Archives for February 2018

On my microwave oven, there are buttons for cooking standard foods. A friend of mine is a cook, and he was making something in my kitchen. He pointed to the "Popcorn" button, the "Hot Dog" button and the "Mac & Cheese" button, which he thought were acceptable. But the "Chicken Nuggets" button—"that's discouraging," he said.

Well have you noticed the canned response buttons on LinkedIn?

 

I don't know what algorithms they're using to come up with these buttons, which do somehow change with the circumstances, but it's discouraging that "indeed" and "yeah" are now roughly analogous expressions (both meaning, roughly, "totes mcgotes).

I do know that the first time I bring myself to push the "yeah" button, it will be a death—a little writer's death. (As it also was a few years ago when a speechwriter correspondent was astonished and insulted when David Murray sent him a winky-face emoticon.)

Once I was the only person on a suburban Chicago bus. I struck up a conversation with the driver, who asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a writer, he moaned loudly. He'd hate to be a writer, he said. He said he looks at the newspaper and he sees all those words and wonders, Does the writer have to write every one of those words?! 

"Yep," I said, "every 'the' and every 'and.'"

Nowadays, even "indeeds" are done for you.

Can antidisestablishmentarianism be far behind? 

Well, my algorithms tell me we're coming to the end of the column.

So go ahead, dear reader. Push "Profound" or "Ha!"

Or "Chicken Nuggets."

We know why the years seem to go by faster as we get older: When you were nine, another year was a whole 10th of your life. When you're 40, a year is only a 40th of your life. So it seems like nothing—because it almost is nothing.

Except, it isn't nothing—it's a whole year.

This time warp affects the way we think of our friends, too. When you were 30, someone you'd known since college was a kind of brother or a sister to you, because you'd known them all your adult life. (And through some important years.) 

But now in midlife, you can be knowing a body for nine years, and when Facebook reminds you, you're surprised. It feels like you just met that person. That's the time warp again.

And it's dangerous.

Because if you treat that person like a recent acquaintance when they've been a faithful friend with whom you've shared life's roiling ocean for most of a decade, you might hurt that person's feelings.

Maybe it's hard to feel like family with someone you've met later in life.

But someone with whom you've kept in steady touch for decade in the mad middle of middle life—that person might be your family.

And you should take special care to extend your gratitude.

Which is the purpose of this post, my midlife friends and midlife family.

You know who you are, don't you?

"They tell you not to punch down. But what else are you supposed to do when you're being nibbled to death by ants?"