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One Thing or Another: Falling for Autumn
By Mark McNeaseIt’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
I’ll admit it, I’m a fall guy. We’ve just endured what I and millions like me believe must have been the hottest, longest, muggiest summer on record. Aren’t they all?
I don’t just dislike summer; I don’t just find it uncomfortable, unsettling and unending. I hate it. Even knowing it would shorten my life by 25 percent, I would gladly get from birth to death without suffering a single July. (The only exception was childhood, when summer was my annual escape from the dullness of compulsory education, sadistic teachers and, to paraphrase Sartre, the hell of other children.)
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One Thing or Another: Drug Ads You Can Dance To
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
It’s early morning (or late night, take your pick, Big Pharma never sleeps). You’re distracted by a text message from your third best friend on her vacation in Florida. You’re thinking through an especially clever but short reply suitable for tweeting, when suddenly you hear music that demands you get up and dance! You’re still in bed. The morning news plays in the background, something about a salmonella outbreak in Des Moines, when they cut to commercial and that irresistible music begins. Your feet start twitching, first barely, then with a pronounced rhythm in sync with the song you’re hearing. You look up at the TV. You realize it’s not a song after all, but a jingle, those can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head hooks designed for the sole purpose of getting you to buy something just to make it stop.
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One Thing or Another: Midlife Waist Land
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
Whether or not you think 57 still counts as midlife (who doesn’t anticipate celebrating their 114th birthday wheezing out a single candle on a ShopRite cake, flanked by an anxious home health aide and an impatient funeral director), the fact remains that age and width are proportionate for most of us. Not all of us, of course. There are those among us who insist they’re only as old as they feel, despite sharp disagreement from titanium hips and birth certificates. You know who you are: you swear by kale smoothies, you’ve never met an elliptical you didn’t want to mount, and you start each day by posting life-affirming platitudes on Facebook.
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One Thing or Another: Don’t Call It Retirement
By Mark McNeaseI’m very pleased to announce the return of One Thing or Another, my regular Editor’s column here at lgbtSr. I finally have the time to do this properly, now that I’ve entered my, ahem, renaissance (keep reading for more on that …). Look for these biweekly, and if you have any topics to suggest, I’d love to hear them! Just email me at this link. – Mark/Editor
This must be what graduating high school felt like. It’s been awhile so I can’t remember the exact sensations, but I’m sure it came with the same, “Oh my God, I didn’t think that would ever get here” feeling I had when I left my office job for the last time two weeks ago. And with it, the ubiquitous office cubicle that most closely approximates solitary confinement in the modern American workplace. I’d known I wouldn’t miss this particular job for longer than it took me to leave the building, and wasn’t surprised when I felt that way by the time the elevator descended three floors.
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One Thing or Another: Age is Trending in 2016
By Mark McNeaseI just increased the font on this to 175 percent so I could read it without squinting or moving the laptop back and forth, trying to get the right distance from my eyes. The days of reading with anything at 100 percent are as gone as my once-lower hairline and the tight flesh that housed my body at 30. Okay, make that 40. 45 …
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One Thing or Another: The Exuberance Principle
By Mark McNease
Here’s a challenge: Try to recall the experiences you had as a child exploring a world that was constantly presenting you with new sights, sounds, tastes, places and people. Then try to re-experience that excitement, that sense that you have never been in this moment before and if you don’t live it right this instant you’ll never have that chance again. It’s very difficult. Our lives’ accumulations of responsibilities, disappointments, obligations, and sheer repetitive behaviors make that long-ago feeling of wonder as hard to reclaim as youth itself. Life can seem, after thousands of days matched by nights that bridge them one to the next, anything but exciting. Unless …
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One Thing or Another: The Joys of Being a (Almost) Halloween Baby
By Mark McNeaseOctober has always been my favorite month. It’s the month when autumn really makes itself felt, especially if you live where the seasons are discernible. (It recently went from air conditioner weather at the tail end of a relentlessly hot summer, to a sudden and unexpected freeze with a 30-degree drop). It’s flu season, which is always good for a sick day or two spent lying on the couch taking over-the-counter cold remedies that do nothing to stop you from feeling like you’re dying. Honey, is the healthcare directive in place? You’re sure you’ve still got your copy? And, How about the will? Can I change it by tomorrow? My sister forgot my birthday, I’m not sure she deserves the belt buckles.
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One Thing or Another: From The Wheelchair’s Perspective
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
Some days just feel longer than others. They seem to deliberately stretch out an extra few hours so we’ll have more time to dwell on all our dissatisfactions, insecurities and complaints. And it doesn’t help to think that each day is irreplaceable, that the box of days I’d been given when I first screamed my way into the world in some delivery room in Mississippi is now about three-quarters empty. Why would the urgency of lives spent in a flicker reach my consciousness when I was busy ruminating on all the things that bothered me?
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One Thing or Another: The Vision Thing
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
One thing you can say about aging is that it offers something for everyone. If your knees aren’t buckling yet, you might have stiffness in various joints; if your joints aren’t betraying you after decades of an intimate relationship, it might take you twice as long to get out of bed in the morning as it did way back in your 40s. Between the added weight most of us take on like an unwanted passenger and the silent creaking of bones that would rather stay on the mattress another twenty minutes, rising and shining can sound like the command of a drill sergeant.
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One Thing or Another: The O-Word
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
The late George Carlin once lamented in his stand-up routine that no one gets old anymore. We’re all just “older.” It’s one of those word games we play with ourselves, masking, and in some cases burying, truths we find inconvenient or unpleasant. After all, we can be older indefinitely; getting and being old has the sound of finality, or at least of an end approaching faster than we’d anticipated.
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One Thing or Another: Laughing Matters
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
What’s funny can be very subjective, unique to each of us as we find some things to be laughing matters and quite a few others not to be. But how often do we stop and think about our sense of humor itself, and what it does for us? Laughing lets off steam, certainly. It releases tension—most clearly in nervous laughter. He didn’t kill me after all! Ha! Or, I was just kidding when I said you were a narcissistic prick! Don’t fire me! Ha! It provides communion. It even distorts faces and occasionally sends us into paroxysms of uncontrolled guffaws. But have you ever considered that it saves lives?
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One Thing or Another: I Was Telling Me Just the Other Day …
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
It’s been a little alarming to observe myself in conversation with me more openly and regularly these days. What I’d once considered a trait of people who meander sidewalks aimlessly or decline to take medication, I now see as a sign I’m either not quite right, or I’ve lost the ability to keep my inner dialogue private—just between the two of me, so to speak.
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One Thing or Another: Learning to Live with the Typos in Life
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
I was reading something I’d written recently and noticed a typo. My first reaction was anger and embarrassment. Alone at my desk at sunrise, I looked around to make sure no one could see my crime—so strong is the shame and so universal the condemnation of typographical errors. How could I possibly have not seen my mistake before I put it out there for everyone to ridicule and use as proof that I don’t care or, worse, that I’m unprofessional?
