The curse of being “pre-old”

When I was in my 40s, I wanted to be in my 50s.

That’s because the women I knew in their 50s were cool. Most of them were fit and fabulous; they still knew how to have a good time and weren’t saddled, like me, with a bunch of scenery chewing youngsters.

A few women complained about the menopause, but most of them joked that the term meant they were taking a break from men. My gang of 50 somethings got together regularly at the Press Club and drank litres of wine, smoked like chimneys and held big jobs.

I was in awe.

But, alas, the 50s have been a big disappointment here on St. Laurent Boulevard. The menopause thing has been absolutely excruciating, although, lately I’ve got the symptoms under control.

But it’s the weight issue that’s a killer.

I’ve been exercising like a mad person for eight months and I’ve lost four pounds.

Four pounds.

So this week, I doubled the intensity of the exercise by switching ellipticals and I’ve added weights back into my daily regimen.

And I quit drinking for the week.

Yesterday, I put on a pair of pants and they felt tight to me.

“Have I gained weight?” I asked Scott.

He shrugged, as any smart man knows to do.

I got on the scale today and I’d gained a pound and a half!

Right, no drinking, increased exercise, still watching the carbs and I’m gaining weight.

Huh.

So this morning, I did my work out, came home, had eggs, ham and home fries and a big honkin’ latte.

This afternoon, I’m going to lie on the lounger outside and eat bon bons.

Tonight, I’m putting the margarita back into happy hour.

The girls back at the Press Club were right.

The key to happiness when you’re pre-old is to self-medicate.

Then you simply won’t care.

Frosh week: Keeping your liver safe

Dear Student:

Welcome to University, your new home for the next four years.

It’s an exciting time for any boy or girl, a time of self-discovery and growth, maybe the first time you’ve been away from mommy or daddy.

It’s a well known fact that many students are not prepared for entry into the world of big people. There will be lots of temptations — easy girls with big breasts, the guy at the end of the hall with the five metre bong, fancy bottles with foreign names on them.

During your first weeks here — before you settle down to your studies in earnest — you will be expected to engage in a variety of forms of unsavory behavior. You will feel pressured to prove you are not a wimp, band geek or loser. Orifices will be open to you freely without benefit of latex. Beer taps will be flowing, oh yes they will.

Health Canada is warning that students who engage in risky behavior may not make it through university and will find themselves punted to the other important department of The Harper Government, Human Resources and Development Canada, where you will find yourself searching for a McJob, welfare or worse. You may also find yourself in a much, much more serious place, a place from which you cannot escape where  you will be making fine cabinetry for $2 an hour.

You don’t want that to happen to you, right?

In the interest of preparing you for your new journey, Health Canada offers these tips to play safe:

• Drink beer only. Studies have shown that students who drink beer may only experience slight headaches and nausea after a night of fun. These symptoms can be alleviated with over-the-counter medication, orange juice, coffee and a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin with hash browns.
• Avoid any drink with a name you can’t pronounce. Absinthe and Jagermeister may sound like cool drinks but combined with Jello shots and margaritas can result in heart palpitations, gut rot and sleeping with ugly people.
• Bring your own and count your drinks. Gyrating on the dance floor and swilling from a kegger can send you into The Lost World, where rooms swirl like a Midway ride. If you can’t bring your own, bring six quarters and every time you have a drink, remove a quarter from your left pocket and place it into your right pocket. This will help you remember how much alcohol you’ve consumed. Plus, you’ll have bus fare at 2 a.m.
• Never go to a second location with a hobo.
• Beware of food prepared by inexperienced classmates. Drunk people stick their fingers in all sorts of bad places; they also forget to wash their hands.
• Always order pizza from a recognized source.
• Don’t eat anything off the floor.
• Always carry a condom. Even if you don’t get lucky, they make great water balloons!
• If you find yourself in the following situations: blackouts, in a bed with twins, in a ditch, at the police station or being rolled by homies, you may be experiencing symptoms of early onset alcoholism. This condition can limit your upward mobility unless you are considering professions such as public relations, journalism or politics.
• If you have one or more symptoms, you should give up drinking and become a Buddhist. Drinking is not your friend!
• Finally, must we say it again? Don’t drink and drive. Your parents will never post your bail, and God will never forgive you.

If you follow these guidelines, you will keep your liver safe and your dreams intact. You will also maintain your good lucks into middle age.

Failing to heed these warning could leave you uninsurable, stinky and looking like this:

Or this:

Constipation is the thief of time

On the mend from Canada Day celebrations, I was thinking that the national bird of Canada should be the mosquito.

I have at least twenty itchy little red hills on my ass and thighs. I even have a nasty sting between my toes.

Must have been a helluva weekend.

We rarely sit out at night anymore, choosing instead to try to find anything on the tube that isn’t a re-run. Bruce Springsteen was right about 57 channels with nothing on. Summer television is a wasteland of reality shows, dance-a-thons, games shows in which producers are trying to kill people, and endless re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. It’s so bad that Rogers cable has introduced a new service for viewers — your cable box now lets you know when there is some “new” on with a scroll at the bottom of the screen.

Thank God for Gordon Ramsay.

And thank God, too, for my son Stef who has delivered me from the evil of mindless programming into the arms of Link. For my birthday, Stef bought me another Zelda game, which he says should take me sixty hours, but will no doubt take me until the rest of the summer to figure out — with a cheat app I bought on my IPhone for three dollars. Scott thinks it’s hilarious that a 55-year-old woman has become hooked on role-playing games. I just think they will take me into my dottery with my thinking skills still intact. I haven’t seen any recent studies about video games staving off Alzheimer’s or dementia, but I’m saying that if you can beat a Zelda game then you can cook and chew gum at the same time.

In any event, I’m loving my birthday gifts. Scott bought me a brand new laptop, which is sitting right below my nose and aiding and abetting my blogging habit. I can avoid the dreaded main frame which is currently being used for storing tax files, old invoices and the work that I have piling up.

I also got a Starbucks gift card from a friend which I believe is a sign that I should shift my drinking habit, move from the liquor store at the Elmvale shopping mall across the parking lot and get my latte on. Time to shake myself up a little, dry out and take myself down to the doctor’s office for the tests I’ve been avoiding since last November. Not that there’s anything wrong. I just need to have the usual blood, urine and backside tests that everyone else has.

Avoiding the tests has been my way of putting off getting stuck in our universally bad health care system, which inevitably means being told I have something wrong but being unable to get whatever it is fixed before I die of old age.

Alas, I’m heading down the other end of the slide rule of life and must now be held to account for my bad behavior over the years.

I’m taking a couple of well deserved days off from the gymnasty to let all the welts heal on my ass from all the revelry over the weekend. I’ll drink a little coffee today, eat the leftover Haagen Dazs ice cream bar that Scott bought me — Holy crap, I’d forgotten what real ice cream tastes like. Really, it tastes nothing like tofu.

Then it’s back to beans and rice, salad and quinoa, as I will pursue my goal of finding out exactly what — dairy or wheat — is giving me a bad gut and constipation. Funny that topics like irregularity replace discussion of the world’s problems in an older person’s conversation.

It’s like Adam Sandler says. When you’re in your twenties, you rail against your parents, in your thirties, you want to rise up against injustice, and in your forties, you’re just hungry and want something good to eat. I’d add to that in your fifties, all you want is a satisfying poo.

And on that note, it’s off to the basement. Back to work trying to make enough money to pay for the dentist to fix that tooth I broke over the weekend.

Cheers!

Party like it was 1975

Got to bed at 3 a.m.

Give or take.

Partied long after the Jamaicans next door — and that’s a feat.

We invited friends we hadn’t seen in years, people we used to meet every Friday for beers at The Thirsty Toad. I wanted to spent this milestone birthday with my favorite people on the planet and most of them came. And you know what?

It was like we’d never been apart.

And really nothing had changed, except our relocation from the toxic oil spill, which I see is finally up for sale. It took nearly a year to dig up all that oil and fumigate the place; I’m sure it will make a wonderful spot for a family to raise their kids. Like LeBreton Flats, Chernobyl or Japan.

Hehe. Better them than us.

Anyway, we had an old-fashioned calorie-laden feast, save for some baba ganoush I whipped up. Hamburgers, hot dogs, coleslaw, potato salad and lemon cake. The spread reminded me of home. Our parents are long gone and now we are the elders, but the kids bailed long before us, and we listened to some great tunes, danced with a purloined Sumo wrestler and solved the problems of the world.

I hope your day was nice yesterday.

Today, we turn a page.

I misplaced my waist

About ten years ago, I misplaced my waist.

I may have left it on the tennis court.

Haven’t seen it for many years due to depression, melancholy, low serotonin levels, a sluggish metabolism, too much red wine, too many bad carbohydrates, President’s Choice Bingo Cherry Ice Cream, not enough exercise, apathy, Costco beef tenderloin, feeling sorry for myself, plantar fasciitis, rotator cuff injuries, tennis elbow, no money.

And the fact I have boobs that weigh six hundred pounds. Each.

Eating, drinking, inertia, old age, bad feet, genetics,

Pick one. Pick something from each category.

They are all to blame.

So about three months ago, I made a decision to start working out, as many of you know. I tried the treadmill but my foot kept blowing up. I tried the stairmaster; I kept falling off it because I have inner ear issues.

I looked at aquafit and thought, hmm, maybe. The gymnasty does have a women’s only pool. So I went looking for a bathing suit, and let me tell you, the experience was tear-inducing.  If the bottom fit, the top was too small. If the top fit, the bottom was like the bottom part of a Gladiator outfit worn by Kirstie Alley. I tried all manner of two pieces and they just looked ugly. So no swimming for me until my bottom matches my top — and that would require surgery.

I have become a hermit over the years thanks to general anxiety disorder, so classes are a no go. Everytime I’m in a room with more than two people, the adrenaline starts shooting out my ears and the top of my head blows off. That means no yoga, hot or cold, no spinning, no weird class with elastics. The only place for me was the gym and the only place in the gym for me was either with the exercise bike or the rowing machine. So I tried them both.

The bike is nice because you can just sit there and watch television. I go for Regis and Kelly, myself. The Food Network is definitely off limits. So is Ellen DeGeneris because she’s so damned funny, I would have to wear Depends to work out.

I do a half hour on the bike, then sidle up to the rowing machine, and don my wonderful IPod shuffle, which is a little clipon gadget filled with my favorite tunes by Neil Young, Blue Rodeo and the soundtracks from two of my favorite movies, I Am Sam (Beatles tunes) and August Rush (Van Morrison, classical, rock and gospel).

Just as an aside, is everyone in agreement with me on the Beatles? I cannot stand to listen to Beatles songs sung by the Flab Four anymore, but absolutely adore classic Be-ul tunes sung by other people. Just a comment.

Anyway, I strap myself into the rower and spend a half hour each day looking out the massive picture window at The Athletic Club, watching the activitiy on Industrial Avenue. Once, at the gas station, an ambulance took away an old lady. Another time, a man took his Husky up on a really high pile of dirt and the Husky tried to get down while the man stood on top. The Husky was lucky he wasn’t strangled. Yet another time, I watched a mother duck and her tiny ducklings walk across the parking lot. They looked like they had missplaced their SUV.

The rowing machine, in combination with Rose’s greatest hits on the IPod, has changed my life.

All of this to say, this week I found my waist after ten years.

It was under my boobs.

Who knew?

Blue skies, nothing but blue skies

By Rose Simpson

Now here’s a Harper announcement that’s a knee slapper as far as I’m concerned.

He’s just announced that when the Conservatives slay the deficit — the one they themselves created worth $40.4 billion — they are going to throw a bone to the middle class by allowing families to income split up to $50,000 at a cost of $2.5 billion a year!

Wow-ee-wow-ee-cazow-ee.

You know that this reminds me of?

It reminds me of people who can’t wait to pay off their credit cards so they can go on a high priced holiday or pay for a nice brand new car. Of course, they haven’t actually paid off those cards; they’re just thinking that they should.

I’m not sure if bankruptcy trustees have a name for this — it’s definitely blue skying.

Many Canadians have difficulty making rent every month, let alone figuring out how they’ll pay for their kids’ education in the coming years.

How can Harper be so confident that the deficit will be eliminated in five years?

Okay, let’s imagine that the deficit, by some miracle, is gone in a few years. Harper might not even be still around. Flaherty might have a disease of some sort. Anything can happen, right. But let’s imagine.

Income splitting would only affect Canadian families where the bread winner is making a good wage, like $100,000 to make a difference. That’s a lot of bread that person’s winning already. But how is this going to help families who are struggling with one person making $50,000 and the other making $30,000 working part-time? That’s a lot of Canadian families. These people are the working poor in this country who sell you shoes and pour your coffee or pack your groceries.

They can only dream of being able to split $50,000.

And what about all those single parent households out there, who could definitely use a tax break like that? Or what about the unfortunates who are paying child support; do they get to income split as well?

And if not, why not?

What’s that you say, Mr. H?  Single or divorced parents can’t qualify because they aren’t good enough for the Tories to pay off?

This is wrong on so many levels. It will encourage women to stay home instead of trying to get good jobs because the government effectively will be paying them NOT to work. It’s like the right wingers say about welfare people. Why get a job that pays less than welfare?

This policy proposal — yet so far in advance of the reality of the Canadian deficit — is an insult to working Canadians many of whom have to visit food banks and shop at thrift stores just to make ends meet.

It’s allowing the Harper Tories of the land more money in their pockets to pay for hockey and art supplies, or that really nice, new SUV.

I’m sure it will be popular with the Tory family compact, but it ain’t gonna fly with a lot of women and it ain’t gonna fly with a lot of seniors.

We need good jobs for both spouses, better jobs for kids coming out of school.

We need to focus on paying off that deficit and stop the Tory blue sky.

As Canadians, I think we’d all like to see this country in the black before the government opens its wallet to buy voters with their own money once again.

Single moms had nothing to celebrate on Women’s Day

By Rose Simpson

I spent International Women’s Day as I always do.

I went to the laundromat to ensure that Scott had clean clothes for work, then I piddled around the house washing up, then prepared three meals for myself, two for Scott, one for Nick.

I took Scott to work, then came home, wrote my blog about lousy cop drivers, then watched The View.

In the afternoon, I went to the gymnasty to have my butt kicked by my personal strainer who has given me four free sessions to tempt me into signing up for more. I won’t be taking personal training, I mean who can afford to pay someone $75 a hour when she rarely makes that in a week?

But, hey, a girl can dream.

I’ve been on this planet for more than half of the 100 International Women’s Days, and I can say, unequivocally, that I am worse off economically than I was three decades ago. Last year, in spite of applying for at least 100 jobs and getting 10 job interviews, I made $12,000 which includes $6,000 I received from income splitting Scott’s pension.

The last time I made $6,000 was back in 1979 when I was writing a freelance column for the Ottawa Citizen and trying to make my way in a piece work world. During the 1980s, even counting time out to have three children, I made a steady income ranging from $75,000 to $130,000. By the 1990s, I found myself in serious economic decline when I became a single parent. In my best year of that decade (1993), I made $30,000 and in  my worst year (1998) I made $15,000.

Things got even worse in the 2000 until I managed to get a poorly paying fulltime job — by professional standards — working at a national association. That job paid me $47,000 and I managed to keep it for two years before getting laid off. Helping to put three kids through university in the last part of this decade eroded whatever gains I had made, which led to the awful income tax return of $12,000 last year.

So I would say, the day after International Women’s Day, that I am not celebrating. Today, I have no job, just a few small contracts, and no retirement in my future.

I look back at my mother’s life, the life of a widow of a soldier who died in 1957. My mother’s life was sad and backbreaking as she raised three kids on her own, first on welfare, then on the salary of a factory worker. Her retirement was awful. By the time she got her pension, she could barely walk thanks to years of bending over looms in 35 degree temperatures working in a sweater factory.

I vowed not to be like my mother. I got educated and I was at the top of my game at the age of 25. Then I made the serious mistake of getting married, then divorced. Single motherhood shattered any dreams I had for a better life for me.

Now I look at my young daughter, beautiful, smart and educated. At 21, she has already landed herself a good paying job — making nearly as much as I made at my last job in my 40s. She has her own apartment, a brand new car and a go-getting attitude.

Time will tell whether she can sustain it.

I’ve already cautioned her about the allure of love, marriage and children. It’s a seductive path paved with landmines, but this path is not for the faint hearted. Marital success can reap great benefits, but marital failure can signal doom.

Motherhood — at least single motherhood, widowed or divorced — is the enemy of the emancipated woman.

Until we can figure out a way to make single motherhood work for us economically, we have nothing to celebrate.

Random thoughts on growing old

By Rose Simpson

I was asked to write a piece about seniors’ safety last week. I was not looking forward to it.

Next year, I’ll be 55, and I can hardly believe that I’m within striking distance of old age. Actually, I shudder to think that I’m actually in late middle age. There’s a great line in Postcards from the Edge where Shirley MacLaine announces she is middle-aged. Meryl Streep retorts that if that were so, then old would be 120. In my case, if I were middle-aged, old would be 110.

So late middle-aged, I am.

In researching this piece, I had the opportunity to talk to two doctors: an emergency room fella and a psychiatrist about the hazards of old age. I learned much about falling, how most older people fall from a standing position as opposed to off a roof. That a person could have a hip or arm fracture and the doctor might not see it because old bones kind of stick together. A lot of older folks get sent home from the doctor’s office with bones that are broken. Did you know that?  And they just, what?  Live with it?

I learned that the second greatest cause of emergency room visits for seniors is traffic accidents. Old people in cars? Nope. Old people getting hit walking. Doesn’t make you feel like taking a stroll does it?

There were a few other things the doctors said that I won’t be putting in the article, stuff doctors don’t normally say, but one doctor did. For example, on drinking. After working in an ER all these years, the doc has decided to stop drinking at 70 — he confessed to a love of imbibing — because drinking and being old don’t mix, not at all. He talked about a little old lady, an 85-year-old, he saw the other evening, a well-appointed little gal from a tony address who came in reeking of vodka. (yes, you can smell vodka) who had mangled her ankle. She had to wait until the next day to have an operation with no pain medication, till she sobered up. Withdrawal, and an operation! Let’s sell tickets.

An elderly friend who drinks too much went in for a hip operation and didn’t read to pre-op sheet. She drank her usual mickey of vodka the night before and ended up nearly bleeding out; she had to have three transfusions!

So much for my theory which is this: if I stop drinking when I’m 55, I can drink when I’m old. After hearing some of the stories, I’m pretty sure it’s time to quit drinking altogether. Maybe after Christmas.

I don’t like to think about getting old; it makes me depressed, which is a leading cause of suicide among oldsters, the doctors tell me. Mostly old men though, who are more likely than any other group to complete a suicide. Instrument of choice: a firearm or a bottle of pills. Thankfully, we don’t have either in the house.

If I’m going to go, I think I’d like to go in an end-of-the-world kind of scenario, where we all go together. I don’t want to go alone.

But after researching this article, I think I’ll follow all the good advice. Don’t fall, don’t walk, don’t drink.

I think I’ll just sit in my chair and eat myself to death watching the Biggest Loser.

In defence of the writer as a geezer

By Rose Simpson

Back in the 80s, I wrote a lifestyles column for the Regina Leader-Post which eventually morphed into a self-indulgent dissertation on motherhood and wifery. The column ran for seven years and chronicled my journey from wife/mom in a perfect, smart and well-heeled relationship in Regina to single mother living on crumbs in the South End of Ottawa.

When I look at those old columns now, I can’t understand why anyone would read them.

Which brings me to my topic today — yesterday’s attack on the writer Nora Ephron by Leah McLaren, the Globe and Mail’s lifestyles writer. In the column, McLaren lambasts Ephron for producing yet another book about getting old. The book, which I will buy, is called, suitably enough, I Remember Nothing. McLaren complains about the recent spate of writers like Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Roth and more, who are writing about their fears about aging and death.

On Ephron, McLaren writes: “I’m sick of hearing about how my hero — and her entire generation — is getting old. I don’t find it astonishing that Jamie Lee Curtis’s breast are saggy or Christopher Hitchens has cancer…I’m afraid in the coming years we’ll be forced to endure many more philosophical revelations about liver spots and comic set pieces about low libido.”

The fact that McLaren has spent years writing about being a smart, successful woman living in London, England, obviously, is beside her point. We, the oldsters, have had to endure reading her missives about buying shoes at Selfridge’s, remodeling her smart little house in Cabbagetown or wherever, not to mention her angst about whether to get married or continue to live in sin.

Ho-hum. Can’t, can’t, simply can’t wait for the baby phase.

And I am sure, as soon as McLaren finds a liver spot, she will not just be writing about it; she’s be dissecting it.

This, I have no doubt.

Column writing, especially lifestyle column writing is about, well, life. Nora Ephron wrote about her life as a 30 something woman who was cheated on by Carl Bernstein. Then she wrote about being a successful writer living in New York who spent much time making souffles and having smart dinner parties. Now she writes about her crepey neck. It’s what writers do.

To be fair, there are a lot of people writing about getting old — especially in the Globe and Mail. Margaret Wente, Christie Blatchford, come on down. That’s because we are boomers and there are lots and lots of us, a fact McLaren had better get used to. We don’t write for Leah McLaren, we write for other people like ourselves, the ones with the turkey waddles and the sore insteps.

Maybe Leah McLaren should find another hero, another role model, someone more her own age — someone like Gwyneth Paltrow or Madonna, aging women who still try to cram their corns into strappy Jimmy Choos, women who can’t decide between the chai tea or double espresso caramel latte.

Our generation of writers talk about our fallen arches and saggy boobs, but we also write about issues — not just about stuff.

Maybe, Leah McLaren should be her own role model.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/leah-mclaren/boomers-bodies-are-breaking-down-cry-me-a-liver-spot/article1823887/

Searching for Debra Winger

By Rose Simpson

“I am one of the happiest people I know. This may be because I don’t KNOW anyone else.” — Debra Winger.

Debra Winger has the reputation as being one of the greatest bitches that Hollywood ever produced. She famously spat in John Travolta’s general direction during the filming of Urban Cowboy. She locked snaggleteeth with Shirley Maclaine on the set of Terms of Endearment. And I seem to recall that she thought Richard Gere smelled bad.

Needless to say, not many people wanted to work with her in the 90s, and so she retired in 1995 to upstate New York to raise her kids, garden and decorate. She hasn’t been seen or heard from much since.

“I’ve had so many hurtful things said about me,” she says in an excellent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today. “But I also said what I now understand to be hurtful things. In those interviews, I was solidified as an obnoxious bitch. I wanted people to honor my process. But eventually I realized, Why did I always have to tell them that?! Always, always, always, I wanted everybody to be in on it with me, and to be as excited as I was. It was so childish. When I think of the relationships that went sour, it was because of that intensity. I had never learned to just hang with it and come in and do the work and respect somebody else’s method even though it was different. Back then, I thought everybody had to work the same way.” As for burned bridges, she said, “I’m really O.K. with the list of people who would work with me again.”

The mystery surrounding Winger’s disappearance is traced in a strange little documentary called Searching for Debra Winger, produced, directed and starring Rosanna Arquette. In the documentary, Arquette interviews famous Hollywood women who have been marginalized, or who, like Winger, have simply taken a pass on acting. In that film, as in this Times article, she comes across as a very level-headed chick who wasn’t prepared to put up with the nonsense and low art associated with making blockbuster movies.

But now she’s back, as one of the patients in HBO’s In Treatment, the superb psychodrama starring Gabriel Byrne. Talk about walking into the fire with your shoes off. Acting in this series has become a heroic exercise for those who’ve tried it, requiring the subjects to memorize up to 25 pages of dialogue for each half hour episode, then shoot each over two days.

But from what I’ve seen for far, Winger is up to the challenge. She’s very, very good. Of course, she is.

She also looks 10 years younger than she is. At 55, she’s only lightly wrinkled with no turkey neck at play. God I wish I looked that good.

For me, Debra Winger is a great role model, a woman who was able to check out for 15 years and come back as if she’d simply gone off for a mini-break holiday. It’s not easy for women our age who’ve taken time off to raise the kids. It’s probably much harder for actresses.

Gives us hope.

www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/magazine/07Winger-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine