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One Thing or Another Column: Not Worth the Weight
By Mark McNease
How things have changed. When I first wrote this column GLP-1 drugs were not yet ubiquitous. Most people had never heard of them, except for reports of some individuals using a diabetic medication called Ozempic for weight loss. I recoiled at the idea. I would never inject myself with something to lose weight! But then, having failed for many years to actually shed the 50 extra pounds I’d put on (twice what’s mentioned in the column), I tried it. Not surprisingly, it worked. Almost a year and half later I’m still using Zepbound, among the most popular, and I’ve lost 35 pounds. Is it forever? Is anything, or anyone, forever? I’m hoping they finally come out with the pill version that’s been promised, but in the meantime I’ve got a steady supply in the fridge.
MY AMAZING WEIGHT LOSS JOURNEY began five years ago. With great effort and dedication, I’ve managed to shed four pounds since that first fateful calorie count. How did I achieve this feat of negligible weight loss? I never thought you’d ask.
It all started with a now-defunct company called Lean Chefs. For a reasonable fee, they delivered a day’s worth of prepared food while we slept: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two yummy snacks. The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia. I would peer into the corridor first thing in the morning and there it was, a small black package at my feet, looking like something that might require a call to the bomb squad under normal circumstances. Inside it was the coming day’s food with an ice pack and an unspoken promise: eat these healthy provisions, and only these, and miracle weight loss will occur.
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One Thing or Another Column: That Relaxed Fit Time of Life
Narration provided by Wondervox
By Mark McNease
I never did buy the bicycle I mention in this, and it’s just as well. I’m sure it would have gathered dust in the garage. I walk as often as the mood hits me, but I haven’t glided down the road on a two-wheeler in a decade or so. I’m still in a relaxed-fit stage of life, perhaps more so five years later, and it feels increasingly as if I’m exactly where I ought to be.It hit me recently when I was out looking for a new bicycle. I told the young man working at the store that I was mostly concerned with comfort. I’m not trying out for the Tour de France, and I don’t imagine myself riding in that event, unlike many of the people I see zipping around the New Jersey countryside with brand names on their backs and Spandex hugging them more tightly than a human ought to be hugged. I’m just a guy who lives in the woods and wants to get my heart rate up a few times a week by circling the back roads of my rural community.
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One Thing or Another: Perchance to Sleep
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Mark McNease
A lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.
I’m an early riser anyway. I’m at my most alert and creative in the mornings, and if I manage to sleep until 5:00 a.m., I consider it a good night’s rest and I’m ready to go.
Do we sleep less because we’re older, or are we older because we sleep less? It’s a mystery for the ages, pondered at 3:00 a.m. when we’re in bed staring at the ceiling or the wall, wondering if we will go back to sleep. It’s a toss-up: sometimes we do, and many times we don’t. Something trivial or significant catches our mind like a shimmering fishhook snapped up by a grouper, and soon we know we might as well get out of bed.
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One Thing or Another Column: So You Think That Hurts?
Narration provided by Wondervox.
A lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.
By Mark McNease
Somewhere after our fiftieth spin around the sun our conversations begin to center less on our plans for the future, and more on our aches, pains, and possibly debilitating side effects of the medications many of us take. “What did you think of your weekend in the Poconos?” becomes, “Can this really cause crippling flatulence? My doctor said it’s rare.”
I never really wanted to know about sleep apnea, or bad cholesterol, or Restless Leg Syndrome. Yet here I am, finally enjoying the benefits of turning 65—Medicare card, Social Security, a near-complete indifference to the opinions of others—while I visit one specialist or another for all these ailments. Need a new CPAP machine? Have to get another sleep test! Wondering why my legs have ached for months? Here’s a prescription that probably won’t harm you in the short term. It’s also used for Parkinson’s, but I don’t have that, so no worries. It’s just twitchy, achy legs. And that cholesterol drug you’re only supposed to take for a few months? It’s been five years.
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One Thing or Another: Age Is Not Just a Number
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Mark McNease
Welcome back to the One Thing or Another column: A lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.
“Age is just a number!” How many times have we heard this uttered with grating cheer, as if getting older was just a figment of someone else’s imagination. To this way of thinking, I’m not really real, I’m a number-defying sprite whose bones, sinews, and brain aren’t in their mid-60s, but somewhere preferable, perhaps 40. I have the luxury of pretending to be any age but the one I am. I’ve always cringed when I heard this, and I always will.
Age is not just a number. Age is empirical. Age is a measurement—how many times the Earth has traveled around the sun, with me on the bridge watching it all speed by. Age is the number of years my knees have carried my fluctuating weight, and how many mornings my eyes have opened to a new day. Age is the truth, and I’m not someone who wants to hide from it with platitudes, euphemisms, and make-believe.
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One Thing or Another: Brave New Retirement
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
“What day is it?”
It took me very little time after retiring from full-time work to ask this question, common among the post-job legions. After spending years with a life organized around a work schedule, one of the first things you may notice when the schedule is gone is that you’re uncertain if it’s Monday, Sunday, or some other day of the week you used to spend punching a time clock of one kind or another. For myself, I’d invested the previous five years staffing a deli counter at a grocery story, Thursday through Sunday. I’d called it my semi-retirement job, since I only had to put in thirty-two hours a week in exchange for benefits. The main reason was to provide health insurance for myself and my husband, and I’d promised myself that as soon as he was on Medicare, I was out of there. And I was!
It’s early days for me in this less restricted life. I can go to weekend festivals again. When we take our two-night getaways, they don’t have to be early in the week, when the hotel rates are cheaper but most of the restaurants are closed. I’d enjoyed that for a long time, but now we can book a room somewhere for whatever nights we want to be there, and it’s almost an overdose of freedom.
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One Thing or Another: Reunited And It Feels So Old
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
If you’re reading this you’re probably old enough to remember the 1978 hit, Reunited, by Peaches and Herb. That song came out a year after my high school graduation, and it seems an appropriate choice now that I’ve been invited to our 45th reunion. I can’t make it this year because we’re going on our annual vacation to Provincetown. Had I been able to attend, it would have been a first: I have not gone to any reunion since leaving Indiana three days after snatching my diploma and packing up my orange Gremlin to head to California. It was a stick shift with no spare tire, but I made it across the continent, and only went back every year to see my parents until they passed away. After that, Indiana became a place to store memories, some of them great, many of them deservedly faded.
I’m not someone who insists that age is a number—tell that to my bones. Age is real. Days pass, weeks pass, years pass, and every living thing ages in the march of time. I’ve also given instructions to euthanize me on the spot if I ever say that anyone is so-many-years young. I would be mortified as well as humiliated if, should I live that long, anyone calls me ninety years young. It’s patronizing and patently false.
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One Thing or Another: Out With the New
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
As another year begins and we make promises to ourselves, if not outright resolutions, why not stop and consider the changes we don’t want to make? The things about our lives that we’re pleased to have in them: events, people, situations, even qualities about ourselves we would not change. I quite like most of my life, and while I want to lose some serious poundage for health and vanity, I can’t say there are many other things I would change about it.
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One Thing or Another: Why November?
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
November seems like an orphan month, stuck between the festivities of Halloween and the extravagance of Christmas. It’s that month when we wave goodbye to moderate weather, and say hello to furnaces and fireplaces. We watch leaves fall helplessly, their spectacular colors melting to a dull compost brown. November has a way of confirming our suspicions that nothing lasts forever. We get the tires checked or replaced, knowing they’ll soon be slipping and sliding in winter weather. We twiddle our thumbs, waiting for sleigh bells and gift ideas. November is just there, like a stretch of time spent in a waiting room. Eventually the door will open and we’ll be invited to the party, but in the meantime we’ll be reading a magazine on dental hygiene and hoping for the best.
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One Thing or Another: The Joys of Being a (Almost) Halloween Baby
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
I’m reprinting this column as an annual tradition. The pandemic changed things dramatically last year, but Halloween is back. Nothing can keep a good witch down!
October has always been my favorite month. It’s the month when autumn really makes its presence felt, especially if you live where the seasons are discernible. (It recently went from air conditioner weather at the tail end of a relentlessly hot summer, to a sudden and unexpected freeze with a 30-degree drop). It’s flu season, which is always good for a sick day or two spent lying on the couch taking over-the-counter cold remedies that do nothing to stop you from feeling like death is close by. Honey, is the healthcare directive in place? You’re sure you’ve still got your copy? And how about the will? Can I change it by tomorrow? My sister forgot my birthday, I’m not sure she deserves the belt buckles.
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One Thing or Another: Cooler Heads (Hello September)
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
I’m not alone in my preference for seasons. Most people have their favorites, and at least one they put up with because they have no choice.
I’m not a summer person, and when my time comes to buckle up and speed away from this crazy planet on whatever form of transportation the afterlife provides, I will depart having never liked the hot season. I tell myself it’s my Viking blood, although I can’t say I have any. Ancestry holds no interest for me whatsoever—and I’m adopted, so whose ancestors would I research anyway?
I’m not alone in my preference for seasons. Most people have their favorites, and at least one they put up with because they have no choice. For me it’s when we’re closest to the sun and farthest from a parka. When June arrives in earnest I know the humidity can’t be far behind, and with it the heat that amplifies its discomfort. If you’ve ever wondered what meteorologists mean when they offer the ‘feels like’ temperature, it’s the moisture, the dew point, that awful stickiness only a powerful air conditioner can neutralize, and only when you stay inside. Walk out the door on a hot, humid summer day, and that refreshing coolness is forgotten in an instant. Ovens are dryer, and at least you can make dinner with them. Speaking of ovens … don’t. When summer is blazing, my rule at home is no cooking that requires heat of any kind. It’s possibly the best thing about those record-setting hot temperature days.
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One Thing or Another Podcast: Amy Simon, President of LGBT Senior Housing and Care, Joins the Show
It’s good to be back after a short hiatus, and to have as my guest Amy Simon, President of LGBT Senior Housing and Care. Join me for a conversation with Amy about her background, her dedication to the LGBTQ+ senior population, and the vital services provided by the organization.
Amy Simon, CEO/President Amy is President of LGBT Senior Housing and Care and the founding director of the LGBTSHC program. Amy is the president of ASimonSays,LLC a WBE public and community relations firm since 2003. ASimonSays specializes in public relations, advocacy policy initiatives and reputation management for agencies, small business, not-for-profits , healthcare, manufacturing, service industries and the arts. Learn more about Amy at www.asimonsays.com