In the sky! It’s the blog signal!

A month from now, I’ll be the guest speaker at the annual dinner of retired Sherbrooke Hospital nurses. I’m not bragging but around here, that makes me kind of a rock star.

I never know what to talk about at these functions because I truly have no expertise other than “faking one’s expertise.”

“What do you want me to talk about?” I asked the organizer as I always do.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just be funny!”

Funny. Nurses. Retirees. Short of dazzling them with my array of catheter jokes, it’s a tall order.

So I’ve decided to talk about aging. Not the aging nurses because, well, I have no expertise in aging nurses, despite what my browser history says. Instead, I want to give them a sort of state-of-the-union address on the new middle-age — how people like me are doing, specifically people like me who will be looking after people like them. I’m thinking they should probably be terrified.

To help put my finger on the zeitgeist (something else in my browser history), I’m reaching out to my bloggy friends, specifically those of you in your mid- to late forties or early fifties, you Gen Xers:

How are you feeling?

How are you feeling about getting older? Are you fretting? Obsessing? Do you think aging is something that only happens to old people? Have you started giving up everything fun? Do you wake up every morning, look next to you and say, “Oh. Hello, death.” Do you no longer care how you look in a bike helmet?

Are we aging better or worse than previous generations? Are we destined to remain obstinately immature?

If you have any thoughts I can tap into, leave them in the comments. Or if you’ve written about this or plan to, link me up. Thanks in advance. You old fogies, you.

P.S. I created the Blog Signal out of one stolen graphic and added another stolen graphic. That’s how art works. So feel free to steal the Blog Signal and use it the next time you need help from your bloggy friends.