AARP didn't ask me out, so I went chasing after them

Over the last few years, I've enjoyed watching people in my age bracket turning 50 and posing for photos holding the letters they received in the mail from AARP, otherwise known as the American Association for Retired Persons.

Often they have a mock sad face and jokingly(?) lament the fact they're now a half-century old. With the crack AARP membership recruiting team having tracked them down, they suddenly feel like senior citizens.

So many of my 1980s-graduating compatriots received these letters and posted about it that I was kind of sad AARP never sent me one. Somehow I slipped under their radar and didn't get an invite to the Old People's Ball.

But then, a couple of months ago, our family switched cell phone carriers from Verizon to AT&T. The AT&T guy told us that, if Terry and I joined AARP, we could get a discount on our phone bill.

Say no more. I hurried over to aarp.org and signed us up.

And it has been great! At least for me. I'm not sure Terry cares one way or the other.

You start getting all kinds of AARP emails and newsletters with product discounts and health tips and other items of interest to persons of an increasingly advanced age.

I find all of it useful.

Best of all, after getting off to such a rocky start, AARP and I are now very close. If this was 1984, I would say we were "going together."

Sometime soon, AARP and I are going to spend a Friday night playing bingo and watching "Murder She Wrote." Then we'll see where things lead.

What can I say? I'm smitten.

There will always be someone better than you at any given activity, which is really OK (I guess)

The AI Blog Post Image Generator returned this semi-abomination when prompted with the phrase "competitive streak." It was apparently taken from the finals of the Deformed Facial Features Track & Field Championships.

When I was (I think) 10 years old, I won our city's Pitch, Hit and Run competition for my age group.

Pitch, Hit and Run is/was, as the name implies, a baseball-oriented event in which kids would be measured on how accurately they could pitch a ball, how far they could hit it, and how quickly they could run the bases.

It was around the age of 10 when I started getting bigger, stronger and faster than most of the kids in my class at school. I was an early bloomer, so I had an undeniable physiological advantage in all three phases of the game.

Winning at the city level meant I advanced to the Cleveland-area Pitch, Hit and Run held at Edgewater Park, maybe a half hour from our house. I only remember three things about that event:

(1) I didn't perform nearly as well there as I had in my local competition.

(2) All of the boys in my age group appeared to be as physically mature as me.

(3) My brother Mark took me to Cleveland Municipal Stadium after the event and we watched the Cleveland Indians take on the then-California Angels.

I didn't come close to advancing to whatever the next level of Pitch, Hit and Run was, and I do recall being somewhat disappointed by that,

It was my first taste of "big fish, little pond" syndrome, but certainly not my last.

A few years later, while I was a pretty fast runner in middle school track, more than once I ran into kids from other cities who were faster than me.

In high school track, I sometimes made it to the finals of 100 and 200-meter dashes in big meets, but rarely could I win it all because other kids were, again, simply faster.

The same held true for spelling bees, writing competitions and other events throughout high school and college where there were defined winners and losers.

At some point, I inevitably came across someone who was better than me.

Which is both a good lesson to learn and the simple reality for 99% of us. No matter what you do or how well you do it, there is only a very, very small handful of people anywhere who can say they're the undeniable, absolute best at something.

This used to bother me to no end, given my wide competitive streak. I grudgingly accepted that certain people were inherently better and/or worked harder than me to succeed, but it took me years to come to terms with the idea of actually losing to them.

I'm not a big fan of losing even now, but I hated it way more when I was in my teens and 20s, let me tell you.

All of which is to say people like me need to learn to adjust to the reality of the world or else live our lives in seething resentment of the highest achievers.

When you run up against someone with more skill than you, the best approach, of course, is to learn from them. See how they practice and prepare. Understand how they got to where they are. Identify the little things they do that set them apart.

But even then, you also have to concede that they may just be more naturally gifted than you, and there isn't much you can do about that.

As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes getting to the top of the heap simply isn't in the cards.

I was floored to discover four out of every five people in the world are younger than me

The AI Blog Post Image Generator has been doing so well lately, but when I prompted it with "How did I get to be so old?" it returned this. I can't tell whether it's spot on for today's post or simply horrifying.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a fun little app housed on the website of France's Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, which as you might imagine translates to the "National Institute of Demographic Studies."

My use of the word "fun" in connection with an organization that studies population trends may feel like a stretch. But I'm telling you, this small section of their site is interesting. They call it "The World Population and Me," and you can access it by clicking anywhere in this sentence.

(Don't worry, it's in English.)

The first thing it asks you to do is enter your age, which in my case is 54. This immediately generated a fascinating comparison between the world population when I was born in 1969 (about 3.7 billion) and what it is today (around 8.1 billion).

That's a huge increase in a relatively short amount of time, but that wasn't what really grabbed me.

What knocked me for a loop was when I clicked on "My Place in the Population."

Doing this revealed that, as of this moment, 79% of the people in the world are younger than me, while 21% are older.

I don't know what I thought those percentages were going to be, but...I'm older than nearly 80% of current humans? What??

I had to sit down for a moment.

The ratio somewhat improved when I limited it to just the United States. A full 32% of the population here is older than me, presumably thanks to longer American life expectancies vs. some other parts of the world.

Still, it does give you perspective. Maybe "too much perspective," as the boys in Spinal Tap might say.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I plan to be around for a long, long time. I don't know if that's what God is planning, but that's my expectation.

It's just that sometimes the math redefines the parameters of "a long, long time," at which point I have to sit down again.

And maybe watch an episode or two of Matlock.

Is "pirate" a viable career choice? On balance, yes.

I simply entered "pirate" into the AI Blog Post Image Generator and it returned this. I'm a fan.

(NOTE: I wrote this post in 2013. There have been several posts over the years that have made me laugh and no one else, and this is one of them. It's still probably not nearly as funny as I think it is, but it's Wednesday and I needed material, so...we're bringing this one back.)

The downside of being a pirate

• The hours. It seems like sailing the seven seas is a hard job and requires a lot of long hours. Not a problem if you really love the work, but still...
• Inordinate risk of on-the-job injury or death. There are a million ways to get hurt or get dead when you're a pirate. Like, for instance, when you try to take over another ship, you could get a sword through the gut. Or the captain could make you walk the plank. And then there's the apparently ever-present risk of scurvy. I'm in corporate communications and have never known one of my colleagues to die of scurvy, so score one for my side.
• Surly co-workers. If the movies and television are any indication, pirates as a group aren't the friendliest lot. The experts will tell you that workplace relationships are important, but I just don't see Black Bart standing around the water cooler talking about last night's ball game.
• High chance of alcohol poisoning. If you're not on duty on a pirate ship, you're drinking. And usually you're drinking rum. I had a bad experience with rum more than 30 years ago and have tried to avoid it ever since. No way I make it even a week if I'm forced to drink rum.
• Little chance for advancement. I'm not sure how the org chart looks on a typical pirate ship, but it seems that any position besides captain or first mate is less than desirable. There's just no potential for promotion for most of the crew.

The upside of being a pirate

• The travel. You get to see a lot of Caribbean islands if you're a pirate. And if you break the ship's rules, you'll get to know one particular island really well when they strand you there. But seriously, no endless days at a desk for you, me bucko!
• The potential payoff. If there's one thing pirates live for more than rum, it's gold. And they tend to find it at an uncanny rate. Assuming your captain is a fair man who evenly distributes the booty once it has been claimed, you're in for a handsome salary. Note, however, that income equity is still not a notable feature of many pirate ships.
• The wenches. There are, of course, virtually no women on pirate ships. But when you hit one of those exotic ports of call to patronize a local watering hole, you will almost certainly be waited upon by a busty server in an off-the-shoulder white top. And after months at sea, this will not be an unwelcome sight.
• The status. Pirates are much cooler than, say, accountants. Or corporate communicators, for that matter. For all the risk of death and dismemberment, there is a certain cachet in being able to say offhandedly at a party, "Yeah, I'm a pirate." And you don't have to look like Johnny Depp to enjoy this little social perk.
• The movie rights. Speaking of Johnny Depp, being a pirate means there's an excellent chance some Hollywood producer is going to want to make a movie about you, or at least he'll want to cast you in a movie, which is just as good. Pirate movies never go out of style.

Conclusion

If you can endure the constant specter of death and the poor hygiene of your shipmates, then being a pirate is a solid and even admirable career choice. You'll need to make sure you have no moral qualms about killing innocent seaman on passing merchant vessels in order to steal their worldly possessions. But really, once you get past that, everything else is cream cheese.

I recently used an honest-to-goodness print dictionary

The other day I was reading an online article that described someone as "magisterial," one of many words for which I think I know the definition but am never quite sure.

I instinctively opened a new tab on my browser and was getting ready to Google "magisterial" when I happened to glance to my right. There, sitting on the bottom shelf of the small bookcase in my office, was the 2006 edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

I'm talking about a bound, printed dictionary. Not some sort of electronic tool, but a hefty tome of more than 2,000 pages, the likes of which you could find in virtually every classroom when I was growing up.

Rather than consulting Mr. Google for the 20th time that day, I instead picked up the dictionary. And man, it was heavy. There were several pounds of words in there, everything from "a" (the logical first entry) to "zyzzyva" (which as you know is "any of the various tropical American weevils of the genus Zyzzyva, often destructive to plants").

I found "magisterial" on page 1051, just under "Maginot" and right above "magisterium."

The American Heritage people offered up three somewhat differing definitions, but only one made sense in context: "Sedately dignified in appearance or manner: 'She would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty.'"

Which is pretty much what I thought it meant, but it was good to get confirmation.

The last time I remember diving heavily into a print dictionary was in 6th grade (1981-82), when a vocabulary assignment from Mrs. Schwarzenberg forced us to crack open the musty old Webster's that sat on a small table in the Mapledale Elementary School library.

(Honestly, I think we used that dictionary as much to look up words like "penis" and "flatulence" than to decipher legitimate vocabulary words.)

Now, believe me when I say I am a champion of technology and progress. I embrace the new and innovative without so much as a backward glance when it comes to home entertainment devices, artificial intelligence, and all manner of electronic gizmos and gadgets.

But there was a nostalgic part of me that really enjoyed flipping through a print dictionary and finding the meaning of a word that had stumped me.

It was slower than Google, but in the end it had the same result and somehow felt...purer? Is that the word I want? More authentic?

It's a silly thought, I know. Who cares how I got the definition as long as I got there? What makes one method better than another?

Nothing, I suppose. I just didn't realize how much I missed 10-pound, 2,000-page dictionaries.

It made me happy that I've lugged this particular one with me from job to job and office to office for so many years.

My sister would have been 71 years old today and sometimes I can't remember exactly what her voice sounded like

 

That's Judi posing with Elissa, Chloe, Jared and Melanie in what was probably 2006 or 2007.

Every once in a while I stop and try to remember exactly what my dad and my sister Judi sounded like.

We have old video recordings of them, and of course I still know their voices. But as the years go by, it takes a little more effort to recall those sounds in exact detail.

This fall, it will be 25 years since Dad passed away, and in May it will be 15 since Judi left us so unexpectedly. That's long enough (at least for me) that their voices don't spring as readily to mind as they used to.

Which seems so strange considering they were both such important parts of my life for so long. You would think the sound of them talking would be indelibly etched in my mind.

And I suppose it is. It just takes a few extra seconds to pull it out of my memory banks.

We are blessed to live in an age when we have digital records of what our loved ones looked and sounded like. I just never thought I would need them.

Whether it's age on my part or simply the erosion of memory over the distance of years, I'm glad I can still bring up recordings of them both using only a few mouse clicks. It's a crutch I don't mind relying on.

Happy birthday, Jude.

These bobbleheads tell a story

As sports memorabilia collections go, the 24 bobbleheads (and one champagne bottle) that sit atop the cabinets in my office are exceedingly modest.

In 2015, a Canadian named Phillip Darling was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the owner of nearly 2,400 bobbleheads. And the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum in Milwaukee is said to have a collection in excess of 10,000.

So the ones I've managed to accumulate aren't all that special.

Yet they are special to me, because each one has a little memory or story attached to it.

In most cases, I acquired these bobbleheads by attending a special promotional night conducted by one of our Cleveland professional sports teams.

Nearly half were given out by the Cleveland Indians/Guardians, for example. My wife Terry isn't the biggest fan of baseball, but she was there for a few of those games.

I think my son Jared probably accompanied me on most of the rest.

An additional eight have been picked up over the years at Lake Erie/Cleveland Monsters hockey games. My favorite of those is the one depicting basketball star Shaquille O'Neal in hockey gear (if you look closely at the photo, it's the third one to the left of the champagne bottle).

There were more than 18,000 people in attendance that evening, most of whom just wanted to grab one of the 10,000 Shaq bobbleheads being given out. We were admitted early as season ticket holders, so we were assured of getting our hands on one.

The Cleveland Cavaliers account for the rest of the bobbles, including the two on the far left that honor the late (and legendary) Cavs broadcaster Joe Tait. The golden microphone there is one of two pieces in the collection with no actual "bobble" component to them, but I love it just the same.

Oh, and the champagne bottle? Jared gave me that when he was working with the Cleveland Guardians. It came from the team's clubhouse celebration after they beat the Tampa Bay Rays (his future employer, as it turned out) in a 2022 playoff series. I even have the cork.

Most days when I come into the office I don't even notice the bobbleheads, as they have followed me from job to job for many years and are just part of the scenery. But when I do look to my left and see them, I always smile a little.

That's a pretty good return on the investment of time and effort I made to get each one.

I recently had an awkward interaction that reminded of another awkward interaction

This is the very gracious Gregory L. King, President of the University of Mount Union. Or just "Greg" to those of us who are clueless and don't know who he is.

Last month I had the privilege of speaking to business students at the University of Mount Union about my career in corporate communications. I was one of several presenters representing a variety of business disciplines, and we spent the minutes before the start of the program mingling with students, faculty and each other.

At one point, a friendly guy walked up to me, looked at my name tag and said, "Hi Scott, Greg King." We shook hands and made small talk for a few minutes before I asked him what his role was at the school.

"I'm the president," he said very matter-of-factly.

Oh. The president of the university. And I had no idea who he was. Had I known his identity, I'm sure I would have called him "Mr. King" rather than "Greg." And I certainly would have been more deferential than I was.

He was clearly an unpretentious person, though, and dismissed my apology with a wave of his hand.

"No worries, I should have been wearing a name tag!" he laughed.

I have a knack for making these sorts of conversational gaffes, and I'm always grateful to be bailed out by others who – like me, I hope – will talk to anyone at any time about anything and don't take themselves at all seriously.

I was reliving the interaction on my drive home when another famous Scott mistake came to mind.

I think I've related here before how Terry and I have come to be friends with jazz saxophonist Dave Koz. Dave is one of the friendliest (and most talented) people you'll ever meet, and his annual Christmas shows are in the "must see" category for us when he comes to Cleveland.

One of the perks of knowing Dave is that his wonderful assistant, Janice, will unhesitatingly leave us two backstage passes so we can say hello to Dave and his band whenever they come to Playhouse Square.

During one of these post-show meet-and-greets several years ago, I made a point of seeking out Dave's longtime musical director and keyboardist Brian Simpson to tell him how much I enjoyed his musicianship and his arrangements of Dave's songs.

I saw him walking down a backstage corridor and called after him. Only I somehow misremembered his first name, and instead of calling "Brian!" I yelled, "Bill! Bill!"

He of course didn't turn around. Why would he? His name isn't Bill.

It took me a few minutes to realize this. I think I eventually tracked him down, but the damage had been done and I was pretty embarrassed.

This is Brian Simpson. "Brian," mind you, not "Bill."

As with Mr. King, I was reliving (and regretting) what had happened on the car ride home. Terry looked over at me at one point and saw I was making a sour face.

"Are you remembering when you called him Bill instead of Brian?" she asked me.

"Yes," I replied through gritted teeth.

Every once in a while, one of us will yell "Bill! Bill!" Usually for no reason at all.

It still makes me wince.

Most men will probably score higher than me on the Real Guy Test

The AI Blog Post Image Generator spit this out when I prompted it with "manly man." I feel like it's really hitting its stride these days!

Some years ago (12, if we're being exact), I wrote a post on this blog in which I described the Real Guy Test. This is a simple three-question quiz I created to help a man determine exactly how much of a Real Guy he is.

The three questions are these:

(1) Without asking someone else or looking it up, do you know exactly what a joist is? ("Close enough" doesn't count. You have to really know what a joist is and what it does.)

(2) Do you have, have you ever had, or do you at least have an intense desire to own a motorcycle?

(3) Do you refer to your friends as "buddies?" (i.e., "A buddy of mine runs one of those generators on the back of his truck.")

I freely admit, even as the person who came up with the Real Guy Test, that my answer to each of these questions is an emphatic "no." There is no semblance of Real Guyness within me.

When I came up with the test in 2012, it included this scoring key:

• 3 "yes" responses = If you and I get into a fight, even if I outweigh you by 50 pounds, you will beat me to a pulp.
  
  
• 2 "yes" responses = You're solidly manly and should feel confident in your male-itude.
  
  
• 1 "yes" response = There's hope for you, but you're not going to be voted Guy of the Year any time soon.
  
  
• 0 "yes" responses (my score) = What time are you coming over so we can watch "The Notebook" together?
  

If you score 0 like me, it is possible to improve over time on the motorcycle and buddies questions. You can develop a desire for a bike, and you can pick up the habit of calling your friends "buddies" in a genuine, non-ironic way.

But the joist question is a one-time only deal. You either know it the first time you take the test and get credit for a point, or you don't. You can't look it up and then later claim it as proof of your manliness. Once a 0 or a 1, always a 0 or a 1 when it comes to that question.

Even still, my score has not budged in the decade-plus since I devised the quiz. I am still a 0 and will remain a 0 for the rest of my days. I don't want a motorcycle, I still have only "friends," and even having read up extensively on joists, my explanation of their function is still somewhat shaky.

I could boost my own ego by adding a fourth question along the lines of "Do you own a light purple t-shirt with the name of French composer Claude Debussy on it?", to which my response is a proud "Yes!"

But somehow I feel that one doesn't fit with the other questions.

A life history as told through cheese

The AI Blog Post Image Generator created this boy. I like how he looks AND how it rendered the cheese. I make fun of the AIBPIG a lot, but let's give credit where it's due. Nice job this time around.

When I was growing up, the only cheese you could be sure we had in the house at any given time was Velveeta, and I'm more than willing to concede that Velveeta isn't even cheese. Wikipedia refers to it as a "cheese analogue," which is wrong on many levels.

Still, being a cheese-like substance, Velveeta counts for purposes of this discussion.

In my earliest years of cheese awareness, the only time I ate Velveeta was when my mom sliced it for me and included it in my lunch. I was too little to peel back the foil covering and lop off chunks for myself using a knife.

By the way, it was only when I married Terry that I became aware cheese slicers like this one (which I could have used for that Velveeta) existed:

Mom would buy other kinds of cheese from the Fazio's deli from time to time, but my memory of exactly what kinds and how often is spotty. I just know that this sliced Fazio's cheese was the first kind that was truly self-service for me, as it didn't take much effort to open the deli/cheese drawer in the refrigerator, take out the cheese, unwrap it, and grab some for myself.

I'll bet it was American cheese or something like that.

As I got older, I expressed a clear preference for three types of easily obtainable grocery store cheeses (in roughly this order of preference):

• Muenster
• Swiss
• Colby

Being the youngest child (and essentially an only child, with my older siblings having moved out), my food preferences had a huge effect on Mom's grocery shopping habits. I generally got whatever I asked for when it came to food. Thus, Muenster, Swiss and Colby were the cheeses of choice at 1807 Harding Drive.

I remember one New Year's Eve (I'm guessing it was either 1980-81 or 1981-82) when I developed a huge craving for Swiss cheese. Conveniently, we had a half pound of it sitting in the fridge just waiting for me.

So I ate the whole thing.

I downed that half-pound of cheese in something like 15 minutes. And being a young but growing boy, I felt just fine afterward. I'm sure I washed it down with Kool Aid or something similarly sugary.

Sometimes Mom would also buy those half-circle blocks of Colby wrapped in clear plastic. These were a pain compared with the deli-sliced square cheeses in that you had to use a knife to get yourself some, but it tasted so good.

As I got into high school and college, the cheese situation pretty well solidified around Muenster and Swiss. You could always count on finding those two varieties and a heapin' helpin' of Dutch Loaf lunch meat in the kitchen any time you wanted a sandwich.

After Terry and I married, I feel like my love of cheese waned somewhat, and I'm not sure why. She would buy my preferred cheeses when I asked, but for whatever reason I didn't care for them as much as I had as a preadolescent and a teenager.

It has gotten to the point nowadays that the only cheese I eat is Weight Watchers mozzarella sticks, which I like both for the taste and the fact they're only 2 WW points each. They're probably stripped of all nutrients, though, and while I enjoy the flavor, I'm sure they don't taste anywhere near as good as that New Year's Eve hunk o' Swiss so many years ago.

Still, there's no denying that cheese in general is relatively unhealthy, what with all the fat and calories it contains.

I know a lot of people would say, "Oh, just eat the cheese. You're not going to live forever anyway, and life is all about enjoyment."

And maybe they're right.

I even find myself hankering for a slice or two of highly processed, factory-produced, cheese-adjacent Velveeta every now and again.

Cheese nostalgia, it turns out, is a real thing.

I realize everyone is winging it to one degree or another, but...

One thing I wasn't told as I was growing up is the fact that no one is going to teach you most of the stuff you do in life.

What I mean is, when you break down your day hour by hour, most activities are things you kind of picked up on your own, or that you're just plain faking your way through.

At least that has been my experience.

I think I had some vague notion as a child that, much as my teachers were already doing for me in school, some unnamed group of people was going to take me aside at some point and explain in detail how to do my job, how to own a house, how to raise kids, etc.

Oh, I got small pointers here and there. And I had great examples to learn from in my parents.

But when it comes to the minutiae of life – personal and professional – by my mid-20s I had reached the horrifying conclusion that I was pretty much on my own when it came to figuring stuff out.

In retrospect, school wasn't teaching us how to do things. It was teaching us how to figure out how to do things.

I wish I would have known that at the time.

Even though I now have a clearer picture of how things work (or don't work), I still get uneasy when I think about all the stuff I do for which I was never really given any instruction.

Job-wise, I went right into the newspaper business without having been taught how to write like a journalist, how to think like a journalist, how to gather facts like a journalist, etc. I just kind of...did it, admittedly better some times than others.

Later on when I moved into corporate communications, I jumped in without a real understanding of what I was supposed to be doing.

Being married? Having kids? Still learning.

Writing? Being a public address announcer? I am doing these things without the benefit of even a single person sitting me down and saying, "OK, here's what you want to do. Step 1..."

And I am in no way unique in this. Many, many of us have this uneasy feeling that we missed some important meeting or class along the way where a lot of vital life information was taught.

But there wasn't any such meeting, nor does anyone offer such a class.

We have collectively been thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim.

Remarkably, most of the time we manage to do it. Or at least we manage to keep our heads above water.

Which is really the same thing.

It's "Groundhog Day," not "Groundhog's Day"...and other unimportant considerations for February 2nd

By Chris Flook - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80320762

We've already established the proper name of today's holiday in the headline, and we're all rational people who do not believe the weather is in any way influenced by Marmota monax seeing – or not seeing – his/her shadow.

So we'll mention neither of those things.

Instead, I offer up these three items:

• Something you almost certainly knew that I didn't (or else I knew it at one point and forgot) is that the terms "groundhog" and "woodchuck" refer to the same animal. This caught me off guard. It made me wonder how much hog could a groundhog hog if a groundhog could ground hog? But then I stopped wondering that because it made me feel uncomfortable in an Urban Dictionary sort of way.
  
  
• I feel obligated to mention the 1993 Bill Murray movie "Groundhog Day," so I'm doing it here. Specifically, I point you to a video I posted on this blog three years ago that answers the question, "How many times did Phil Connors (Murray's character) have to relive Groundhog Day in the movie?" Here's a direct link to the video on YouTube. I won't reveal the answer, but it's way more than I originally thought.
  
  
• Speaking of the movie, the idea of a never-ending Groundhog Day is painfully appropriate for those of us living in Northeast Ohio or similar four-season/temperate climates. By this point we're mostly sick of winter, and there's no indication it's going to end any time soon (Pennsylvania Dutch superstition notwithstanding). We've had measurable snow in early May, for crying out loud. Do you think we're feeling hope on the 2nd of February? We are not. At least the holiday now acknowledges that, thanks to Bill Murray.