AARP didn't ask me out, so I went chasing after them

Over the last few years, I've enjoyed watching people in my age bracket turning 50 and posing for photos holding the letters they received in the mail from AARP, otherwise known as the American Association for Retired Persons.

Often they have a mock sad face and jokingly(?) lament the fact they're now a half-century old. With the crack AARP membership recruiting team having tracked them down, they suddenly feel like senior citizens.

So many of my 1980s-graduating compatriots received these letters and posted about it that I was kind of sad AARP never sent me one. Somehow I slipped under their radar and didn't get an invite to the Old People's Ball.

But then, a couple of months ago, our family switched cell phone carriers from Verizon to AT&T. The AT&T guy told us that, if Terry and I joined AARP, we could get a discount on our phone bill.

Say no more. I hurried over to aarp.org and signed us up.

And it has been great! At least for me. I'm not sure Terry cares one way or the other.

You start getting all kinds of AARP emails and newsletters with product discounts and health tips and other items of interest to persons of an increasingly advanced age.

I find all of it useful.

Best of all, after getting off to such a rocky start, AARP and I are now very close. If this was 1984, I would say we were "going together."

Sometime soon, AARP and I are going to spend a Friday night playing bingo and watching "Murder She Wrote." Then we'll see where things lead.

What can I say? I'm smitten.

There will always be someone better than you at any given activity, which is really OK (I guess)

The AI Blog Post Image Generator returned this semi-abomination when prompted with the phrase "competitive streak." It was apparently taken from the finals of the Deformed Facial Features Track & Field Championships.

When I was (I think) 10 years old, I won our city's Pitch, Hit and Run competition for my age group.

Pitch, Hit and Run is/was, as the name implies, a baseball-oriented event in which kids would be measured on how accurately they could pitch a ball, how far they could hit it, and how quickly they could run the bases.

It was around the age of 10 when I started getting bigger, stronger and faster than most of the kids in my class at school. I was an early bloomer, so I had an undeniable physiological advantage in all three phases of the game.

Winning at the city level meant I advanced to the Cleveland-area Pitch, Hit and Run held at Edgewater Park, maybe a half hour from our house. I only remember three things about that event:

(1) I didn't perform nearly as well there as I had in my local competition.

(2) All of the boys in my age group appeared to be as physically mature as me.

(3) My brother Mark took me to Cleveland Municipal Stadium after the event and we watched the Cleveland Indians take on the then-California Angels.

I didn't come close to advancing to whatever the next level of Pitch, Hit and Run was, and I do recall being somewhat disappointed by that,

It was my first taste of "big fish, little pond" syndrome, but certainly not my last.

A few years later, while I was a pretty fast runner in middle school track, more than once I ran into kids from other cities who were faster than me.

In high school track, I sometimes made it to the finals of 100 and 200-meter dashes in big meets, but rarely could I win it all because other kids were, again, simply faster.

The same held true for spelling bees, writing competitions and other events throughout high school and college where there were defined winners and losers.

At some point, I inevitably came across someone who was better than me.

Which is both a good lesson to learn and the simple reality for 99% of us. No matter what you do or how well you do it, there is only a very, very small handful of people anywhere who can say they're the undeniable, absolute best at something.

This used to bother me to no end, given my wide competitive streak. I grudgingly accepted that certain people were inherently better and/or worked harder than me to succeed, but it took me years to come to terms with the idea of actually losing to them.

I'm not a big fan of losing even now, but I hated it way more when I was in my teens and 20s, let me tell you.

All of which is to say people like me need to learn to adjust to the reality of the world or else live our lives in seething resentment of the highest achievers.

When you run up against someone with more skill than you, the best approach, of course, is to learn from them. See how they practice and prepare. Understand how they got to where they are. Identify the little things they do that set them apart.

But even then, you also have to concede that they may just be more naturally gifted than you, and there isn't much you can do about that.

As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes getting to the top of the heap simply isn't in the cards.

I was floored to discover four out of every five people in the world are younger than me

The AI Blog Post Image Generator has been doing so well lately, but when I prompted it with "How did I get to be so old?" it returned this. I can't tell whether it's spot on for today's post or simply horrifying.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a fun little app housed on the website of France's Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, which as you might imagine translates to the "National Institute of Demographic Studies."

My use of the word "fun" in connection with an organization that studies population trends may feel like a stretch. But I'm telling you, this small section of their site is interesting. They call it "The World Population and Me," and you can access it by clicking anywhere in this sentence.

(Don't worry, it's in English.)

The first thing it asks you to do is enter your age, which in my case is 54. This immediately generated a fascinating comparison between the world population when I was born in 1969 (about 3.7 billion) and what it is today (around 8.1 billion).

That's a huge increase in a relatively short amount of time, but that wasn't what really grabbed me.

What knocked me for a loop was when I clicked on "My Place in the Population."

Doing this revealed that, as of this moment, 79% of the people in the world are younger than me, while 21% are older.

I don't know what I thought those percentages were going to be, but...I'm older than nearly 80% of current humans? What??

I had to sit down for a moment.

The ratio somewhat improved when I limited it to just the United States. A full 32% of the population here is older than me, presumably thanks to longer American life expectancies vs. some other parts of the world.

Still, it does give you perspective. Maybe "too much perspective," as the boys in Spinal Tap might say.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I plan to be around for a long, long time. I don't know if that's what God is planning, but that's my expectation.

It's just that sometimes the math redefines the parameters of "a long, long time," at which point I have to sit down again.

And maybe watch an episode or two of Matlock.

Is "pirate" a viable career choice? On balance, yes.

I simply entered "pirate" into the AI Blog Post Image Generator and it returned this. I'm a fan.

(NOTE: I wrote this post in 2013. There have been several posts over the years that have made me laugh and no one else, and this is one of them. It's still probably not nearly as funny as I think it is, but it's Wednesday and I needed material, so...we're bringing this one back.)

The downside of being a pirate

• The hours. It seems like sailing the seven seas is a hard job and requires a lot of long hours. Not a problem if you really love the work, but still...
• Inordinate risk of on-the-job injury or death. There are a million ways to get hurt or get dead when you're a pirate. Like, for instance, when you try to take over another ship, you could get a sword through the gut. Or the captain could make you walk the plank. And then there's the apparently ever-present risk of scurvy. I'm in corporate communications and have never known one of my colleagues to die of scurvy, so score one for my side.
• Surly co-workers. If the movies and television are any indication, pirates as a group aren't the friendliest lot. The experts will tell you that workplace relationships are important, but I just don't see Black Bart standing around the water cooler talking about last night's ball game.
• High chance of alcohol poisoning. If you're not on duty on a pirate ship, you're drinking. And usually you're drinking rum. I had a bad experience with rum more than 30 years ago and have tried to avoid it ever since. No way I make it even a week if I'm forced to drink rum.
• Little chance for advancement. I'm not sure how the org chart looks on a typical pirate ship, but it seems that any position besides captain or first mate is less than desirable. There's just no potential for promotion for most of the crew.

The upside of being a pirate

• The travel. You get to see a lot of Caribbean islands if you're a pirate. And if you break the ship's rules, you'll get to know one particular island really well when they strand you there. But seriously, no endless days at a desk for you, me bucko!
• The potential payoff. If there's one thing pirates live for more than rum, it's gold. And they tend to find it at an uncanny rate. Assuming your captain is a fair man who evenly distributes the booty once it has been claimed, you're in for a handsome salary. Note, however, that income equity is still not a notable feature of many pirate ships.
• The wenches. There are, of course, virtually no women on pirate ships. But when you hit one of those exotic ports of call to patronize a local watering hole, you will almost certainly be waited upon by a busty server in an off-the-shoulder white top. And after months at sea, this will not be an unwelcome sight.
• The status. Pirates are much cooler than, say, accountants. Or corporate communicators, for that matter. For all the risk of death and dismemberment, there is a certain cachet in being able to say offhandedly at a party, "Yeah, I'm a pirate." And you don't have to look like Johnny Depp to enjoy this little social perk.
• The movie rights. Speaking of Johnny Depp, being a pirate means there's an excellent chance some Hollywood producer is going to want to make a movie about you, or at least he'll want to cast you in a movie, which is just as good. Pirate movies never go out of style.

Conclusion

If you can endure the constant specter of death and the poor hygiene of your shipmates, then being a pirate is a solid and even admirable career choice. You'll need to make sure you have no moral qualms about killing innocent seaman on passing merchant vessels in order to steal their worldly possessions. But really, once you get past that, everything else is cream cheese.

I recently used an honest-to-goodness print dictionary

The other day I was reading an online article that described someone as "magisterial," one of many words for which I think I know the definition but am never quite sure.

I instinctively opened a new tab on my browser and was getting ready to Google "magisterial" when I happened to glance to my right. There, sitting on the bottom shelf of the small bookcase in my office, was the 2006 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

I'm talking about a bound, printed dictionary. Not some sort of electronic tool, but a hefty tome of more than 2,000 pages, the likes of which you could find in virtually every classroom when I was growing up.

Rather than consulting Mr. Google for the 20th time that day, I instead picked up the dictionary. And man, it was heavy. There were several pounds of words in there, everything from "a" (the logical first entry) to "zyzzyva" (which as you know is "any of the various tropical American weevils of the genus Zyzzyva, often destructive to plants").

I found "magisterial" on page 1051, just under "Maginot" and right above "magisterium."

The American Heritage people offered up three somewhat differing definitions, but only one made sense in context: "Sedately dignified in appearance or manner: 'She would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty.'"

Which is pretty much what I thought it meant, but it was good to get confirmation.

The last time I remember diving heavily into a print dictionary was in 6th grade (1981-82), when a vocabulary assignment from Mrs. Schwarzenberg forced us to crack open the musty old Webster's that sat on a small table in the Mapledale Elementary School library.

(Honestly, I think we used that dictionary as much to look up words like "penis" and "flatulence" than to decipher legitimate vocabulary words.)

Now, believe me when I say I am a champion of technology and progress. I embrace the new and innovative without so much as a backward glance when it comes to home entertainment devices, artificial intelligence, and all manner of electronic gizmos and gadgets.

But there was a nostalgic part of me that really enjoyed flipping through a print dictionary and finding the meaning of a word that had stumped me.

It was slower than Google, but in the end it had the same result and somehow felt...purer? Is that the word I want? More authentic?

It's a silly thought, I know. Who cares how I got the definition as long as I got there? What makes one method better than another?

Nothing, I suppose. I just didn't realize how much I missed 10-pound, 2,000-page dictionaries.

It made me happy that I've lugged this particular one with me from job to job and office to office for so many years.

My sister would have been 71 years old today and sometimes I can't remember exactly what her voice sounded like

 

That's Judi posing with Elissa, Chloe, Jared and Melanie in what was probably 2006 or 2007.

Every once in a while I stop and try to remember exactly what my dad and my sister Judi sounded like.

We have old video recordings of them, and of course I still know their voices. But as the years go by, it takes a little more effort to recall those sounds in exact detail.

This fall, it will be 25 years since Dad passed away, and in May it will be 15 since Judi left us so unexpectedly. That's long enough (at least for me) that their voices don't spring as readily to mind as they used to.

Which seems so strange considering they were both such important parts of my life for so long. You would think the sound of them talking would be indelibly etched in my mind.

And I suppose it is. It just takes a few extra seconds to pull it out of my memory banks.

We are blessed to live in an age when we have digital records of what our loved ones looked and sounded like. I just never thought I would need them.

Whether it's age on my part or simply the erosion of memory over the distance of years, I'm glad I can still bring up recordings of them both using only a few mouse clicks. It's a crutch I don't mind relying on.

Happy birthday, Jude.

These bobbleheads tell a story

As sports memorabilia collections go, the 24 bobbleheads (and one champagne bottle) that sit atop the cabinets in my office are exceedingly modest.

In 2015, a Canadian named Phillip Darling was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the owner of nearly 2,400 bobbleheads. And the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee is said to have a collection in excess of 10,000.

So the ones I've managed to accumulate aren't all that special.

Yet they are special to me, because each one has a little memory or story attached to it.

In most cases, I acquired these bobbleheads by attending a special promotional night conducted by one of our Cleveland professional sports teams.

Nearly half were given out by the Cleveland Indians/Guardians, for example. My wife Terry isn't the biggest fan of baseball, but she was there for a few of those games.

I think my son Jared probably accompanied me on most of the rest.

An additional eight have been picked up over the years at Lake Erie/Cleveland Monsters hockey games. My favorite of those is the one depicting basketball star Shaquille O'Neal in hockey gear (if you look closely at the photo, it's the third one to the left of the champagne bottle).

There were more than 18,000 people in attendance that evening, most of whom just wanted to grab one of the 10,000 Shaq bobbleheads being given out. We were admitted early as season ticket holders, so we were assured of getting our hands on one.

The Cleveland Cavaliers account for the rest of the bobbles, including the two on the far left that honor the late (and legendary) Cavs broadcaster Joe Tait. The golden microphone there is one of two pieces in the collection with no actual "bobble" component to them, but I love it just the same.

Oh, and the champagne bottle? Jared gave me that when he was working with the Cleveland Guardians. It came from the team's clubhouse celebration after they beat the Tampa Bay Rays (his future employer, as it turned out) in a 2022 playoff series. I even have the cork.

Most days when I come into the office I don't even notice the bobbleheads, as they have followed me from job to job for many years and are just part of the scenery. But when I do look to my left and see them, I always smile a little.

That's a pretty good return on the investment of time and effort I made to get each one.