Retirement-Trading Money for Time

I’ll be 62 in November and I want to retire soon after that.  I don’t know if that’s prudent, because waiting until I’m 66 would get me a lot more money, but it’s what I want.  My friends Mike and Connell have always been industrious ants to my carefree grasshopper self.  Both have been tight with their money, never spending much, always saving and investing.  I didn’t start saving until late in life, but luckily I’ve been working for the state of Tennessee for over 35 years and have a pension coming.  Enough to live on if I spend wisely, something I’ve never done. 

Living like a grasshopper is possible before retirement, but after retirement its an ant’s life for sure.  I’ve got to learn to pinch pennies and that’s going to be a new lifestyle for me.  CouponBug here I come.  I expect those old adages like a penny saved is a penny earned, or waste not, want not, will become way more meaningful after my retirement.  

If I can’t change my spending habits this year, it’s probably a sign I shouldn’t retire.  Soon a fixed income will become a reality.  What they really should call it is a fractional income.  The fraction I must embrace is 6/10th.   Every month this year I need to prove my retirement worthiness by only spending 60% of what I normally spend.  Luckily, since Susan started working in Birmingham, I’ve been learning to cut expenses.  I think I’m close already, I just need to fine tune my penny pinching ways.

The trouble the 40% has to mainly come from causal fun expenditures, like eating out, cable TV,  buying tons of books and music, going to movies and plays, buying gadgets and computers, etc.  I could save hundreds a month if we sold the house and I got an apartment.  Susan works out of town and has her own apartment, but I live in house she grew up in that we bought after her parents died.  The cheapest way for me to live would be to sell the house and move to Birmingham, but I don’t want to do that because I have so many friends here.

When I look at my credit card statement it has lots of unnecessary charges.  Charges for stuff I can’t be buying after I retire.  If I was like Mike and Connell, I would have never developed such bad spending habits.  They’ve been telling me this for decades, I’ve just haven’t listened.  It’s amazing how much stuff we buy that we don’t need.  Or how much stuff we pay too much for, or how much stuff we just plain waste.  I buy $6 worth of grapes, but I let $3 worth go bad.

A word to the young, from a guy who didn’t listen.  Every dollar you spend now is a dollar you won’t have in the future.  Well, I never listened to that kind of talk either, but I guess every essay needs a message.

Essentially what I’m doing is trading money for time.  I’ve always wanted more time, here’s my chance.  Luckily I’ve never been one of those people who wanted to retire and travel the world and lead the good life.  I won’t have the money for that.  What I want is time to read and write,  I want to listen to music and write fun computer programs.  I want to systematically study the history of science and literature.  Maybe I’ll learn to play the guitar, but I always say that, and never do.

I’ve got 500 hardback books waiting to read, and 200 audio books queued up to be listened to.  I’ve got several novels, and hundreds of essays and short stories I want to write.

I want to spend a lot of time just snoozing and napping.  I actually want to read all those cool websites and blogs I’ve been bookmarking, and watch all those movies and documentaries in my Netflix queue.  Awhile back I bought the complete run of The Rolling Stone magazine on DVD.  I’d like to read all the record reviews and listen to those albums on Rdio.  Awhile back I bought a DVD of all the “Amateur Scientist” columns from Scientific American.  I’d love to go through them and do some of the experiments.  I want to program a time-line database.  I want to learnt to program in Python and write programs that teach me math.  I’d like to build my own super computer (by year 2000 standards) for modeling visual data.

I’m Henry Bemis and I finally have time enough at last.  I just hope my glasses don’t break.

Now this paradise of time is going to cost me.   Eating out for convenience won’t be practical.  Spending money to go out to a play or movie just to spend two hours with a friend will be wasteful.  Buying a new tablet or computer because it’s new and different will be an insane act.  I have four computers, an iPad, two Kindles and an iPod touch.  That’s a kind of CPU luxury will be silly in the future. 

I now buy 10 books for every one I read.  After I retire, I need to read 9 books for every one I buy.  I need to become a library patron again.

I’ve been living without cable for a couple years now.  For the price of Netflix and Hulu I have more great TV to watch than I can cram into a lifetime of 24×7 couch potato living. 

Many people I know have dropped their land lines and switched to a smart phone.  I’ve kept my land line and use a dumb cell phone that costs me about $8 a month.  My 12 year old truck just passed 71,000 miles, so I figure I can drive it another 20 years.  Susan began working out of town five years ago and I started cost cutting then, but now I’ve got to get deadly serious about not spending money if I want to live without working.

And in a way that’s such a weird concept, to live without working.  I’ve been working for four decades.  Will retirement be like my growing up years?  Or will I be growing down?

There’s more to preparing for retirement than just living cheap.  Work has always been a major social outlet, so I’ll need to psyche myself up for spending a lot more time alone.  Less money and fewer friends maybe, but hopefully do more with those fewer people, a lot more.  Most of my socializing costs money.  I need to invite people over.  I need to learn to cook for people and plan inexpensive activities at home.  Oh yeah, that means I need to learn how to cook and host parties.

My friend Peggy who recently retired says her problem is time management.  She says she never gets anything done because she always feels she has all the time in the world.  I hope that doesn’t happen to me.  Of course, I might be fooling myself.

That’s the thing about planning for retirement, you really don’t know what it will be like until after you retire.  Wouldn’t it be funny that I’ll finally get to give up the old 9-to-5 and then discover I was one of those guys who was happiest working until they died?  I don’t think I will be.  All the people I know that have retired have said retiring has been the best thing in their life and they are busier now than ever before.

JWH – 1/21/13

The Circle of Life–Coming Back to Where We Started

My sister Becky once remarked that we started off life living pretty much in one room, and then we spread into several rooms as we become toddlers, and then out of the house as we become kids, then off to school to find our group friends, and slowly we travel further and further from home, making more and more friends, but then as we get older, we travel less, and we start having fewer friends, and then we start staying in our house all the time, and finally we end up in one room again.

If you live long enough you end up back in a crib with people changing your diapers.

My friend Peggy has started hanging out with other people in their sixties, at a dance club that’s a lot like a high school hangout.  Her friends have created a new subculture around old tunes and dances they learned in their teens. 

Many older people I know have begun reconnecting with childhood friends and schoolmates through Facebook.  We have an urge to return to friendship groups like we had in K-12.

Nostalgia means returning home.  I’ve reached an age when my peers look backwards.

I’ve also noticed something else about getting older – people want less from life.  Back in high school and college we all had such big ambitions about what we wanted to do when we grew up.  Now we want less and less.  We want to retire.  We often return to the hobbies we loved while growing up.

I’m reading books and watching television with the same passion I had in junior high.  And my passion for new music is much like I felt for music in the 1960s.  I listen to it alone in my room just like I did in 1965, and find the same immense pleasure  I once did.  Somehow I didn’t pass back through the phase of listening in groups of friends getting stoned.

I do feel somewhat different from other friends my own age – I like new music, and they dwell on the oldies, or stuff that sounds like it could have been on the charts in 1961-1969.  I know this will sound sacrilegious, but listening to The Killers at the moment is more meaningful than replaying The Buffalo Springfield.  I don’t think none of us are the same, or can become who we were, but so many of us are swimming towards the past like lemmings.

My older friends divide into two distinct groups:  those with children and those without.  The ones with children and grand children follow a different circle of life than those childless.  When I talk to friends with children, our conversations often remind me of talking to my parents and grandparents.  Talking to my friends without kids, often feels like we’re still back in tenth grade.

My wife Susan, and some of my other lady friends have gotten into watching TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s again.  I think we all are drawn to different aspects of the past we loved so dearly.  Or does watching old shows just recreate old feelings?

In my book clubs, we often talk about our favorite books, movies and TV shows from childhood.  All of us Baby boomers have commonality even though we’re all extremely different.  We will relive the 1960s one day at a time, each a 50th anniversary.

And getting old means becoming weak again like a child.  I can no longer lift and do things I once did.  Eventually we’ll get too old to drive, and finally we’ll get too old to even take care of ourselves.  Dementia and Alzheimer’s is like evolving mentally backwards.

Even sex seems to diminish, like we’re returning to a kind of re-virginal state.

It’s also hard to befriend people in a different part of the circle of life.  When we’re kids we play with other kids, when we’re teens, we hang out in gangs of teenagers, when we move away from home, we hang out with other single people, when we get married we hang out with other married people, when we have kids, we hang out with other people with kids.

I’m not old yet, but I already feel the urge to fly south to live in a 55 Plus community.

Should I fight this urge?  Or should I just go with the flow?  Do I have a choice?

If you’re around my age, 60, are you feeling this too?

JWH – 10/8/12

Are We Living Through an Economic Paradigm Shift?

 

Because of the economic crisis of the last two years, people and businesses are cutting back on their spending.  Our economy is based on consumer spending and I’m now talking to a lot of people who have sworn off spending like the used to when they lived heavily in debt.  On the news there are reports of companies sitting on large cash reserves.  Some economists had hoped the economy would have already turned around but consumer spending and jobs don’t reflect that.  In Detroit, the Big Three automakers are out of the red ink and into the black  by being leaner and meaner.  They are making more money selling fewer cars.

The economic booms of the past twenty-five years all coincided with an overheated economy of people spending beyond their means and investors going crazy over unwise investments.  Could we be moving into an era of caution?  In previous busts we turned the economy around fast by going back to spending freely, but we don’t seem to be doing that this time.

I notice a lot of things that might point to different trends.  Something like 80 million baby boomers are approaching retirement and they are finally realizing it’s time to save and not spend.  I know that’s how I feel.  But also, after a big economic crisis people fear insecurity and want to hang onto their dollars.  Remember how the Depression era people lived for the rest of their lives?  That generation was shocked by the easy spending of the Baby Boom generation.

The younger generations out there now live a lot more frugally than the Baby Boomers.  They often live with their parents longer, and they learn to adapt to lower paying jobs.  And they are heavily into credit card and school loan debt, so they don’t have the resources to spend freely.

The rising cost of living have made the retired generations living on fixed incomes already cautious about spending, and now that they lost a lot of their retirement capital they have to make every dollar go twice as far.

But there are other clues lying around too.  When the economic crisis hit, television, newspapers and magazines were flooded with advice on how to live with less and I think a lot of people took up this advice and now like living with less.  The most popular story at the New York Times at the moment is “But Will It Make You Happy?” about people who have downsized their life to find more happiness.  Psychologists are telling people owning things won’t make you happy, it’s what you do that does.  If this modern Thoreau like philosophy catches on it will put a huge dent into the economy.

Logic tells us if everyone lived by the best popular advice, saving money, spending wisely, eating well, this would be a tremendous shock to the economy.  To have 5% unemployment our economy has to run hot with overspending.

And look what the Internet has done to the economy.  Before the Internet there were many music stores in every city selling CDs, now they are practically gone.  People use to spend hundreds of dollars each month on their cable bills and now people are happy with Netflix.  People use to spend big bucks on software and now they want free open source programs.  Amazon is putting local bookstores out of business by underselling them, and now with Kindle, they are putting an even bigger hurt on them.  I pay Rhapsody $9.99 a month to listen to all the music I want, where I used to spend $100-200 a month on CDs.

My wife and I have always bought new cars, but we’re thinking about buying used next time because the cost of an average new car has gotten so high.

We try to spend when we can because we know it helps the economy, but we want to spend wisely, like house renovations, and we also try to buy new products that are energy saving.  The whole ecological movement is also making people spend less.

In the news pundits talk about a “New Normal” for the economy because things are not turning around quickly like economists expected.  It’s pretty obvious if we want the “Old Normal” we need to act like we did then and we’re not.  Maybe young people will, but I’m getting too close to retirement to spend without caution.  My new normal is to hang onto every buck I can, and when I spend a buck make it count.

The only solution for the government to counter this new normal is to spend like crazy to put people to work.  The New York Times is also running a story, “Defying Others, Germany Finds Economic Success.”  Germany took a different route out of the economic crisis and it appears to have paid off.  Beside spending wisely, they think they found a solution for unemployment.

Government officials here are confident they found the right approach, including a better solution to unemployment. They extended the “Kurzarbeit” or “short work” program to encourage companies to furlough workers or give them fewer hours instead of firing them, making up lost wages out of a fund filled in good times through payroll deductions and company contributions.

In my naive way, I’ve always wondered in bad economic times that instead of laying off ten percent of the population, why not just cut everyone’s pay by ten percent.  Then in boom times, pay people more.  It sounds like Germany is trying something like that and its working.

I’m not an economist, nor do I like watching all the talking heads on TV talk about the economy.  But like Bob Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.  If we’re living in a new economic paradigm, then we might need to be patient.  Blaming the Democrats or the Republicans is pointless.  We need to break the old political and economic cycles.  The federal government should spend money on improving America.  That will create value worthy jobs. 

The improvements should be ones that the majority want.  What kind of infrastructure do we want?  We should reevaluate war spending.  Is there a cheaper way to fight terrorism?  Does illegal immigration help or hurt the economy?  I have no idea.  Does universal health care help or hurt the economy?  If we did away with Social Security and Medicare, millions would be put out of work, and most families would have to spend their savings taking care of their aging parents.  I think it’s pretty obvious that killing off these entitlement programs would devastate the economy and make everyone poorer.

We need to rethink common assumptions.  Is big government bad?   Would paying less taxes stimulate the economy?  I’m not so sure.  The federal government produces a lot of jobs, and those people who hold them spend a lot of money that create more jobs.  We know it’s impractical for everyone to work for the government.  We just need to know which jobs are best created from tax dollars and which jobs are best created from business dollars.

K-12 teachers, police, fire fighters and soldiers have traditionally come from tax dollars.  And it’s pretty obvious we have a lot more health care workers if they come from the tax dollar too.  Although it might be interesting to take a state, maybe Texas or Alaska, since they are so conservative, and do away with all civil servants and see what happens.  Would life be better if every road you drove was a toll road, and if you wanted teachers for your kids, you hired them yourself, and if you wanted protection from criminals you carried your own gun?

I’m just thinking out loud.  I’m predicting the economic recovery will take much longer than expected because new kinds of jobs need to be created.  I don’t think Republicans will bring about instant change in the new elections.  I’m guessing the economy will stay painful for a long time and that pain will shape a new economy.  Global warming started decades ago and it’s already shaping a new economy.  Over population started long ago too and the current illegal immigration patterns almost follow the laws of physics.  The same physical laws will explain the never ending melting pot of ethnic diversity.

The world’s population has doubled in my lifetime.  That’s bound to make a paradigm shift.  Too many conservatives want things the way they were when the population was half of what it is now.  That’s not possible.   We need to prepare for an economy with several billion more people, in an era of growing scarcity, and whacked out weather.  There’s no going backwards.  If we returned to the overheated economics of before we’ll never solve the global warming problem.  As it is, we’re like a bottle full of ants and mother nature is starting to shake that bottle vigorously.  It’s time to do everything we can to slow down and live cautiously.

JWH – 8/15/10

What I Want To Be When I Get Old

I’ve picked twelve areas of knowledge to pursue in the last third of life.  It’s a conscious effort to organize my thoughts and actions.  Twelve specialties sounds like too many, but I’ve selected them like building blocks to work together as a whole.  Essentially what I have done is analyze what I’ve been doing for years unconsciously and state them here publicly to make them clear to me.  The pains of aging remind me of my limited time left on Earth and inspire me to change.  What I’m really doing is deciding what I want to be when I get old.  

Areas of knowledge might sound too lofty.  I could say I have twelve self-improvement topics I want to study, or even call them twelve goals for going the distance.  We do not have the language to express ideas of self-programming.  I’ve always loved John Lily’s book title Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, but sadly the book is about a great scientist going off the deep end with hallucinatory drugs and sensory deprivation.  But I digress.  Self-improvement is a vast topic for the publishing industry but has a poor connotation, but that phrase might come closest to my task.

I am a fat, lazy, late middle-aged man who has tumbled through life like big rolling weed acquiring random knowledge and wisdom through undisciplined osmosis.  Since I’m a programmer and work with computers, I think with cyber concepts, so picture an old PC that’s been running Windows XP for years.  This dusty old machine takes forever to boot up, and runs  slower and slower each day.  It’s time for a tune-up!  I want to delete all the clutter and crapware, cleanse the registry, run malware utilities, uninstall all the programs I don’t use, and decide on which programs are the most productive to keep.  I’m realistic.  I don’t expect to suddenly become a new Intel i7 machine running Windows 7, but I can make the old hardware run much more efficiently.

When we are young we have great ambitions about growing up.  We want to be somebody special and find the perfect mate.  During our middle years we expand our ambitions, seeking security, wealth and success.  But for the last third of life our goal is retirement, where we reduce our workloads and seek simple pleasures.  I say bullshit to that.  Maybe it’s because I didn’t find the success I wanted in youth and middle age that I hold out hope for an ambitious last third of life.

I’m not worried about the outward appearance of aging, the wrinkles, baldness, age spots or hobbled gait, what I’ve discovered that’s hard to see as a young person, is getting old is a state of mind that deals with wearing out mentally.  Avoiding pain, illness and injury becomes a relentless occupation.  My daily pains are minor compared to what I’ve seen in others, but the decline in health I’ve experience so far is wonderfully educational.  So for my first study goal is pretty obvious, and probably universal.

1. Maximize Health

I don’t need to become an authority or expert on this subject, but I do require major studying and practice.  Hell, I know the basics, eat right and exercise. Where I need to specialize is in the discipline of of mind over matter, or more precisely, mind over body.  I could greatly improve both the quality and quantity of my sunset years if I could lose weight.  I’ve been slowly gaining weight since my late twenties, and the only time I was actually able to lose poundage was due to illness, not a practical long term solution.  Of course, the secret to weight loss is knowledge many have sought and few have found.  I need to study books about the mind, and maybe even woo-woo subjects like yoga, meditation and will power.  This is one subject I wished I had mastered in childhood and practiced lifelong.

2. Enlightened Citizenship

I wanted to become an expert in green living, but I’ve decided that focus is too narrow.  I am deeply disturbed by partisan politics and our lack of will to make tough decisions about all our problems.  I believe in social democracy; we vote daily on countless issues with our every decision.  I am reading The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong and I’m reminded of her description of how the ancient Chinese practiced their religion.  Instead of being concerned with invisible gods and abstract concepts of the sacred, these people sought perfection by improving the simple acts of everyday life.  In other words, how you clean your house is more spiritual than religious rituals you embrace. 

3. XHTML/CSS/PHP/JavaScript/JQuery/CodeIgniter

After thirteen years of programming in classic ASP  I need to learn a whole new suite of programming languages and tools.  This is putting me way out of my comfort zone, but it’s my chance to prove that an old dog can learn new tricks.

4. Internet Living

I’ve been living on the net since the mid-80s with BBSes, Genie, CompuServe and Prodigy.  I’ve embraced digital life.  I’m fascinated by it’s potential.  I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet, so I want to explore all the emerging possibilities and even write about what will happen in the future.

5.  Clear Writing

I want to be a much better writer.  I love blogging, but I want to go beyond dumping out my thoughts.  I’m a wordy bastard that can’t structure an essay, much less a book.  I need to remove the clutter from my sentences and learn to assemble  paragraphs into larger structures that build coherent ideas.  I’m best at 500-1,000 words, but I want to write larger essays and even a book.

6.  Techniques of Fiction

I’ve been trying to write fiction since a high school creative writing class.  Like my failure at dieting, I can’t break through the writing discipline barrier either.  I’ve taken many writing courses and workshops.  At best, I can crank out words, but except for one time in endless tries, I can’t reach the critical mass of fictional fusion.   I need to master the language of fiction in the same way I write a computer program, so the story works without major bugs.

7.  Robot Novel

I’m struggling to write the great American robot novel.  After space travel, time travel, and alien encounters, robots are about the most over-written topic in science fiction.  Yet, I believe I have a fresh idea if I can crank out 100,000 readable words of fiction.  Notice how specializations 5-10 relate?  I’m not going off in twelve different directions, but hope I’m pursuing twelve skills I can integrated into a synergy of effort.

8.  Evolution of Mind

To say anything fictional about robots will require understanding artificial intelligence, and AI has always depended on studies of the mind.  I find my library is full of books on robots, AI, mind and evolution.  I bought all those books because they were individually interesting, but now I’m going to read them as fuel for my novel.  If we are the pinnacle of intelligent life on Earth now, what will occupy that position in a million years?  Or a billion?

9.  Sense of Wonder

I’ve been a reader and scholar of science fiction my whole life.  People who adore science fiction claim its because it generates sense of wonder.  Sense of wonder has been around far longer than science fiction so it can’t claim exclusive rights, but I do believe that science provides a special kind of sense of wonder.  For too long now science fiction has been living off past glories.  It’s time to find new concepts that push our sense of wonder button.

10.  Cosmological Perspective

Our perceived position in the universe has always been very philosophical.  It is very hard to grasp our location in relationship to the rest of reality.  Even the shape of the universe is impossible to fathom.  If we are God’s supreme creation, why are we so small?  And can any religion or philosophy be valid that doesn’t fully incorporate our knowledge of cosmology?

11.  Learning in Old Age

What are the limits of acquiring new knowledge in an old brain?  Could I learn something in my last third years that I wasn’t able to learn in my first third years?  Could I go back and finish Calculus II, or learn to play the guitar?  There is a discipline barrier that I’ve never been able to crash through.  I find my wisdom grows as my body declines, but will I ever be wise enough to overcome the limitations of my body?

12.  Our Existential Relationship with Fiction

We can’t understand reality so we make up stories.  It is impossible to predict the future yet we constantly create fiction to envision what will come.  And I don’t mean science fiction.  These twelve areas of knowledge I am pursing are a fiction.  The odds are I’ll just get older, fatter, suffer more, watch even more television while waiting to die.  I invent fictions about how I will change myself and fight the inevitable.   But that’s my point about programming and metaprogramming in the human biocomputer.  Is life no more than meta-fiction?

* * *

These twelve topics of specialization are ambitious, but I don’t think impossible to achieve.  It will make me a Renaissance (old) man.  And success can be measured across a range of achievement levels.  No one gets out of here alive, so death can’t be considered a failure of life.  I am reminded of the many books I’ve read about Eastern religions where the last third of life is set aside for spiritual pursuits.  At the end of the rat race, wisdom is the only possession worth pursuing.  But I grew up with a Western world mindset.  Reality is a savage land meant to be conquered, not accepted like our friends, the Eastern gurus teach.

Christians love the concept of the eternal soul.  As an atheist I’m not sure souls exist, at least not in the past.  That doesn’t mean we don’t want to fashion our own souls.  That doesn’t mean we aren’t evolving towards creating souls.  Through discipline we program our identities.  Through metaprogramming we program our programming.

JWH – 2/27/10 

Saving Money on Cable TV and Internet

We pay $163 for cable TV and high speed internet service.  That bothers me, because, for every month we pay $163 now, it means one month we won’t have $163 after we retire.  When my wife and I get too old to work and only have a fixed income, we will probably wish for all those frivolous dollars we once spent.

I know quite a number of young people earning little and older people, either retired, or near retirement age, earning little, that have given up cable and/or Internet access.  I’ve also read it’s one of the first bills to cut when families are downsizing because of the economy.  A lot of young people I know never seemed to develop the cable addition that folks my age have acquired.  So they will spend big dollars on cell phones and Internet, but scrimp on TV.  I also know a number of people now that have no cable TV at all.  Others have given up house phones and Internet too.

If you combine the house phone bill, cell phones bills, Internet access and the cable/satellite TV bill, telecommunication becomes a huge piece of the monthly budget pie.  In our household, it’s bigger than the utility bill or car notes we had in the past, second only to the mortgage.  Last night I watch ABC World News, three episodes of Weeds from a Netflix disc, and recorded an old black and white movie off of TCM.   We pay $4 a day for our cable.  Much of what I watch could be had from over-the-air TV or Netflix.

Free TV

I have helped a number of women in their fifties set up digital TV boxes so they could watch free TV.  This is the absolute cheapest way to have TV, but you only get a handful of channels.  Depending on signal, indoor antennas can be easy to use or annoying.  So far I haven’t met anyone wanting to spend the money on an outdoor antenna.  If you’re lucky, you can get ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX and several other digital stations in HD.  This free option does make life much simpler.  And when the antenna works well, I’m very impressed with the quality of the picture.

Free TV + Netflix

Upping the budget to $8.99 a month, you can get a Netflix subscription and see nearly all movies and a good selection of premium cable shows like Big Love, Mad Men and True Blood, but just delayed by several months.  Most cable TV shows now come out on DVD, so if can wait for your favorite shows, you can watch them in order and without commercials.  This offers the best selection for the least money.

Free TV + Netflix + Internet

If you’re willing to budget another $25-50 for DSL or cable Internet, you can expand your options even more.  If you must have the Internet, then this option is a no-brainer.  Trying to find low-cost Internet access is hard.  There are $10 monthly modem services, but they require a house phone, and many people have ditched landlines to save dough.  I have heard it’s possible to get low-cost DSL without local phone service but it’s a difficult option to arrange since AT&T and Baby Bells push bundled services.  And if you crave the Internet, then you usually crave fast Internet, and that’s about $50 a month.

Now, if you have fast Internet, and you’re willing to be a Do-It-Yourselfer, you can buy or build a Home Theater PC.  This gives you a DVR plus access to streaming TV and downloadable video, including high definition videos.  Think of this as free, on-demand, Internet TV.  Hundreds of thousands of people are experimenting with this now, and cable companies are getting worried.  Internet video quality is constantly improving, with HD becoming common.

With free services like Boxee, Miro and Vuze and a HDMI or DVI cable from your laptop or computer to your HD TV, you can develop your own free on-demand TV library or select from a large lineup of streaming network shows. 

Video is quickly becoming the new medium for communicating over the web.  People have been watching video on their computer screens for years, but now people are finding ways to make their computers into set-top boxes connected to their TVs and controlled by remotes, so they can watch TV as God intended, from the comforts of their La-Z-Boy.  

Cable and satellite TV providers are worried that the Internet will soon provide people with all the TV they want and they will be out of business.  You’d think they’d want to offer a better service for less money to compete.  Follow this link to a Google search for many articles about living without cable TV.  A lot of people are doing it.  I like the concept of cable TV, so I won’t be abandoning it just yet, at least not until season 2 of True Blood is finished.  I just want to find ways to bring down the cost of cable, but if I can’t, I’ll consider abandoning it completely.

Cable/Satellite TV “a la carte”

People often wonder why they can’t lower their cable bill by just buying the channels they love to watch.  Most people watch a handful of favorite channels but have to wade through hundreds of TV and other cable services they just don’t want.  I get 200+ channels but probably watch less than 12.

There’s two obstacles to this problem.  One, if people bought only what they wanted, many cable networks would go out of business, so cable providers fight this option.  Second, as long as cable companies must provide analog channels, those stations you get when you plug your cable wire directly into your cable-ready TV and scan the channels, then they can’t sell channels separately.   When cable companies go to 100% digital, a la carte buying will be technically possible.

Right now, a la carte channel buying is not possible, so it’s only a dream option to save money.

My Dream TV and Cable Internet Service

I don’t mind paying for what I want.  I think my current $163 cable/internet bill is too high!  It should be closer to $75.  What I would love is a perfect convergence of TV and Internet.  I want to buy a la carte just the exact TV networks I want, and I want to own my own equipment so I can customize it.  I’d like a Home Theater PC that played and burned DVDs/Blu-Ray discs, was a DVR recorder for 2 terabytes of shows, played all my own digital media, including MP3 songs, JPG photographs and any collected videos I made or bought, plus streamed music and videos from the Internet.  That means my entertainment system would consist of a TV, home theater PC and speakers, all controlled by one remote.  That would simplify my setup greatly, and save electricity.  Right now I have:

• HDTV, with remote
• DVR/cable box with remote
• Receiver with remote
• Media player with remote
• Blu-ray player with remote
• CD/SACD player with remote

My wife bought me a very nice Logitech programmable universal remote, but I never liked it.  Life was so much easier back when I was growing up.  We had one TV, three channels and no remotes.  Life has gotten too complicated.  I dream of living with one remote and no more than 12 fantastic high-definition TV channels with no damn commercials.  Infinite variety could come from Internet TV.  With fewer TV networks, the quality of TV production should go up.  I would get better shows for my time and money.

JWH – 8/14/9

Why Can’t I Play Video Games?

Excitement is turning up all over for the new video game Spore and I’m thinking about buying it.  The trouble is I can’t play video games – at least not modern games.  I could play Space Invaders, PacMan and Galaga back in the arcade days, but for decades now whenever I try to play a popular video game I come to a screeching halt.  It’s like I have a mental block – I literarily have no idea what to do. I guess if I had grown up with video games I’d have a repertoire of gaming skills and it would be intuitive how to start each new game.

Spore seems like just the right kind of game for me since I love evolution and science fiction.  I downloaded and installed with minor difficulty the Spore Creature Creator Trial Edition.  My first stumbling block came when I couldn’t figure out how to launch the program.  It took me awhile to even discover I had a Games area on my Start Menu where the installer put it.  When I finally got the program running I knew enough to know I’m suppose to create a creature, but there are no guidelines as to why and what for.  Do I just add features randomly on a whim?

The same thing happened to me when I bought Civilization, Ages of Empire, Myst, and other trendy games.  They sound wonderful, but when I start them up, I wonder what do I shoot, and how do I avoid being hit.  That’s about all I know.  The last video game I was addicted to was Arkanoid.  Susan, my wife, age 55, plays video games for hours at a time and earns endless satisfaction from them, but then she’s always been adept at games and puzzles.

I can play cards to be social, and I know how to play chess, but my mind just clouds up with boredom when I do.  I find reading about chess far more entertaining than playing it.  Someone once suggested I lacked the gaming gene, and that may be true.  But I want to play.  Video games are the emerging art form of our times and it seems like a shame to miss out on them.  Unlike jazz or impressionistic paintings, the cost of experiencing the art of video games is hours of work and I’m just too lazy or impatient to pay the price.  I feel guilty about that.

I’m afraid if I don’t catch up to the video game world now, it will evolve past what I’ll ever be able to learn, if they haven’t already, and I’ll be shut out from this art form for the rest of my life.  Playing video games might be compared with playing the piano or the guitar, something I can’t do either.  However, guitar players can record their performances and I can enjoy them.  Wouldn’t it be neat if great video game performances could be recorded for people like me to experience?  I imagine watching video games would be a combination of watching a movie and a spectator sport.

Getting old means learning to live with limitations and it’s annoying to discover that I can’t do something nearly all first graders do with ease.  It’s already galling enough to know that my old body can’t handle the physical games I played in school.  I now understand why golf is so popular amongst oldsters.  Not being able to play video games, which require little physical effort, is more telling, since it suggests my mind is going, but it’s more damning than that, it means I’ve lost the will to play.  Now that does make me feel old.

The makers of Spore and other video games should offer free editions with training wheels for us late blooming boomers.  I can picture these games with lots of tutorials and practice sessions.  They need to start with 1 minute practice games, and then move up to 2 and 3 minute games.  Get us hooked and we’ll buy the full package.

Another thing video game makers could do is create video gaming teaching programs.  Analyze the most common features of video game play and create lessons on them.  Or build online gyms for video game training where novices can go and do circuit training to build up their skills.

And I need to build up my tolerance and patience levels.  I need to stop being so wussy and caving in after 45 seconds of frustration.  It’s why I didn’t stick with playing the guitar or any other activity that didn’t feel natural from the first moment.  I wonder if I adapted to playing video games if I could apply the same mental techniques to learning how to play the guitar and other pursuits I gave up on in the past?

Update 9/8/8: I guess I won’t be buying Spore after all. The fury over it’s DRM has convinced me to not bother. I’ll have to find an older game to start my video gaming training.

Jim

Being the Peacock

It is the male peacock that wears the fancy dress and struts his finery to attract the less flashy lady peahens.  In the animal world it generally appears to be the male that gets all dolled up to catch the female, so why in our species are the females the disciples of Vogue?  With animal courtship the males do all kinds of crazy things to show off because it’s the females who get to make the final decision.  Human females also get to make our final decisions on mating, but it also appears they get to do all the gaudy displaying too?  Or is that true?

Males of our species do show off by making money, showing strength, doing dashing deeds, while only using a modest amount of flashy color and huge tail feathers.  Hell, suits are in by the young men again.  You can’t get less flashy than a suit.  Last night I saw a rock band all wearing black coats, white shirts and dark ties.  Their looks were dull but they were making a big noise to attract women.

In our species it appears that the males are still the ones that show off, but somehow the role of preening was giving to our ladies.  From fashion runways to Vegas shows to Miss America pageants you can see the extremes of female plumage.

I think this biological programming has had a tremendous impact on female behavior and psychology, making women very different from men.  Okay, I can hear all the protests now.  Yes, I know some men love to show off their costuming and some women don’t.  But I think this programming subroutine goes far deeper than outfits.  Women are a thousand times more concerned about their looks then men.  Why is that?

Let me give an example.  Among my lady friends, and I’m mostly talking about women in their fifties, I’m starting to hear the same story repeated independently from all of them that makes me worry.  They all hate to see themselves naked.  One friend said she holds her hand in front of her eyes when she gets out of the shower to shield her vision from the image of her naked body in the mirror.  When she says this I’m thinking I’d loved to see her step out of the shower and towel off, so it’s not that she’s bad looking.  But why has she become so hideous to herself that she won’t look at a mirror until she’s dressed and ready to hide her face in makeup?

If this was an isolated comment I wouldn’t have much evidence for my case, but I hear stories like this over and over again.  We’ve reached an age where my women friends are horrified by their bodies but I’m not, not by mine or theirs.  I still want to look up their dresses and down their blouses to catch whatever glimpses I can.  And another common thing I hear from these women are gripes about men wanting younger “firmer” women.

They seemed obsessed with the word “firmer” too, because they say it with such resentment.  And no matter how much I tell them I’m still physically attracted to women my age and even a bit older they don’t believe it.  They say I’m an oddball and 99% of normal men only want to look at twenty-something women.  Sure we like looking at younger women, but I’ve talked to my fellow boomers, and the consensus is older women can be just as hot.

Women may blame their resentment on men, but I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t theirs.  Sure there are men obsessed with sweet young things, but none of my pals are like that.  I think a lot of men have to chase younger women because as they get older the females of their generation stop wanting to be caught, forcing those guys to go further afield to hunt.  But this isn’t the point of my story.  I want to focus on the psychology of being the peacock.

I think both sexes are cursed by their biological programming.  Personally and culturally we’re possessed by the drive to reproduce.  This is understandable from a biological point of view, but why doesn’t the sex drive shut off when the baby making years are over?  When women go through menopause, why don’t they suddenly wake up and think, “Gee, I feel great.  I don’t have to preen anymore for those goddamn males always chasing after me.”  And then relax into a new lifestyle.  Why should women hate their bodies just because the sign “Great Babies Made Here!” gets turned off?

From the male side of things I wished my thoughts weren’t constantly befuddled by my cells urging me to go make babies.  Obviously, the reason why I still want to see fiftyish women get out of the shower is from residual programming to reproduce.  I’m already hearing all those people thinking, “Well men can make babies until they die.”  Just because we can, and just because we have the drive, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.  Evolution designed us to live long enough to reproduce and then die.  Our brains helped us beat those plans and  we live much longer than evolution planned.  At a certain point in both the lives of men and women we get to an age where babies aren’t wanted.  But the damn baby making programming inside of us doesn’t shut off.

Woman feel angst about losing their younger bodies and men feel angst about not getting laid as often.  It appears that the women who looked the best in youth hate themselves the most while aging.  Of course this is well illustrated by Hollywood starlets pursing plastic surgery till they have faces that look like rigor mortis of death.  The nature of women playing the peacock was well illustrated in an old movie I saw the other night, Mr. Skeffington, with Bette Davis as a beauty obsessed woman constantly courting marriage proposals even after she was married.

I feel sorry for my women friends.  Why can’t they accept wrinkles and sags?  Firm tits and ass are only signs that say, “I Make Babies.”  Why can’t old guys understand that the urge to chase young women is your cells tricking you into fatherhood?  In the end, I think the burden of the peacock syndrome on women is far harder than left-over horniness in men.  I don’t hate my body because I can’t get laid.  Being a peacock when the feathers fall out must be painful and pathetic.

I have a long running argument with one of my lady friends.  She says who we’re attracted to is mental, and I say it’s biological.  Well honey, I think if it’s mental you would be able to rationalize yourself out of the peacock syndrome.

Jim

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 56, Again

It is so easy to get distracted while writing.  My goal the other night was to focus on what it means to search for sense of wonder books in late middle age, but I got sidetrack from this intent by reminiscing about Clifford Simak’s City.  We science fiction fans often agree that around age 12 is when discovering science fiction is the most exciting.  But should that be so?  And is it true for everyone?  Indeed, it is easy to become jaded as one gets older, as well as becoming better educated, more cynical, sophisticated, and, dare I say it, more discerning.

Does that mean we are destined to outgrow science fiction?  I have to admit that I find it very hard to discover new SF&F to enjoy.  Furthermore, I’ll admit that when I reread some of my favorite books from my golden age of discovery they often fail to bring me back to the good ole days.  The thrill is gone.  And when I do reread books that I still love I’m worried that I’m just wallowing in nostalgia, and not appreciating the story for its own merits.

Is the power of science fiction at its greatest potency when viewed by twelve year olds because they are wild-eyed, full of enthusiasm, and anxious to discover everything exciting about the world, or because children are easily manipulated by the slight-of-hand of fantastic stories?  At 12 our critical x-ray vision isn’t very strong, so we tend to welcome everything with believability.  I know it’s just entertainment, but when I was a kid I wanted to believe in science fiction.  It was my religion.

To play devil’s advocate to my own supposition, I should admit on cross examination that I read with great excitement the Harry Potter novels and the Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.  There is a clue here.  Those are young adult (YA) novels.  Furthermore, my all-time favorite novels to reread are Robert A. Heinlein’s twelve YA novels.

The mature of the literary world have often sneered that science fiction is crude pulp fiction for adolescents.  I don’t know how mature I am at 56, but I still find excitement in the concept of science fiction, and want it to be an art form for all ages.  Now this could be avoiding adultification on my part, and I may not be alone, because look how successful Harry Potter books have been with my fellow boomers.  Many of the blogs I read about science fiction are written by old guys like myself fondly looking back to their favorite books.

There is a boom in YA fiction, being read by kids and adults.  I know plenty of middle age people who have found a renewed excitement for reading through YA novels.  So, is it the age of the reader, or just the YA subject matter that stir up our minds?  YA writers know how to target their audience with stories that resonate with the teen years.  Science fiction and fantasy, whether marketed as YA or adult fiction strongly appeals to youthful readers.

This finally brings me to the question I want to ask:  If literature can be targeted to the formative years, can it also be targeted to the waning years?  When I first started reading Old Man’s War by John Scalzi I thought, “Hot damn, science fiction for old guys.”  If you’ve read the novel you’ll also probably guess my disappointment in the change of direction it eventually takes.

As a boomer seeing my golden years glow on the horizon, I want those years to be a new golden age of science fiction.  I wonder if there’s a market for sunset science fiction?  Who knows, maybe I have a bad attitude towards aging, but I can’t help but thinking I’ll have 15-30 years of wrinkly freedom.  It won’t be like being young, but it doesn’t have to be all about dying either.

I think the excitement of reading YA fiction is the quality it brings to thinking about the future and exploring what we can be “when we grow up.”  One reason many people turn away from fiction is because growing up turns out to be a dud in relation to our YA fantasies.  Adultification sets in and dreams dissipate with compromising.  One of the tragic beliefs of youth is we’ll have lots of time to pursue our dreams after high school, but college, jobs and marriages kills that dream fast.

If I retire and have 15-30 years of free time, I’m going to have that free time I wanted in my youth.  I might not be fit to do anything, but I shouldn’t give up.  What we need is RA fiction, Retired Adult fiction that inspires us to do something with those years of freedom.  Fishing, golfing and shuffleboard are philosophical lacking, so I want sense of wonder ideas for my elder years.

Hell, maybe J. K. will write a series about a Hogwarts Retirement Home.  Or Victor Appleton II can be resurrected to write about the adventures of a geezer Tom Swift.  However, this time around I want maximum sense of wonder with less fantasy.  I can believe fantasies about a robotic Jeeves becoming a geriatric companion easier than I can believe being downloaded into a cloned body.  I’d love to read more stories about the possibilities of mental rejuvenation.  I’m not against physical overhauls, but so far medicine only seems to produce scary people with rigid faces.

What we need is the idealism of the 1960s for octogenarians.  Let’s see some creative utopian assisted living homes.  And does anyone write erotica for the wrinkled?

Science fiction original sold me the Brooklyn Bridge on Tau Ceti.  It’s easy to fool kids that rocket travel is just around the corner.  This time around I want science fiction writers to really wring their imaginations and bring about another golden age of SF.

Jim

Number One on the Runway

I am reminded of that great song title from Timbuk 3, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.”  With economic chaos and skyrocketing oil prices, the future is looking a bit overcast – no need for shades now, huh, but what if that’s an illusion?  In China, the future is so bright that a billion people are putting on sunglasses.  I’ve read that there is more peace and prosperity now than anytime in the history of the world.  Global warming may only be the foot that kicks us in the ass and forces humanity to get its shit together.  A new President could clear those dark clouds on our horizon and brighten up U.S. prospects for decades to come.

We’re all on a jet that’s about to take off for the future, but who is in the cockpit, and what’s our destination?  My generation are all thinking about retirement and I’m wondering if we’re all flying down to Florida to play shuffleboard or dominos all day.  I can remember summer of 1968 like it was tomorrow.  We wanted the Vietnam war to end so we could start building a bright future.  We wanted a lot of change.  We lived on great expectations.  Many of the young felt like they were part of a movement, a movement for change.  Barack and all Democrats worked to sell the same sentiments forty years later.  Is this election the last chance for the Baby Boomers to get it right and achieve their dream?

Protestors used to chant “The Whole World is Watching” and I think our generation felt it was true, even though most of the world lived off the radar of mass communication when we were growing up.  During those mythical years of the 1960s our generation always felt we were number one on the runway taking off for the future, but now, we’re seen as being the generation number one on the runway to retire.  Is it now time for us to be quiet?  Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both Baby Boomer Presidents.  We may get another boomer, with Barack Obama, or the Silent Generation may have its last chance to have their only President, with John McCain.

I was reminded of my Baby Boomer status when Piers Fawkes at PSFK tagged this site as 1 of 14 blogs he monitors for information about Baby Boomers.  Maybe the whole world is no longer watching us, but at least the marketing people are still keeping an eye on us.  For those who need a generational timeline, see below:

• 1901-1924 – Greatest Generation/GI Generation
• 1925-1945 – Silent Generation
• 1946-1964 – Baby Boom
• 1965-1982 – Generation X
• 1983-1994 – Generation Y/Millennials

I find it tremendously hard to imagine the mindset of the generations that have come behind us.  First of all, they never demanded to be heard, and as a result of that, they never got the press the Baby Boomers did.  The Greatest Generation are famous for living in historically epic times and their generation was defined by the events they faced.  The Silent Generation made the world for the Baby Boomers and influenced them.  The Baby Boomers embraced rock and roll, but Elvis and the Beatles were from the Silent Generation – an odd nickname, huh?  And as resources such as oil become problematic, will we have a new Greatest Generation that solves those problems?

Signs are everywhere that the young are ready for the boomers to retire, for instance, read “TV Viewers’ Average Age Hits 50” over at Variety, where they whine that the damn people watching TV are too old for their precious 18-49 demographics.  What’s the matter, are the young TV execs afraid their whole industry is a Baby Boomer fad?  The whole world probably didn’t have their eyes on us, but we certainly had our eyes on TV.  Are the newer generations less mass-media oriented?  I’ve read males of certain ages have stopped watching TV altogether.

Is the Baby Boomer’s hour in the spotlight about over.  Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both born in 1946, making them the two Baby Boomer Presidents.  Strangely, John McCain, born in 1936, a year after Elvis, is from the earlier Silent Generation, so that generation is still hanging in there, and suggests there’s time for the Baby Boomers to cling to the spotlight for another decade or two.  Barrack Obama was born in 1961, making him part of the rear end of the Baby Boomers.  We’ve now had a hippie President and jock President, so it would be great to have a minority President, and hopefully there will even be time for a female Boomer or even a gay Boomer in the White House.  Evidently, our time is not up until the overweight boomer sings.

I’m reading The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, a tail end boomer himself, born in 1964.  Zakaria’s wise assessment of current world affairs suggests our generation can still have influence for years to come as political pundits.  The Baby Boomers might be moving into their retirement years, but we dominant politics, journalism and opinions, and probably will for awhile.  I can not recommend The Post-American World enough, because Zakaria puts us Baby Boomer Americans in our place by letting us know what the rest of the world was seeing when we thought they were watching.  Our self-centered perspective has blinded us to what was happening with the 95% of the Baby Boomers in the rest of the world.

When you read Variety’s listing of the average age for various TV shows, and see “How I Met Your Mother,” a show about people in their twenties, has an average viewer age of 45, then you start to wonder, where the hell are the young people?  You do see them.  The news is reported by a vast array of beautiful young people.  Movies and television shows are all about the young.  You see them standing behind Obama and McCain, they fight our wars, and they direct movies, write novels, create music, and they fill jobs all around us.  But what do they want?  Where are their spokespeople?

When Generation X taxis out on the runaway where are they going to take us?  When Generation X campaigns for the Presidency, what will be their issues?  You’d think they’d make Global Warming their issue.  Maybe their generation speaks loud and clear and I don’t hear them because I’m insulated by the thickness of my generation.

If Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman are right, not only do we need to hear from Generation X and the Millennials, but we need to hear from their ranks from all over the world.  That old saying, “Think globally, act locally” is more important than ever.

I hate to say this, but maybe the numbers at Variety are more damning than they are suggesting.  If the average age of TV watchers is 50, then television is a has-been media.  What mass media has an average age of 25?  Video games?  Text-messaging?  FaceBook?  I’m sorry, but tuning into Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 seems like checking out of this world in the same way that Timothy Leary advocated dropping out.  Virtual worlds don’t count, only reality.

China and Dubai are growing at speeds and magnitudes that outpace any boom in U.S. history.  The whole world should be watching them instead of “How I Met Your Mother” or whatever equivalent show or video game you’re using to escape from reality at the moment.  Where is this generation’s Bob Dylan that’s writing “Because something is happening here, But you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones?” or Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth?”

There’s heavy stuff going down, but where are the young protestors?  2008 is going to be an important election.  It is time for change, just like we thought back in 1968, but this time the biggest issues are more pressing than ever, and if we want a future where we need shades, we all need to be watching.  Whether our plane is taking off for retirement city, or the big city to start a new career, we’re all sailing on the same Spaceship Earth.  Whether you’re 15, 35, 55, 75 or 95 there are some shows on TV we should all be watching, but they ain’t escapist shows, but documentaries about what’s going on around the real world.

Jim

The Potential of Possibilities

I’ve had this restless unease my whole life about wasting time, always feeling a nagging guilt I should be doing something constructive instead of having so much fun.  I’ve always been a why do today what you can put off until tomorrow kind of a guy.  Bumping along this way, I’ve finished college, got married, kept a good job and basically done the essentials, but I never pursued those ambitions I dreamed about in youth.  Well, obviously everyone can’t be an astronaut or rock star, two careers ill suited for my personality even if I had had the natural aptitude, which I didn’t.  On the other hand, if I had applied myself I could have been an astronomer that occasionally wrote science fiction novels.  I was just too lazy.

When you’re thirteen and thinking about your future you feel you have endless time.  Just five years later when I had to fill in the forms that declared my major I wasn’t in the mood to buckle down to math and physics classes because by then all I could think about was majoring in the opposite sex.  Oh, I started the classes and got decent grades, I just didn’t have the discipline to keep taking them for eight straight years.

There comes a time when you realize you have to choose between chasing a dream and settling for being ordinary.  Becoming an original like Neil Armstrong or Bo Diddley takes a kind of focus that few people have, and being ordinary is a natural pursuit for those people who love variety.

But I can’t help but think of those five years of adolescence when I felt the potential of possibilities.  It’s a time when I viewed a vast vista of time and dreamed of all the ways to spend it.  That’s how I’m now feeling about retiring – I have an expanse of time that’s full of possibilities.  People often talk about young ambition, but what about old ambition?  Why is retiring seen as a time of withdrawal from life?

Everyone talks about what they want to be when they grow up, but why don’t people talk about what they want to be before they die?  How come when people retire they don’t go off to college and major in something for their retiring years?  If I can retire with thirty years before I’m sixty, and I could live to be ninety, then I have thirty more years for a second career.

Well the cruel answer of the fates is at sixty we don’t have the health and energy we did at eighteen, but is that a show stopper?  Once again, it’s a question of discipline and focus, and choosing between having general fun and pursing specialization.  Has anyone at age sixty ever set out to do something new like become an engineer, doctor, actor or pop star and succeeded?  I can understand you can’t pick becoming a major league baseball player, deep sea diver or fighter jet pilot because of the physical limitations, but what about thinking careers?  Isn’t old age supposed to be for the wise?

On one hand I think of retirement as catching up on reading all those books I bought and never read, and pursuing quiet activities like watching television and listening to music, and just plain relaxing after years in the rat race, but on the other hand why don’t I expect more of myself.   We ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, as if being grown is just achieving full physical height.  If growing is equated to mental development, then asking someone what they want to be when they grow up is like saying, what do you want to be doing when you die, because unless we’re attacked by some brain plague, we can keep growing to the end.

Jim