Live Fast, Party Hard, Die at 100

Here’s an interesting Yahoo article that confirms something I’ve long suspected: that people my age can expect to live a lot longer than the current 80-year average. A Stanford University biologist gives information about anti-aging treatments that may come on the market within the next decade or two that will likely increase the average age of death to 100 years. Personally, I believe that by the time I die, it will be more like 120.

This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, along with running low on oil, this is going to cause major, unavoidable, permanent changes to our society—to our whole civilization. Will we still retire at 65? That would leave forty whole years to pursue hobbies. That’s almost like another whole lifetime. And if the retirement age gets pushed back, due to people being fit to work for longer, I think we will see a shift in the kinds of work people do. Plugging away at a career your heart isn’t into for 20-30 years is one thing; but 40-50 years? Half a century to delay your dreams until retirement? I don’t see people putting up with that.

People already change jobs, even careers, a lot more than they did when the Boomers were children (a period everyone seems to collectively agree is the “real America”). Living an extra 20-30 years will probably have the greatest effect on the work lives of Generation X and the generation after us, because we are old enough to have ingested the “work til you’re 65, then retire” meme, but young enough to where the therapies will be available while we’re still working. What will we do? With our solid grasp of technology, will there be an even bigger push towards workplace flexibility? Will we look at our longer lives, and choose to be more fluid in our priorities? Will things like gap years and extended parental leave become the norm? Or will we still rush to get to college, rush to graduate by 23, rush into a career, and just be good little cogs for even longer?

Another interesting aspect of this is how it may affect women. We already live longer than men, but in our society, we become more invisible as we age, especially past menopause. It’s true that Boomer women are changing how older women are seen, just like they’ve broadened the experience of everything they’ve already gone through. But massive problems have nevertheless been left in their wake. Young women are still seen by society as “past their peak” appearance-wise at 25, and automatically less worthwhile; and 30 is practically “old”. Will what is considered the most attractive age finally rise to more realistic numbers? And menopause—will it come later, vastly increasing the fertile years and the childbearing-age population? Or will it stay around 50, which will then become only the halfway point of a woman’s life, leaving five whole decades free for other things?

One hundred years is a long time to put up with being judged, dismissed, and legislated against. Will women face down a 100-year battle with sexism and finally demand to be treated as equal human beings for their whole lives? Or will they still be perceived to peak at twenty, and just have an 80-year decline, instead of a 60-year one?

We will inevitably see.

Does President’s Day Still Matter?

From Rude Pundit’s article:

“At the end of the day, President’s Day, if you will, George Washington would fuck Bush’s shit up because he placed the Constitution above all else, and he saw the Constitution as the will of a people. As the current administration callously manipulates the document, as if it has some fine print only it can discern through use of secret fluids and strange lenses and unholy alchemy, maybe we can remember that there was a time when a belief in the Constitution wasn’t quaint or that the laws themselves weren’t an impediment, but a means to greater ends.”

Amen, MF.

What I’m Reading

Courtesy of the Edinburgh Public Library:

Daughter of the Forest, Juliet Marillier

This is a really good read. It’s the story of a young woman who must perform an unpleasant magical task to save her seven brothers from an evil enchantment as swans.  It’s a long book, and in some places could have been tightened a bit; but the narrator’s voice is believable and her choices are understandable. The portrayal of Medieval Ireland is interesting, if brutal in parts, and the magical scenes in the story are handled in a surprisingly realistic and convincing way. Plus, the love shared between the sister and her brothers is palpable. My only real complaint is a seeming dropoff of the plotlines at the end. Perhaps this is due to the book being the first in a series. I will likely be reading the next two installments.

The Queen’s Fool, Philippa Gregory

I read her book, The Other Boleyn Girl, at the hostel during my recent trip to London. That book was dark, convoluted, full of unexpected twists and unforgettable images. This one follows the same “woman in Elizabethan court” formula, but it isn’t as gripping. I never got sucked in and forgot I was reading a book, like I did with the first one. This one’s was a bit more thin, yet in some places more gruesome and sad, making it somewhat of a hard read. And I didn’t agree with very many of the choices the narrator made, causing me to never have the respect for her that I did for the protagonist of Boleyn Girl. If you read a book by Gregory, read that one.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (first four books), Douglas Adams (reread)

The Cartoons…You Know the Ones

This post was originally written in the comments section of a post on AMERICAblog. I’ve debated whether to put it up again here, because it’s hard to take a stand about such an inflammatory subject. It’s easy to be convinced that you know nothing about a topic, just because you can’t know everything. But nobody knows everything, not Muslims, not Danes. Bullshit is bullshit, and it’s time sanity came back in vogue.

First is the comment that provoked my response, and next is my response:

Muslims have become the latest group to hate…remember the anti-Jewish cartoons printed in the Nazi press?

I don’t like ANY religion…it’s the racism, oppression and imperialism against brown people that I cannot swallow.
Damn your eyes | 02.08.06 – 8:14 am

No, fuck no.

I’ll be damned if I’ll sit here and listen to myself get called a racist for disagreeing with hypocritical crybabies. I don’t give a flying fuck if Muslims appear to be a different race from me. I didn’t look down on them, for their religion or their race, before 9-11; and I made sure that I didn’t after 9-11. I made a POINT not to be racist, when it seemed like the knee-jerk reaction. And now, when a bunch of misogynist, homophobic men throw violent tantrums over a CARTOON, I’m supposed to be “racist” because I feel contempt?

The vast majority of these men believe in a religion that would see me dead, not because I am a criminal, but simply because I am an outspoken, bisexual, educated liberal female. I would be stoned to death in their society, for things that my country fortunately still protects my right to do. If the West is the Great Satan to them, I am what they believe to be the most vile result. And I’M the bigot?

I don’t agree with all that that Michael person said, and I certainly don’t think he should have slid into name-calling. But for heaven’s sake, stop acting like he’s some mindless white supremacist. When I look at these particular protesters, I do see very backwards, primitive individuals—people who have not been raised to respect others’ right to even exist, let alone disagree. People who have moved to foreign countries, and raise hell at every offense, then act like the original residents ought to change to accommodate them. That’s what I find primitive—not how anybody looks or what they call G-d. It’s not racist to say that this current behavior is backwards. It’s a dangerous slope we’re on if we can’t admit that.

I lived 30 minutes from Marseille during the French riots, and the other females and I were not going out at night, even with our male friends. I remember how that felt—to feel trapped inside your home in fear, fear of violence from people who were often newcomers to the country, no better than you. I felt, up close and personal, a small taste of what it must feel like to be a female or other non-straight-male in that culture. No, I don’t have much respect or sympathy for the rioters. When they learn to treat their own peers decently, then they can worry about how their host countries act.

And no, I do not think this is “Bush’s fault”, not this time. He might have fanned the flames, stupidly or purposefully. But this double standard is built right into the protesters’ fundamental belief system. These beliefs were around before America was even a country. Should we be more “sensitive” to it? What, precisely, would that accomplish? On this blog I see countless exhortations to the Democratic leadership to stand up to Republican violence, fearmongering, and general bullying tactics. But when it comes to violence from people who happen to be Muslims, we’re supposed to fall all over ourselves to rationalize it, and assume we deserve it, because other white people have done things to them that you and I wouldn’t condone?

Sorry, no. Bullies are bullies. If you don’t stand up to them, even just by refusing to be controlled, you regret it eventually.

And before anyone gets the impression that I think something I don’t:

I’m against the war(s) in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. I’m against America’s disrespect and bullying of other countries. Muslims are not by any shot the only dangerous fundies, and religion is not the only problem in the world. Violence fucking sucks, period, even if it temporarily feels good. I’ve been in a riot. It was fun. But I was 13. I wouldn’t do that now.

Certainly not over this.

Didn’t Take Me Too Long

I’ve spent the last couple of days uploading all my recent photos, not only from my week in London and subsequent trip back down to southern France (to get the rest of my things), but also a small quantity of images taken the first day Rance and I got to Paris last August. I’d apparently put them on his computer back then, but not my own. After my recent 2,000-photos-erased disaster (back up your images before you mess with iPhoto!), I was scrounging for replacement pix wherever I could find them, and I ran across those. I like them, and they have a novelty to me since I haven’t seen them since last fall, even though I took them.

As I got them ready to put them on the blog, I felt again the emotion of last August, the arrival in Europe again after years of missing it and months of difficult preparations for it. I remember being in Paris again, the excitement of being in such a familiarly beautiful city, yet seeing it for the first time through Rance’s eyes. And I remember the feeling of eagerness to go down to southern France, and get this study abroad year started.

Anyone who’s read this blog’s archives will know that things didn’t go the way I thought they would. There’s no way to point blame at any one thing, of course, though I do wish certain people had behaved differently. I wish I hadn’t gotten sick, hadn’t had problems with my hosts, hadn’t had such a tremendously difficult time with the money. There is a lot of sadness in me about how things turned out, especially when I consider the eagerness for the adventure that I felt in the beginning, in Paris, and on the train down. But the disappointment is just one level. Peel a layer back, and I find an enormous awe in me, for the things I got to do and see, the people I got to meet, the changes I went through inside. There’s nothing quite like knocking about a beautiful, exotic part of the world with great new friends, literally watching as positive changes take place inside you. Watching as you become more of the person you always wanted to be. In that respect, my study abroad experience was perfect.

Yes, I was pretty ill, and yes, I discovered just how aggravating it can be to struggle to get the simplest things done in a sometimes-frustrating foreign place. And it’s true, I had a lot of anger towards some of the other Americans I had to deal with on a daily basis.  They did suck. But it’s official: I miss my time in Aix-en-Provence last fall. I miss my friends and the silly, scary, challenging situations we got into. I miss the feeling every day that I was doing something remarkable—studying art in Provence, living abroad for a year, in a gorgeous country where I barely spoke the language.

I’m not saying that I’m sorry I left. I’d had enough. I’m glad that I got to think, until the very end, that I’d be there for a whole year, because I approached it differently than the semester-long people did. I truly lived like a resident. But I’m also glad it ended when it did. It was wearing me out, physically and emotionally; and it wouldn’t have been the same this spring, with all my friends gone back to the U.S. Even so, I look back on last autumn with amazement and a feeling of wonder, that I got through that, and that I got to do it in the first place.

10 Things That I Don’t Miss

1. The blaring, blinding, always-in-your-eyes Provencal sun
2. Pushy, ogling southern-French/Mediterranean men
3. “Sloppiness-is-creative” art types
4. My 45-minute walk to class at Marchutz
5. “Fritches” (French bitches, classic definition)
6. Only having internet access during business hours
7. Rich American study-abroad students who only wanted amusements to consume…including some insufferable guys who took advantage of the 10:1 female-to-male ratio at school, and played girls off one another
8. French drivers: the worst I’ve ever seen, and I mean including Atlanta, Richmond, and Washington, D.C.. These folks put cars where cars should just not be.
9. Repeated blood tests
10. Stuck-up tourists that came to Aix on the weekends to shop, looking down at you like you were a serf because you didn’t have six designer shopping bags in each bejeweled hand (and who used said shopping bags to clear paths for themselves on narrow streets)

10 Things That I Do Miss

1. How everyone says “Merci, au revoir” to the driver when getting off the bus
2. The funky techno that my hot French neighbor always played (I never did get up the nerve to go ask him what it was, alas)
3. Olives, salty peanuts, and kir cassis at a little table in my cafe…nevermind the damn pigeons
4. The whooshy sound of trains in the Paris Metro
5. Rounding a corner and coming across another fountain, one you’ve never noticed before
6. All my classmates had one of the same three ringtones, so when one phone would ring, 10 or so people would grab for their bags
7. Maisons Du Monde–like Pier 1 Imports on gel-tab acid…cheap, too
8. Real baguettes and pain au chocolat from la Crousti’s
9. The half-chime, half-woman-singing avertissement when a train was approaching a station
10. My study-abroad friends, the sense of camaraderie and in-this-togetherness

Heavy-Handed Spin, #1,043

Reading a quick article on Yahoo News about what the Oscar nominations could mean about American culture. It was interesting to note a bit of irony. The running opinion of the piece seemed to be that the most-honored movies were doing a service by bringing up for discussion heavy political and cultural topics:

“Even a film that steers clear of geopolitics, such as ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ carries a pointed nod to real life when it references the 1998 beating death of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man in Wyoming. It is being lauded, even by detractors, for confronting the issue of the personal costs of making life decisions on the basis of social norms.”

Don’t get too excited, Yahoo hasn’t reached enlightenment or anything. Someone apparently thought that, in order to be “fair and balanced” (like Fox News), the article needed to report what a pinheaded thug thought of the films.

The requisite red-state-appeasing sheep’s-baa came from one Michael Medved, whoever that is:

“This year’s nominated films, he says, show that the industry continues to grossly ignore the interests of the vast majority of moviegoers. ‘This year’s films are more likely to acknowledge their bias or their agenda,’ says the syndicated talk show host. ‘That’s a good thing.’

“But, he adds, the industry’s preference for what he calls left-wing politics, in everything from Middle East policy to promoting alternative lifestyles, is not. Nearly every film on the Oscar list has done poorly at the box office, Mr. Medved says, underlining the fact that the vast majority of America is not interested in them.”

Yeah, right-wingers represent “Real America”. And that’s why Bush’s job failure rating is at 54%. Is it a mandate yet?

“‘It would make good sense if they would green-light something with a different point of view,’ he adds.”

It would make even better sense if bigots would just come out and acknowledge their bias and agenda. But even if they don’t, it’s still obvious. The dismantling has begun.