Friday: I look forward to being a Senior Citizen

Not in a weird way. I’m not really in a rush to get through life. If anything, I’m taking life too slow. That’s just my nature though, to not be in hurry, to react slower than average, to sit back and enjoy watching things happen. Starting to understand why I’m looking forward to being part of the AARP club? Maybe not. Let me give you a few more reasons.

As previously alluded to, there are times that I don’t feel like a young person. It’s not a physical feeling, like my joints are creaky and hearing is going. I guess in an attitudinal way (that’s a real word by the way). I’m not always looking to do something crazy, I’m not a fan of large crowds, and I don’t understand why people are always walking so fast and talking so loud. Older people have already figured this stuff out. They realized that doing something crazy (and I mean crazy bad, not crazy good like spontaneous) usually leads to regrets and consequences. They realized that large crowds are usually full of people of questionable quality, because if they were of high quality it wouldn’t take so much of them to accomplish whatever the goal of the crowd was in the first place. They’ve realized that walking slow allows you to think, talk, and just enjoy things more, especially when done at a reasonable volume. I think they’ve probably realized a bunch of other secrets too, but I think I’ll probably have to wait till I’ve put in my time to learn those.

Senior citizens for some reason also get charged less money for most everything. I don’t really understand this, but I’m not going to argue about it. I’ll take the cheaper movie ticket, or dinner, or car insurance. Especially the car insurance. Which leads to the final reason.

Few personal flaws cannot be easily and acceptably blamed on age. For example, are you a bad driver? Maybe, but if you’re old and a bad driver then you’d just be called mediocre. Impatient? No, you just don’t have that much time left and are understandably not in a mood to deal with incompetence. Stingy? Never, you just came from a different time, when tipping 25 cents was acceptable, and giving a gift or donation of $5 would have made you a shot caller. Smelly? No,….well maybe yea. You’ll probably still get nailed on that one, the benefit of the doubt you get for being old has limits.

So being a senior citizen has tremendous upside. People blame your ugliness inside and out on the age. Things are cheaper. All the tough decisions from your life have already been made. You can just sit back and relax, and maybe if you feel up to it, try and help some young kid put together a life as good as, if not better than yours. So I’m looking forward to it. Like I said, I’m not in a rush to actually get there, but it’s nice to look on down the line and see that after all the craziness of living this life, there might be a couple years of reflection and cheap movie admission.