Status Update: Busy Is How My Age Is Meant to Feel

Back when the real baby-boomers (as distinct from those of us who came along at the end of the demographic generation, and were more like baby-busters) were in their fifties, a popular song went, "If you don't look ahead, nobody will! There's no time to kill!"



Ever since then I've been observing my generation, and what I notice is that--actually it seems to span the years between forty and seventy, with some people, like Grandma Bonnie Peters, extending it to and past age eighty--the feeling that "there's no time to waste" is to fifty-somethings what the feeling of "in love" is to twenty-somethings. If we don't feel that way, something's wrong.

So, pulling out of this week's Glyphosate Awareness chat with some major breaking news for this week's Newsletter, I have left to do, in this week's online time:

* Another 10,000-word e-book

* This month's Zazzle project (and what about the Glyphosate Awareness postcards for other States?)

* Catch up on Goodreads book reviews (I actually wrote a long book review while eating dinner on Sunday, and eventually I'll probably make the time to post that too)

* Review an e-friend's latest e-book, which I read, and which won't be easy for me to review considering that I am and most of my e-friends are outside its target demographic, but it was beautifully written

* E-mail someone who's most active in real life, about a real-life project

* Two more "real" posts on this web site

* The Newsletter

* Try to read the Twitter feeds of everyone who interacts with me on Twitter; this cannot be guaranteed

* Try to read at least the individually typed e-mails; this cannot be guaranteed, either

* Also, take time out of scheduled online time to rent and set up this winter's real-world store

* Also, take more time out of scheduled online time for the Friday Market, unless it's raining

* Also, follow up with some real-life reporting on the residents of the retirement project being able to get help cleaning their flats after simple food poisoning episodes: they're claiming that some sort of bureaucratic snafu is keeping them from getting the housecleaning help to which everyone's been told they're entitled, free of charge, which is why their children/nieces/nephews aren't doing it.

Plus the usual October stuff when I get home, and oh yes, at some time this week I'm supposed to sleep, but that's only penciled in. The thing about going online from a cafe is that when you're busy you drink a lot of coffee, and then at the end of the day when you go home and you're still busy and you're a light sleeper anyway, you tend to forget to sleep. And the thing about that is that, although you can still pull an occasional all-nighter after age 50, it's easier to reach the point of adrenal exhaustion and harder to recover.

One cure for feeling busy is delegation. Middle-aged people I know check in with one another. Well, one real-world acquaintance was feeling too busy minding a store, so person sold a half-share in the store, then used the money to invest in something else that takes even more time and energy. That's about the only person I know who is between ages 45 and 60 and isn't absolutely frazzled by the demands of parents or children or, for a lot of us, both at the same time.

When seriously looking for someone to delegate something to, which fortunately I'm not, this week, we look at the supposedly retired sector of our demographic generation, the Real Baby-Boomers who are in theory too old to work. I mean, they've quit their jobs, sold their businesses, and Settled Down to live on Social Security. I talked to a few of them this weekend--fortunately not about working for me. Well, one of them's looking for a new store, and one has the fall clean-up to get done, and one's looking for a part-time job, and one's taken a new part-time job...

Busy. Busy. Busy. That's the way middle-aged people are. But it's the way we're meant to be. We have to do all those things we want to do before we become too old to do them, so there's no time to lose. (I didn't even mention my fear of not living long enough to knit up all the yarn in my wool room...I'm resigned to the fact that if I kept the use of my eyes and hands to the age of 150 there's no way I'd knit up all the patterns, but that's not a problem since the pattern hoard is mostly for prospective knitted-stuff-buyers to choose from anyway.) If someone forced us to slow down, we'd howl. If you know a middle-aged person who is not busy, something is probably wrong with that person.