Aging gracefully, or not

A woman in my neighborhood bookclub jokingly recommended How Not To Act Old by Pamela Redmond Satran to us all a few months ago. I didn't know the book but found it cheap on half.com -- a site I thoroughly recommend if you like used books.  This book is a silly but occasionally pointed list of habits, manners of speech and basic idosyncrasies that those of us over 40 probably have, which the author claims are out of step with many people under 35.

So what, you may say, and you're right. But it is true that if you have, say, a boss who is noticeably younger than you, or if you work closely with younger "peers", and I use that word deliberately, it is useful to know how not to give yourself away, so to speak.  How not to lose that important peerness.

Some of it is funny and other parts are a little crude but I have to admit that I have taken several recommendations on board. For example, I no longer wear reading glasses outside the house. I have progressive contacts, and very trendy -- almost too trendy, actually -- blue framed metallic glasses, that correct my mild astigmatism on the top, and allow me to read everything on the bottom. The progressive lenses hide the reading bit. The author points out that it is just too tempting to wear readers on the end of your nose and look over the top, which just looks awful. No one under 40 needs to do that. And if you're coloring your hair and going to yoga and joking around about Jenna Marbles (ha! did you get that reference?) with your work pals, you do not want to spoil everything by looking like Mrs Claus at an odd moment.

Here are some other useful recommendations:

• Learn to type on your smart phone with your thumbs and make sure you are wearing your contacts so you can read your txt msgs without holding the screen at arms length
• Stop leaving voicemails; no one listens to them. They just check call history and if they want to talk to you they call you back. Or txt instead
• Don't talk about health problems.
• Don't talk at length about your children; talk about yourself. This is difficult when you're flipping between your school parent friends (with whom you always talk about children) and your younger work friends, but I think it's important. Many of my nurse friends at UT have kids, but we don't discuss them. I learned this when Jess txted me at the hospital to tell me the school bus had crashed (no one was hurt-- and it actually rear-ended the disabled kids' bus). I was half laughing and half horrified and related this to several nurses sitting around me, whom I then realized were much closer in age to my children than they were to me. They found the whole business hilarious.

Here are a few other funny admonitions I try to remember:

• Don't be  unable to find your cell phone because you put it in a different place each time
• Don't yell into your cell phone (Jess complains that I do this)
• Enough with the Jane Austen worship- guilty.
• Don't start conversations with strangers - well, thankfully compared to most Texans, I am positively reserved.

The book also lists things that are now "old" but used to be young, like Harley Davidsons, dinner parties, dried flowers in the home, acrylic nails, Paul McCartney, and the expression "surfing the net". 

Like many cute books, this one was originally a blog and you can still read it at http://www.hownottoactold.com/. So there is quite a lot of filler in it to flesh it out to a book of 200+ pages and 185 lists. But I have vowed to stop dating myself by pointing out, for example, that I was already married and living in London when the Berlin wall came down; that I covered Margaret Thatcher's resignation for a regional newspaper;  or what the IT industry was like before the internet. None of that is necessary information; it's just something I used to contribute to suitable conversations, because I'm amazed myself at how fast things have changed. Not anymore.

Oh! and I am on Twitter, you know: amyberkleyellis. You can follow me. And if Jessica reminds me how to do it, I'll follow you back.