Brand-Shiny-New Old Person Says Hiya

[zeeKintheboX]

I am, in fact, a brand-new person in regard to this forum; I only discovered the podcast yesterday morning & created my forum account about five minutes ago … which I believe meets even the most exacting definition of “new”. However, in the pesky world outside of this particular online community, I am NOT in any sense of the word a “new person”, as I’ve been there for a very long time … next month, in fact, I shall be obliged to face the bewildering fact that I have somehow managed to remain both alive & adequately functional for … (how is this possible?) … FIFTY-FIVE YEARS. Which plants me smack into “late middle age” in the terminology preferred by our youth-obsessed culture, which is just a fancy way of saying “old” … & personally, I have no use for such empty euphemisms - I find the whole situation both amazing & hilarious. FIFTY-FIVE? I was NEVER supposed to live this long … when I was nineteen, the general consensus amongst those who knew me best was that I’d most likely never see my thirtieth birthday … & not even the most optimistic among them would have predicted I’d make it to forty … but I’ve now attended a double handful of those same people’s funerals, & - other than some standard, post-menopausal weight gain & an intermittent, totally ludicrous case of gout in my left foot, my body continues to function without significant deterioration … despite the many terrible things I’ve done to it … but really, it doesn’t matter … my physical age is nothing but an abstract number … unlike my EMOTIONAL age, as I quite sensibly stopped maturing emotionally at the age of nine. So in short, whatever. Gen X rules!!! Now I will shut up & commence lurking. — ZK

[manuel_moe_g]

Howdy ZK, thanks for sharing

I am gen-X too, blows my mind how damn old I am as well, lol

Sorry to hear about the gout in your left foot

All the best, please don’t be shy to share here on the regular

[troebia]

Welcome ZK, we are a few regulars here and seemingly a lot of lurkers At 58 I can relate to a lot you're mentioning.

[zeeKintheboX]

Greetings to you both, & thank you for responding!!! As you have both revealed how old you are, it stands to reason that you are both well aware of how fucking difficult it is to learn certain things - a second language, for instance - when you're already past thirty. I mean, it's of course possible, it's just REALLY, REALLY HARD. MUCH harder than it would have been twenty, or even ten years earlier. I mean, it has nothing to do with intelligence, or attention span, or even diligence ... it's NATURE. & while it might not be obvious at first, mainly due to the fact that the actual WORDS being used to communicate are the SAME as the ones you already know, and moreover, have been quite successfully using to communicate all sorts of things for years & years & years, not long after you first begin to communicate digitally -- that is, in the manner which literally came into existence with the Internet, you will realize, whatever the words you use to describe it, that what you're doing is not merely learning how to use a new sort of technology; you are learning an entirely new language ... a language resembling English (or whatever your native tongue might be) ONLY in that it uses the same vocabulary ... but the underlying rules governing their proper usage are based upon a different method of communication altogether ... & moreover, one which, during the entire pre-internet history of the WORLD, did not even exist.

& that, my friends, is my pseudo-intellectual, totally lame excuse as to why I so seldom respond to things which others have, so kindly, left as a response to ME ... because, in the "old days", we did virtually all of our communicating in real time ... of course, notes & letters EXISTED, but virtually nobody used either medium to communicate unless they literally HAD to. I can only imagine how utterly horrifying it must sound to members of these younger generations hearing about a time in the not-so-distant past when, in order to communicate with another person, you had NO OTHER OPTION other than to literally TALK to them. Either on the phone, or IN PERSON. Real-time, face-to-face interaction with other people was simply something that happened EVERY SINGLE DAY, & during real-time conversations, "leaving" a response is, of course, a GIVEN ... your only choices are to either A) respond immediately to anything & everything anyone says to you, or, B) choose NOT to respond ... which, though possible, was considered pretty much universally as blatantly, purposefully RUDE behavior, & thereby TOTALLY unacceptable, socially speaking. Honestly, after twenty years of enjoying the luxury of ignoring text messages, failing to check my email for DAYS, & reading what others have said in response to something I might have said, then not bothering to leave any sort of reply. Of course, I tell myself that the reason I don't leave a reply is because I have nothing to say ... that is, nothing substantial, or containing new information ... nothing, that is, that would advance "the plot". But what ever happened to common courtesy? Of course, nobody expects an online conversation to end with a semantically-null dance of pleasantries which, in real-time conversation, serve the purpose of communicating in a socially acceptable fashion that the interaction in question is now coming to a mutually agreeable conclusion according to the rules governing such things, and therefore minimizing the possibility of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, & so forth. You couldn't do that on a message board - it would take forever & be REALLY, REALLY ANNOYING. But if we were to be honest, wouldn't we have to admit that we really DO like it when somebody responds to our online post? Doesn't just seeing that somebody has said something -- even before you read it or even know who it was -- cause your brain to grant you just a wee little jolt of dopamine? AHHH ... precious, precious dopamine ... but I digress. In my usual, verbose fashion, I have used many, many more words than necessary to communicate something ... something which, ironically, is not actually made up of words at all ... as the only thing all of these words are meant to communicate is the knowledge that your post has received a response. I RESPOND TO YOU (both of you).

I hope that got you some dopamine.

ZK

[Mental Fairy]

Oh I loved that post, gave me a perk up for the day.
How beautiful it used to be when a letter was posted or received. The time in between the actual posting and hearing the response was a continuous buzz in the back of the brain.
However, I am endlessly grateful for this forum as many people on here have helped pick me back up again. This sounds odd but as age progresses I feel more grateful, I guess having lost my twin to the other unknown side I always feel like the lucky one in a way. I also feel deeply sad at times, currently fighting that with a mental axe. I was doing some work on my mums teeth today and was grateful for having the skills to do so. Not many mums can do that.

Please post again, your a gem.