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Sunday Poser — I Am Not as Young as I Used to Be

Fandango1 Comment
BERJAYA
Banner courtesy Jim Adams

For this week’s Sunday Poser, Sadje asked:

Have you ever made a mistake that taught you a valuable lesson? Do you think that our mistakes are as valuable as our right decisions?

Oh yes. I learned a very tough lesson the hard way: when you get older — and by older, I mean 70 and above — you are not as agile or as flexible or as quick to react as you were when you were younger. Even more important, with age, one’s bones are more brittle than they once were. And that means that they are more likely to break when you fall.

As to the part about our mistakes as valuable as our right decisions, I believe that the lessons learned from our mistakes are probably more painful and/or costly than the lessons we learn from making right decisions.

Hence, they are also more memorable.

Fandango’s Story Starter #226

Fandango10 Comments
BERJAYA

It’s time for my Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every so often I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

The older she got, the less sure she was about anything.

If you care to write and post a story built from this story starter teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

5 Things — Feeling My Age…and Then Some

Fandango20 Comments
BERJAYA

Dr. Tanya, over at Salted Caramel, has this prompt called “5 Things,” where she asks us to list five things about a particular topic. For this week’s topic, she wants us to share 5 things/reasons why we feel younger than our actual age.

I was going to skip this week’s 5 Things prompt because I am not feeling younger than my actual age these days. In fact, I’m feeling very much like a decrepit old man. But then I decided to write yet another whiney, feeling-sorry-for-myself post.

Before I stupidly climbed up a ladder in January to clean my gutters, I would have responded very differently to Dr. Tanya’s question. I definitely wasn’t feeling my age. Sure, I had some chronic maladies, but they were more annoyances or inconveniences than debilitating, age-related conditions.

But six months ago, I fell off that damn ladder. I fractured my left hip and broke the humerus in my right arm at the shoulder. I had to have emergency hip replacement surgery and have been undergoing intensive physical therapy for both my hip and my shoulder since February.

It’s almost six months later and I still need a cane to walk and it’s not without pain. And I still have a limited range of motion in my right shoulder.

So until I’m back to pain-free walking without a cane and have a full range of motion in my right arm and shoulder, I’m not likely to feel younger than my age, which I did just six months ago.

SoCS — Word Not Found

Fandango15 Comments

BERJAYAFor this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill asks us about a word we have to look up. She says, “We all have words we can never spell. Use one of yours in your post and let that word drive your stream of consciousness wherever it goes.”

I used to be an excellent speller in my younger days. But then, as I got older, my brain started to shrink and has now apparently exceeded its maximum word capacity, requiring it to run some diagnostics and to perform a raw data purge. As a result, words that I used to absolutely know how to spell without doubt or hesitation, are sending me 404 Error – Word Not Found messages, forcing me to go to either Google or to dictionary.com figure out how to correctly spell the damn word.

The most recent example of this inability to spell a word that I’ve correctly spelled countless times was the word “aficionado.” I was actually writing an email to my brother-in-law when I typed that word — or at least what I thought was the correct way to spell that word — and that pesky squiggly red line appeared under the word I had typed, a sure sign that my email app was telling me I wasn’t spelling it correctly.

I had typed “officianado.” Then I removed the second “f” and the resulting spelling, “oficianado,” still had that squiggly red line under it. Dammit.

I went to Google and did a search on “oficianado” and this is what I saw:BERJAYAOf-fucking-course! It’s “aficionado” with an “a” and not an “o” at the beginning. And it’s “cionado” and not “cianado.”

I knew that! Or I used to know that, anyway.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #71

Fandango24 Comments

FPQWelcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.

By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

You’re probably familiar with the old expression, “You’re only as old as you feel.” Or maybe you’ve been told by someone at some point to “act your age.” Or perhaps you, yourself, when asked your age, have said, “Age is just a number.”

Well, that brings me to this week’s provocative question(s). 

How old are you* and how old do you feel — older or younger than your actual chronological age? Do you generally act your age? And what does “acting your age” mean to you?

*If you’re uncomfortable revealing your actual age, maybe you can just say something like, “I’m in my twenties.” Or fifties. Or “I’m a senior citizen.”

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.