I attended a workshop yesterday at the Blogworld & New Media Expo on writing for the over-50 market. One thing that was immediately clear was how averse people remain to the word ‘senior,’ and how we keep pushing its definition further and further up until being a senior these days means your aging adult children are about to pull the plug on you. A lot of people take offense at being called ‘senior’ and seem to think it’s literally the kiss of death. I’m not one of them. IHOP and plenty of other places offer their senior discounts at 55, and damnit, I can’t wait. Give me that 20 percent off! And while you’re at it, call me Senior! Call me old! Call me anything but a ‘boomer,’ a word that now seems to be the favorite of marketers, consumers, and everyone else who likes the broadness of it. Personally I think it sounds like baby-talk for potheads. ‘Boomer.’ One of those awful cultural creations like ‘baby bump’ and ‘eighty-two years young.’ Infantilizing us all, prolonging our adolescence into our 60s – oh, wait, we’re still boomers then. Our 70s? Maybe we’re post-boomers then. Anything, please God, but the dreaded ‘senior,’ when, we imagine, we’ll be spoon fed by nurses before they prop us up in wheelchairs and park us in the hallway for the night. Senior is an honorific. Like esquire, or doctor. We should treat it that way. We should be proud to be seniors, with our senior discounts and our senior power and, above all, our senior’s life experience. Let’s face it, if you’re thirty, I am your senior and I earned it. When I started this site it was with the clear intention of embracing age. If you like calling yourself a boomer, go right ahead. But I am not afraid of the word ‘old,’ that once commanded reverence in a culture less youth-obsessed. To me senior means you know more than I do, your wisdom is greater, your experience something to defer to. Not blindly, but with due respect. Senior is not a dirty word. Let’s clean it up and return it to its shining essence.]]>

Contrary to myth, seniors are some of the earliest adopters of new technology and can be found across the social medial landscape. The Next Web has come out with its list of the best and worst tweeters over 65: Among the best: Judy Blume (73), Roger Ebert (68) and Joan Rivers. Among the worst, for using Twitter to further their brand and being inauthentic: Barbara Walters, Larry King and Yoko Ono. Read the article here.]]>

Another fabulous movie review from Steve Hayes, ‘Tired Old Queen at the Movies.’ You can read my interview with him here.]]>

By Mark McNease Yesterday Frank and I spent an afternoon in New Castle, Delaware. It’s a lovely town not far from Wilmington, about two hours from our house in Stockton, NJ. Once a year they have a homes and gardens tour, the oldest in the country, with some of the residents opening up their historic old homes and their still-immaculately kept gardens to the public. Frank had been there before but this was my first, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. There are cobblestone lanes, the Delaware River to one side of the town, and a dozen or more very old houses. The first one we toured (a brief tour since it’s a small house) was owned by a black man whose family had lived in the house for generations. His great-great aunt was a freed slave whose attempted kidnapping for return to slavery caused the townspeople to arrest and convict the kidnappers. It was quite a story, and quite a man – he told us that he was the only African-American who opened his home for the tour, because he thought the history was important. You’re supposed to buy tickets for the tour but no one stopped us. We walked through several of the gardens, the local cemetery (I have a thing about visiting cemeteries when I’m travelling) and enjoyed all the people in period costumes. You can spend the day there, or, as we did, a few fun hours. “A Day in Old New Castle” is worth the drive and highly recommended for a spring day’s outing. See a slideshow here.]]>

I over-reacted as usual. It’s something dangerous but also admirable about me: beneath an exterior others have described, to my puzzlement, as calm all my life, is a cauldron of emotion. Some anxiety. Plenty of hair-trigger indignation – it doesn’t take much. (It wasn’t until I started making videoblogs and clips with myself in them that I saw this apparent calm others have always seen, a sort of lethargy; I attribute it in part to my roots as a Southerner, and in part to my determination very young to conceal my feelings.) I’d been waiting two weeks to find out if I’d get a job I interviewed for at my company. My boss is leaving in just over a week, and I’d been sitting in my cube every day doing precisely nothing. Okay, well, blogging, which isn’t nothing, but it’s not what I’m paid to do here. Yesterday I left early and met my friend Rick, who’s visiting from Shreveport. We got back to the apartment after having coffee and bagels, and there on my work BlackBerry was a message from my friend Denise, also an executive assistant. “So sorry to hear about the job,” she wrote. Huh? She clearly knew something I didn’t, so I called her and asked her what she was talking about. Someone else got the job I’d interviewed for and they had told Denise, no doubt thrilled to be moving to the upper echelons of executive assistantdom. That’s when the fuse reached the explosives. I emailed human resources and let them know what a mockery this made of company policy. I’ve been here ten years, she’s been here six weeks, having been hired to work for someone else. I was humiliated and insisting they initiate my severance package immediately. Then, about a half hour later, I got an email from the man who’d interviewed me. He praised my skills and experience, explained that they had hired Jean, and promptly offered me another position, assisting people I’ve known well for some time, in one case for a decade. I said I’d be delighted. While the chickens aren’t yet hatched on this job offer, the whole experience was an emotional roller coaster. I made assumptions, went quickly to my default position of being wronged, and let the indignation fly. I was wrong. I made an ass out of me and me. Today the landscape is quite different, and while I may not end up with this job, what I assumed to be true was not, and I was left once again with the lesson that waiting a few hours at least before reacting can make all the difference.]]>