Friday, September 03, 2004

I don't understand (but I want to)

I noticed after doing a profile, and taking a look at it, there are links to profiles of people who share the same interests, favorites, etc. And again, I noticed everyone who posts an age seems to be younger than me. Now, I don't think I put an age on my profile because it seems more consistent with the title of my blog, but I will say here that I am 44 years old, and will be 45 in October. So, are those of us in this age bracket not reporting our age,or do people my age just not do this kind of thing? Am I again poking around in a venue not meant for me? One of the things I have promised myself as I grow older is to remain curious about new things, and not to say, well, that doesn't mean anything to me or I have no interest in that. Of course, there are some things I really have no interest in, but I never want it to be just because it's new or different. One of the best, most useful things I learned in high school was from one of my art teachers. We were going to a gallery or something, and he told us we shouldn't say we didn't like something, because he said maybe we didn't know yet whether we did or didn't. Instead, he advised us to say, "I don't understand that." When I remember that, it serves me well in life.Thanks, Mr. Hoover.

2 comments:

Dana Watson said...

Hi Mary!

My advice for proofreading blog entries, aside from just reading them over (which is often easier to do when they've been posted, and then you can go back and re-edit them), is to type it in Word or something first, and run spell check. It doesn't catch everything, but it catches some things. It's what I did in Japan, back when Blogger had a tendency to eat posts without actually publishing them.

Also, it seems to me that once you graduate from college, age has very little to do with the people you identify with. Age matters a lot when you are still in school, because each year differentiates a person's experience so much, but "post-college" seems to be what the age category becomes after that. My friend Danola was nearly 10 years older than the rest of us in Japan, but she seemed the same age. She says it's partly because she acted younger, and partly because we acted older than our respective ages, but in the end the only thing that mattered was that we were all at the same point in our lives, regardless of the background we were immediately coming from. We were all at a point of change, living in a culture not our own, doing the same job, and age had nothing to do with our identifying with one another.

Be friends with the people you like, and like the things that interest you, regardless of where the demographers would like to put you.

Mary said...

Thanks, Dana. I did go back and edit the published posts (although I still can't make new paragraphs.) You're right, of course. I have always had friends & acquaintances older & younger than me, and it was dependent more on circumstances than age. However, there are real frustrations at this point due to a certain "nebulosity" (my new word.) Of course, there are joys and surprises too, and that's the major theme I hope to explore in this blog.