
I will forget.
I will forget.
I will forget.
Tick tock, tick tock, the clock marches me towards my death. My body will live longer than I. When I pass, the people I used to love will have already been grasping the hand of my corpse. I will not know who they are. I will not know who they were to me, their names, the way they made me feel. None of the things that matter the most out of absolutely everything will stay.
I've seen terrible ones on the internet, but this one...
I can't wait until I'm old enough to witness a peer using it:
"You better call Life Alert, 'cause I've fallen for you and I can't get up."
Ā« Animals might see crisp detail at a distance, or nothing more than blurry blotches of light and shade. They might see perfectly well in what weād call darkness, or go instantly blind in what weād call brightness. They might see in what weād deem slow motion or time-lapse. They might see in two directions at once, or in every direction at once. Their vision might get more or less sensitive over the span of a single day. Their Umwelt might change as they get older. Jakobās colleague Nate Morehouse has shown that jumping spiders are born with their lifetimeās supply of light-detecting cells, which get bigger and more sensitive with age. āThings would get brighter and brighter,ā Morehouse tells me. For a jumping spider, getting older āis like watching the sun rising." Ā»
ā Ed Yong, An Immense World