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One Thing or Another: Auld Lang Anxiety (So Long 2016)
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease/EditorI’ve witnessed the end of a few years in my time, but seldom have I welcomed their passing as much as I welcome the final days of 2016. It has been both a year to remember and a year to forget, the way one allows painful memories to fade. While I wouldn’t trade the year for, say, a wrinkle in time that caused me to jump from 2015 to 2017, I can say without hesitation it’s been a year of cataclysm, change, overwhelming emotion, and degrees of stress I hope to never experience again.
I could write about job loss for the year, the death of one pet and health scare for another. I could write about getting shingles that still itch. I could write about an entire year consumed by political news that went from the entertaining to the grotesque, to the utterly heartbreaking. And that would be just the beginning.
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One Thing or Another: Shingle Bells
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNeaseI don’t know what’s more excruciating, living through shingles or attempting to write a humor column about them. But since I consider laughter a true medicine, and a sense of humor vital to surviving this life, I’ll do my best to smile through the pain.
It seems appropriate to end my Year of Living Stressfully with a case of something we’re led to believe only strikes people over the age of 60. I celebrated my 58th birthday in October, so while I’m not that far from the mile marker beyond which shingles waits for one in every three of us, I still thought I was safe for a few more years. I obviously have not had the vaccine I see commercials for every hour or so (do our television sets know what products to market to us yet, the way websites do?). I also couldn’t tell you until now that I’d had chickenpox as a child. I don’t remember my childhood diseases, only its discomforts, which were many.
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One Thing or Another: Heaven’s Diner
[clickToTweet tweet=”One Thing or Another editor’s column: Heaven’s Diner. ” quote=”I wonder how different the world would be if we met in diners instead of on Facebook or through apps designed for brief encounters.”]It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
Mark McNeaseI recently read an article about New York City’s disappearing diner culture. The writer lamented the loss of a sense of community diners gave the city over many decades, falling victim now to ever-rising rents and changing tastes. (The concept of community that takes place outside a smartphone is apparently strange and foreign to many people today.)
This, one day after ending a visit to relatives by having breakfast in a Richmond, Virginia, diner. When we walked into the place I immediately looked around at the colors inside. The exterior, in black and red, had told me I could expect something exceptionally diner-ish. The booths were red and black, the tables yellow. The two waitresses were distinctly post-punk, with tattoos and neon hair. The crowd, as is usually the case in diners, consisted of people who knew each other from years of eating there. Only first names were necessary, if names were needed at all. And each of them – men, women and children – looked as if they’d enjoyed lives filled with grits and hash browns, without a single kale salad from cradle to grave. My kind of people.
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One Thing or Another: Country Mice
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
It’s the morning of the time change, that twice-yearly, incomprehensible turning of the clocks by an hour. We’re told, as if it’s an extra treat for puppies, that we’ll have “another hour to sleep.” This is ridiculous, since most of us inhabit bodies, not clocks, and rather than sleep another hour (something I would relish) we just wake up sooner. So here I am an hour earlier than I would have been yesterday, sitting at my living room desk in the true darkness of the countryside, listening to the few sounds a small, old house in the woods has to offer this time of morning. It’s a house I’ll soon be moving to with my husband and two cats. A house I’ve loved for ten years but only experienced as a weekend getaway. That’s all about to change.
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One Thing or Another: The Joys of Being an Almost Halloween Baby
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.By Mark McNease
It’s that time of year again when all the world celebrates a birth like no other … mine! What’s that saying? ‘60 is the new 55.’
October 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 death is near. 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: Electile Dysfunction
[clickToTweet tweet=”Set for another disheartening, demoralizing “debate” in which both sides will declare victory and everyone loses.” quote=”Yet another disheartening, discouraging, demoralizing “debate” in which both sides will declare victory and everyone loses.”]
By Mark McNeaseIt’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
I’ve always been able to identify the lowest points of my life by an inability to find anything funny. My sense of humor is a remarkably reliable barometer with which to gauge my well-being: The less I’m able to laugh at myself and the world around me, the more I’m in need of immediate therapy. Someone needs to talk me off my ledge of despondency. In those dark times I neither smile nor appreciate the smiles of others. I find them grating, in fact, and may even want to wipe them from people’s faces, gently. But then it passes; the clouds reveal a sun that has always been behind them. I appreciate the phenomenon of consciousness again, and find myself engaged in a world that is generally as marvelous as it is overwhelming.
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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.
