Personal Energy. I am 60½ years old (and yes, I do vaguely remember when we were so eager to be credited with being older, that we asserted every half or even quarter year), and I can sometimes work 14 hours in one day on my various Internet and other computer activities, plus the things one must always do to maintain a household, feed the cats, feed the fish, clean out litterboxes, etc. Other times, however, on days when I am active many fewer hours, I am exhausted, for no apparent reason, no matter how well I eat, no matter how many vitamin pills or nutritional supplements I take.
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I am trying, only now, to remember if I ever, in earlier stages of my fairly long life — longer by far, alas, than most people in the Third World get to enjoy; and the quality of my long life heretofore has been immeasurably better than theirs — tired so easily and got so little done with my free time. I want to believe that I did, because I was always lazy, and I'm slowing down now only because I'm lazier now. But that's not true, any of it.
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My father used to accuse me of laziness, because my biorhythms, even when I was a child, made me groggy in the morning but alert in the afternoon. My father was alert in the morning, and insisted I be so too. No could do.
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He wanted me to do things, like plant tulip bulbs, early in the morning. I was actually really glad to plant tulips, but not in the morning. Can't we do it in the afternoon? NO!
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I'm writing this entry after 7am, when I've been up all nite. I was exhausted at 4pm, so lay down, and was able to function at 5:15pm. Then I was out of the house doing useful things for several hours.
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I'm active and alert now, at 7:20am. I didn't plan that. My father thought I was willful and lazy. I was neither. I was just on the Night Shift, but neither of us knew it.
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For many years — no: for decades — I accepted my father's judgment that I was lazy. Then, perhaps 10 years ago (and remember, I'm 60½ years old, so that's only 1/6 of my life away), I did an actual survey of how I spent my time. I created a fill-in table for what I do every quarter hour of the day, and printed out multiple copies. Then I wrote down in each appropriate space what I was doing at the time.
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It turned out that I was working 3 and 4 hours a day at home in addition to the 7 or so hours a day I was working for somebody else in an office. On the days when I wasn't working outside the house, I was working 5, 6, or even 13 hours a day on my computer, and additional hours every day on housework, laundry, etc. I wasn't lazy! I worked very hard almost every day! REVELATION. But I actually had to do a quarter-hour-by-quarter-hour recordation of my activities to realize that.
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Now, however, I find myself lagging. I have heard television descriptions of clinical depression, and I want not to believe that I am clinically depressed. But let's examine a few specifics.
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I have filled my house with my favorite foods. I have Japanese gyoza in the frij, and la yu (ra yu) hot-pepper sauce on hand. (Whoa! I just found out, thru mistyping, that "sauce" and "cause" are anagrams!)
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I have Indian pea-and-potato samosas in the frij, plus marmalade, grape jam, and honey to put on them. I have beef for London broil. Frozen pizza in the freezer, and anchovies to put on it in the pantry. Ice cream. Peanut M&M's and Jolly Ranchers in various flavors.
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But I don't want to eat any of that.
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Yes, it's summer, and I want to lose winter weight — consciously. But I have no appetite, and it may not just be that nature tells me to cool it as regards calories given this weather (98 F two days ago). I just have no joie de vivre right now, not in terms of appetite, not in terms of anything.
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I get a little boost when I see a beautiful man (and I did see a really goodlooking (young) guy earlier this evening, sitting at the same table as I at a real-estate seminar), but I am not moved to pounce on him nor even draw him in with my radiant smile. It's as tho I'm already 80 and dying.
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I can plan for tomorrow, and make lists of a few things I hope to accomplish in a given day, but I wake up with no enthusiasm for life.
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Is that living? Or subsisting? And how do you recapture life when it seems to have left you?
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The first thing, of course, must be to resolve to stay alive thru an awkward and atypical time. Counselors constantly, and wisely, advise: "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem." Quite so.
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I actually wake up most days eager to scan the headlines, first to find a hot word for my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website and second to settle upon a topic for my (almost-)daily political blog (which you're reading). I try to alternate between themes I touch repeatedly and issues I have never dealt with before. But, in truth, I'm not that varied a man myself. My interests are few but deep. I know a little about a great many things, but a lot about only a few. (Even so, I know more about almost everything than 98% of the general public. That is not bragging, only reporting.)
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There are other days when I simply don't want to get out of bed for hours later than I "should" ideally rise.
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My younger sister referred me to a longevity-calculator website. I filled in the requested specifics and was presented, according to that site's preprogrammed conclusions, with an anticipated lifespan of little more than 69 years — meaning I should die at most 8 years from now.
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I have been inclined to pooh-pooh any such suggestion, on the basis that no one in my family, on either side, has died before their late 70s, and my father's mother died at 95 (albeit senile at the time).* My personal experience of the world, however, inclines me to caution.
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I worked for years in a New York law firm in which one associate was a very nice man who was 67 years old. He began to tire easily, and started falling asleep at his desk. Marilyn, the receptionist, on discovering him asleep at his desk, would close his door and divert calls.
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Then, on Good Friday one year, when most people left the office early, we got a call from the police at Grand Central Station. An elderly man had collapsed and died in the Station, and the authorities needed someone to ID the body. My boss had that dubious honor, and sadly did ID our elderly friend. He was only 67.
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At least he had no lingering death, no humiliating loss of memory or bowel control. He just "kicked it" on the way home from work.
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How many of us will have such luck?
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How many will struggle thru life, then suffer progressive debilitation into utter disability?
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That's not a happy thought, I realize. But when you get old, you think such thoughts. Life becomes at once inexpressibly more valuable AND something you know you must part with. You rejoice in still living, and resign yourself to dying, at the same time.
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I have been attending school — !! — for perhaps 10 weeks, learning the real-estate business. I was abruptly fired from my job as a word processor for lawyers / legal secretary on the evening shift on January 4th, ostensibly because my JEWISH employers resented my criticisms of the political stances of SOME Jews, tho it might just have been a pretext for firing me for other reasons, such as my age (I turned 60 a mere 15 days before I was fired), sexual orientation (homosexual), gender (male, occupying a job ordinarily held by women), disability (surgery on both knees) during a period when the managing partner was in intensive care for a heart attack that might require enormously expensive heart-transplant surgery that was straining the firm's healthcare plan, etc.
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In any case, I am very happy about the change of career I have embarked upon, especially the more I get to know about the real-estate field. But I wonder if I will have the energy to pursue a late-life career.
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"Careers", rather than "jobs", ordinarily require some intensity about making money. I've never had that.
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Presently I don't care about money because I've got a lot, as I see things: in my 401(k) account; Roth IRA; equity in my house; and money in the bank from my mother's estate. Moreover, I will reasonably soon qualify for Social Security. For the first time in my life, then, I have both time (I'm not working: I was fired, remember?) and money — initially, Unemployment benefits; now savings from my mother's bequest. I recently exhausted my Unemployment benefits because I chose not to appeal my wrongful firing. Perhaps I should appeal anyway, even tho I am taking steps to change careers and don't really NEED the money. So I can do, comfortably, what I WANT to do.
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I have serious ethical problems with our present, misguided "laws" about at-will employment versus protected employment, so have not pursued rights that people who do not have my ethical reservations might have appealed for, or sued for. I'm still thinking of suing, since I suspect there were other factors than my political views at work in my firing.
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It's not that I sympathize with the "dirty Jew bastards" (my goodness that phrase rolls off the tongue easily) who fired me, but only that I believe that in private employment, people have the right to refuse to hire, to promote, or even to fire anyone they want for any reason they want, even if that be race, religion, gender, or any of that other crap which government has no right to inquire into or punish people for considering. So my principles rebuke me for even thinking of challenging an extension of my Unemployment benefits, tho they probably shouldn't. I don't know if so much as 1/20th of people who feel themselves wrongfully discharged would hesitate for an instant in appealing for a full year of Unemployment benefits after the first 26 weeks had expired. But, then, I'm not your average bear.
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No one can intimidate me. So if the "dirty Jew bastards" — I do like the sound of that, tho of course not all Jews are bastards! The ones who fired me sure are, tho — at Saiber Schlesinger Satz & Goldstein hoped to silence me by firing me from a c. $50,000-a-year job, they made a major miscalculation. All they did is embitter me against Jews, and who needs that? Much of the world hates Jews. You'd think Jews (who will gladly tell you they, e.g., Albert Einstein, are the smartest people on Earth) would have the good sense not to antagonize people needlessly. But they don't. So much for Einstein. He was the exception to the Jewish rule.
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If it were simply a contest between my will to live and the preference of Zionist Jew bastards that I die, I would of course rally to live. But at end, Jews aren't really important to anybody but Jews. Christians and Moslems could work a deal without even telling the Jews about it. The whole planet could sidestep and bypass the Jews without the tiniest bit of difficulty. Why, then, DOESN'T the whole world just ignore the Jews? Good question. Do you have an answer? I sure don't.
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My present existing-but-not-really-living is a phenomenon having nothing to do with economics. I am devoid of worry about my economic future, but I'm not particularly happy to be alive. Do you know the feeling? I'll get over it, I think. But I ask anyone else out there in a funk, Will you? If you're worried you might not, do not hesitate to seek professional help. There's no more shame in plumbing the depths of your psyche with the help of a professional than there is in hiring a plumber to replace a corroded garden-hose connection or asking an electrician to replace a wall outlet that burst into flame a week ago.
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The human race has spent thousands of years acquiring knowledge of many types, in many specialties. That knowledge is now available to us, and we don't always even have to pay for it. If we are temporarily depressed because of age, poor health, effort without emotional reward, or any other cause, we can consult a professional, and perhaps feel better afterward. Couldn't hurt.
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* A friend of mine many years ago (John B.) suggested that Alzheimer's might be "nature's way of easing the end" of life, so that one is not aware of, and thus not afraid, of imminent death.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,791.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:05 AM