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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?
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One Thing or Another: A Word On Forgetting, Before I Forget
One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
You’ve had this conversation before, probably recently: Your co-worker, family member or friend asks you some variation of the question, “Did you wash my bowl in the sink?” (Or, did you take my pen, my keys, my cell phone, or some other object I swear had been where it is not now.) Even more alarming, you may be the one initiating this exchange and unable to remember something you’d done just ten minutes ago. If you’re forty, you probably dismiss it as a consequence of distraction. If you’re fifty, you shrug it off as forgetfulness. But if you’re fifty-six (my age), or older, you hear the little voice in your head whispering, “Early onset! Early onset!”
You don’t know exactly what is hitting you earlier than expected, but you’re convinced this is the beginning of the end of your ability to remember anything. You head to the drugstore for a bottle of Gingko Biloba, which you will forget to take. You look online for various illnesses that affect memory, wondering if any of them is the cause of your not remembering washing that bowl (with special dread reserved for Alzheimer’s). You take up crossword puzzles or Sudoku. You leave sticky notes to remind yourself of anything more significant than a trip to the bathroom, and you pray it’s a temporary lapse because the alternative is terrifying.
