Aging – Page 62 – Auxiliary Memory

Movies for Old Men

I can only remember my father going to one movie, in 1958 when I was six, when the whole family went to see Snowfire. My wife’s father always bragged the last theater movie he saw was Fiddler on the Roof in 1971. A neighbor who is one year older than me, claims the last movie he saw at the theater was Animal House in 1978. My two closest male friends quit going to movies long ago, but I don’t know when. The only reason I still go out to the movies is because of lady friends. I do know some males my age that still love getting out to see a movie, but not many. Yesterday I went with my friend Janis to see Godzilla – her pick – and I was bored the whole time, even though the young people seated around me were cheering. The most fun I had was looking at all the odd names as the credits rolled by.

Many of my lady friends love action blockbuster flicks, the kind I used to think were targeted to teenage boys. The whole world seems to love superhero movies based on comic books. Maybe I’ve morphed into a curmudgeon, because those movies seem downright stupid to me, with grown men pretending to fight each other with choreographed violence that’s as realistic as a Three Stooges slap fest while wearing embarrassing costumes that only a seven year old kid would wear in real life, and then only on Halloween. And don’t get me started on the psychological appeal of flicks like The Expendables series. Our society has gone gonzo for guns. And it’s not that I’m anti-gun. My favorite movie genre is the western—a Colt .44 and a Winchester is all the firepower I think anyone should need. But I get the feeling everyone is scared and paranoid and feed off action pictures because they feel powerless and wish they had super powers, bulging muscles and very large caliber machine guns to protect themselves.

Janis and I also went to see Chef this weekend. Now that was a good movie for an old man. It was a touching story about a divorced dad getting to know his young son that he’d been neglecting because of work. Jon Favreau plays a creative chef, Carl Casper, stuck in job cooking the same menu for ten years. Carl gets in a internet feud with Oliver Platt, who plays Ramsey Michel, a vicious food critic blogger. Carl bonds with his son Percy, played by Emjay Anthony, who teaches his dad about Twitter. Then Carl inspires Percy to learn to cook. Slowly the film becomes emotional rewarding, and a film worth watching by an old guy. The theater I saw Chef at was small, but most the seats were filled with older people, and some of them even clapped at the end. I’m not sure young people would have liked this film, but I doubt we’ll know, because it’s not the kind they’ll go see. No guns, no car chases, no buff bods, no Wile E. Coyote violence.

This afternoon I plan to go see Belle with three lady friends. Even if I wasn’t hanging out with women, I’d want to see this one. As an old guy, a well done historical film is actually a type of movie that makes me want to go out to the movies. The older I get the more I like realism. I prefer documentaries, or very accurate historical dramas. You’d think it would be the other way around. That young people would crave realistic movies to learn about life, and old people would want escapist fantasies. Maybe I’ve given up on escapist fantasies because the older I get the less reason I believe that they will ever come true. Even if I owned a whole arsenal of weapons and an elegant collection of spandex attire, and even had real bulging muscles to stretch out my costumes, I could never be a superhero. It’s about as realistic as trying to fantasize that beautiful young women would want to have sex with my ugly old body.

But I can relate to a clueless dad learning to Twitter from a ten year old.

JWH 5/26/14

Does An Organized Desk Mean An Organized Mind?

Recently I read “10 Things Organized People Do Every Day” by Jordana Jaffe at MindBodyGreen. Jaffe is the founder of Embarkability, and her ten simple habits about being organized seem very practical and real. I hope she doesn’t mind that I quote the ten for those people too lazy to go read her article with explanations. They are:

They plan each day the night before.
They have and keep only one to-do list.
They spend at least 30 minutes going through and addressing emails in their email inbox.
They clear their desk of paper piles.
They have a morning routine and an evening ritual.
They spend 10 minutes at the end of each day tidying up.
They put their clothing in the laundry bin.
They never leave dishes in the sink.
They carve out time for lunch.
They open up their mail.

The ten truly resonates with my cluttered lifestyle, so I feel maybe she’s right.

I guess this is why I’m not a successful entrepreneur. I do eat lunch every day, mainly because going without would be painful. And I’m pretty good about putting my dirty clothes in the proper bins. But I’m pretty bad about the rest, especially opening mail, processing email, and leaving piles of paper on my desks. To pat myself on the back a little, some days, not most, but some, I put the dishes right into the dish washer after eating. I keep trying to-do lists and failing, and I’ve often tried to develop morning and before bed planning times. Unfortunately, I always drift back into unorganized chaos.

My scientific question is: If I faithfully make these ten routines into regular habits will it change my brain so I’m an organized person? People seeing the way I work and live will not believe this, but for my whole life, I’ve wished I could have an organized person with an orderly desk. Jaffe tells us organized people follow these habits, but I’m not sure if changing my bad habits into good ones would transform my brain and make me into an organized person. It’s an interesting experiment to consider.

However, looking at the piles of unopened mail, magazines, forms, warranties, etc. sitting on my desk, and checking that my email inbox has 2,054 messages, makes me think it might take a while to get my neurons to dance a different jig. I think I’ll try, and I’ll even tell my wife and lady friends to nag me thoroughly, which they love to do, and I start testing this hypothesis.

I wonder how many days of following these ten habits will it take to rewire my brain?

JWH – 5/20/14

Living Life As It Happens Versus Making Dreams Comes True

Do you measure happiness by the number of dreams you’ve made come true, or by accepting life as it comes to you? It’s very hard to control reality. If your whim is to go to the movies, that’s not to hard to make real. But if your whim is to travel to Europe, that requires a lot of effort to make into a reality. If your dream is to become a Nobel Prize winning scientist, then you’re moving into the world of chance, no matter how hard you work.

Recently, my wife and I were talking about our regrets, and things we wished we had done when we were young. We are both lazy, and neither one of us have strong motivational drives. I said it’s a shame we didn’t do more when we were young, but maybe we did the things we really wanted to do, like watch TV, go to the movies, play with our cats, hang out with friends and family, read books, and so on – just ordinary everyday things.

Our friend Olivia has been on hundreds of vacations, while Susan and I have probably been on less than 50 each in our whole life. If you measure success in life by where you’ve been, then we have little. We know many people with beautifully decorated homes that we envy, but our house has the couch potato décor of two TV watching experts. We’ve met rich and successful people, and by those yardsticks we come up short too. But have they read the thousands of books I have? I’m a bookworm, so I live to read.

If success in life is measured by making fantasies come true, we haven’t done very well. The trouble is I have at least a dozen good fantasies a day – that’s about a quarter million daydreams in my lifetime. Which ones should I have made come true? You see, I think our society is too bamboozled by desires.

Because of television we see how millions of other people live and we think we should have their lives too. If we see someone go to Colorado for a ski trip we feel bad if we can’t too. If we know someone with a Porsche we feel bad we don’t have an high performance sports car too. Susan’s brother and wife are going on their second trip to Europe, and Susan probably feels bad we’ve never had our first.

Me, I feel I go to Europe all the time. The two books I’m currently listening to are from Russia and England. The last movie I watched from Netflix was French. I regularly read The Guardian. I watch a lot of TV from England, read a lot of books by European authors, and regularly read histories about Europe. I love European painters, and have seen many of their great work here in traveling exhibits. I’m studying classical music, most of which has European origins. In high school I studied German, and in college Spanish. And I can’t count how many documentaries I’ve seen on European history, art and science. I once started an internet business with a guy from Paris. It’s not like I don’t know about the place, I’ve just never been there. I’m fascinated by Western civilization, but have little desire to see the relics, and if I did, the main reason would be to see the paintings. Most of what I actually like about Europe is in books and music, which transcends space and time.

One of the things I realized from my discussion with Susan was that I live in my head, and I think most people don’t. To Susan and most of my friends, the real world is where they can see, hear, touch, smell and taste external to their bodies. Success is measured by experience or accumulation.

I live in a different world. I think life is philosophical, and you live it as it happens. Success is measured by how well you digest it. It’s not what you see, but how you see it. It’s not what you earn, but how you earn it. It’s not who you know, but how you know each other.

What’s funny, is by my method of measuring, or theirs, no matter how much external or internal success you find, it’s never enough. If you don’t die with regrets, then you never looked very far.

JWH – 4/19/14

Focus–Finding My Flow

I’ve always been too lazy to be successful. My ambitions have always been greater than my ability to focus, so I’ve lived a life of quiet desperation (for those of you who remember your Thoreau). The constant rationalization throughout my adult life was I had to work and thus didn’t have the time and energy to pursue those ambitions. Of course that’s bullshit. Successful people always find the time to pursue their dreams no matter what situation they find themselves. And now that I’m retired and have all my time free, I have no rationalization to protect myself from my own crapola.

A song to play in background while reading this essay.

What’s required to be successful at any goal is focus. People who can concentrate to the point of getting into the zone and finding their flow have a much better chance at being successful. However, relentless focus isn’t the only answer, many people on the autistic spectrum can focus obsessively, and just ordinary people with decent hobbies can find flow for escaping reality. Success is focus, 10,000 hours of practice, and a creative awareness of the past with the ability to imagine something new and different. Of these three qualities, I believe I have little of the first, a fair amount of the second, and quite a bit of the third.

My will is flabby, but my ego is buffed. (I’m sure all us Walter Mittys can say the same.)

An astrologer once told me that there are two kinds of people – those who create and those who consume. I’ve spent my life consuming thousands and thousands of books, documentaries, essays, stories, songs, movies, television shows, and so on. This is my 765th essay for this WordPress blog. In my life I’m sure I’ve written over a thousand essays. That’s a long way towards my ten thousand hours of practice. I’ve been working on both fiction and nonfiction books, but I can’t focus enough to stick with them. I can write these little short blog essays, but that’s about as far as my mind can focus. To break through my concentration barrier will require changing myself quite a bit. I don’t even know if that’s possible.

Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows I’ve written this essay before. I write essays like this one to talk myself into changing, but I never do. At age 62, change does not come easy. I’m a man who loves his rut, so it’s odd for me to even desire change. But I’ve known all my life that if I want to succeed with my writing goals I have to change. I assume I never will, because I never have, but the desire to write a book never changes either. It’s an odd Catch-22. And the funny thing is I know exactly what I must do. I must give up all my distractions and focus on a single goal.

Like many times before, I have to tell about the parable of Destination Moon, a movie made in 1950 about the first trip to the Moon. Like Neil Armstrong nineteen years later, these movie astronauts had to do some last minute maneuvering when they went to land, but unfortunately they used too much of their fuel. They landed okay, but didn’t have enough propellant to take off. Eventually one of the scientists figures out if they jettison enough weight they’d have enough fuel for the return trip. They had to throw out all their collected samples, their scientific equipment, their radio, all the unnecessary rocket control instruments, even their space suits. Getting back to Earth was an all or nothing gamble. That’s how it is with ambition – you have to jettison all the extra weight to be light enough to take off.

There are writers who published bestsellers by getting up two hours early and writing before they have to hit their nine-to-five job. I never could do that. I never could eat just two cookies. It was always all or nothing with me. When I read books like The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin that took seven years to write, or The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson which took ten, I realize what it means to be a writer, you have to be dedicated in a way that most normal people never can be. Wilkerson interviewed 1,200 people. And the source material Goodwin had to read would have taken me more than seven years just to read.

It’s easy to fantasize about doing something, it’s hard to actually do it. That’s because success takes unswerving focus. Last night instead of watching Nature, Survivor, Nova, Nashville and part of The Glass Bottom Boat with Doris Day, I should have been writing, or at least researching. Yesterday afternoon instead of reading News360 and listening to music, I should have been writing. Instead of reading Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, I should have been researching.

Sometimes I wish I could just commit to four hours of dedicated work, say from 9am to 1pm. But I can point to two of my recent blog posts that show you how distracted I am: “Reading: A Compulsion, An Addiction, Or Obsession?” and “Too Many Distractions While Running in a Thousand Different Directions.”

Now that I’m retired, and have all my time free, it’s all too obvious just how little discipline I have. The momentum of my life feels like I’m the Titanic and I see the iceberg, but to change course with all this momentum behind me is impossible. If I could ever write my first book in my sixties, I’d be the poster geezer for late bloomers. I still have hope though. Even the tiniest course changes can affect the destination of a big ship hundreds of miles out.

I figure if I keep writing these essays nagging myself to change, I just might.

[By the way, did you get the ironic humor of the song?]

JWH – 3/27/14

Will I Be Left in the Tech Dust If I Don’t Own A Smartphone?

I’ve been using computers since 1971. Mainframes, minicomputers and microcomputers – labels that have long since disappeared. I got my first personal computer in 1979. I used FTP, Usenet, Gopher, email, years before the web, and remember being blown away when Mosaic came out in 1993. I spent a lot of money on computer and gadgets over the years, but for some reason I don’t want to buy a smartphone. Oh, I’d love to have a smartphone – I just don’t want the monthly bill. And since nearly everyone else is becoming a smartphone user, will this leave me in the tech dust?

I have a poor man’s smartphone, the iPod touch and a pay-as-you-go dumbphone. It essentially does most of what a smartphone does, and I only spend $50 every six months for 500 minutes. I also have an iPad 2 and a Nexus 5. I’m not totally out of it, but when I read Engadget I feel like I’m at a black tie party wearing a sports jacket and jeans, and even those are getting threadbare and moth eaten.

Now I’m reading about smart watches. Pass. Google glasses. Pass. Have I gotten too old to compute?

I am cheap, but then I’m retired. I now spend about 99% of my time at home, so mobile devices just don’t have a compelling sell to me. Yet, all the tech glamor is now in mobile devices. I do use mobile apps on my Nexus 7, but I’d much prefer using most of them on my 23” monitor.

Is the bleeding edge of tech savvy now limited to on-the-go computing? Am I joining the ranks of the cyber-Amish by not owning a smartphone. Am I less of a geek for not wanting the latest smartphone every year?

Getting old is getting old, so I must accept that young people are going to do and know things I don’t. BFD. I’m not whining, but since I’ve retired I realized, more and more, I’m cutting myself off from the mainstream of people. I’ve always done this. Being a gluten-free vegetarian atheist has a way of isolating me from normal life. Being a computer geek is something I’ve always identified with, so is choosing not to follow the cutting edge of tech another way to isolate myself? (I can hear my friend Annie growling at me, “Hell yes, you moron.”)

This reminds me of a friend who died about twenty years ago. He had become so negative about life that he only like two things, Duane Allman’s guitar playing, and Benny Goodman’s clarinet playing. Luckily I still love hundreds of things, but I’m starting to realize that list is shrinking. Is that another way of defining aging – that you list of likes shrinks?

There another way of looking at though. One I feel is more positive! As we get older we juggle more balls, or spin more plates. Remember those guys on Ed Sullivan that would keep plates spinning on sticks? Back then, we called life “the 9 to 5 rat race.” As we grew up we learned to spin more plates. At some point in your life you realize that keeping all those plates spinning is a lot of damn work. Then you go all Zen dog and start spinning fewer plates. Retiring is moving into those years when you spin fewer and fewer plates. And the positive spin I mentioned? Well, you enjoy life more because you just keep the things you love most in motion.

JWH – 2/25/14