I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (19 page)

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I would try to come up with one memorable code but not: 123456, 12345678, or Password, Pussy, or Baseball. A successful hack of millions of Yahoo accounts on July 12, 2012, revealed that’s what the majority of people use as passwords.

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In January 2012, under pressure from Disneyland Paris park employees who insisted on keeping their goatees, Disney gave up its no-facial-hair policy.

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In 2009, when Eileen Fisher announced she wanted to target younger customers, a lot of women over fifty were pissed off! Incidentally, American women over fifty spend more than $25 billion a year on clothes. We also have more discretionary income than any other demographic group. Why’d you break up with us, Eileen?

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In February 2012, iVillage published a survey indicating two-thirds of married women prefer Facebooking to sucking face, or any other sucking, for that matter.

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“Boomeritis” is an officially recognized medical term coined by an orthopedic surgeon in 1999 for injuries boomer-aged people get when they exercise as vigorously as when they were younger. I spent six months in “the boot.” The boot has become something of a status symbol, a middle-age must-have accessory—it’s an advertisement of your virility.

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It’s been widely noted, but is always worth repeating, that Anne Bancroft was only six years Dustin Hoffman’s senior when she played his seductress in
The Graduate
.

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If you’ve ever wondered if the fact that the majority of computer programmers are male actually affects your life, consider this: “exfoliant” is not listed in the Mac dictionary.

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I am always suspicious of anything labeled “wellness,” a term that has grown to encompass everything from regular exercise to meditating on abundance.

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Neither “injectables” nor “bioidenticals” is in the Mac dictionary either.

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When I started writing this chapter, studies showed that middle-class Americans will spend $235,000 on average raising a child, and that excluded college tuition, but by the time I finished writing it, the cost had risen to $241,000.

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I’d also have a lot more money today if I could just get back the dollars I wasted on groceries, magazines and assorted toiletries I bought while trying to disguise my tampon purchases when I was a teenager.

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“Cosmeceutical” isn’t listed in the Mac dictionary, but in this case, I like to think that the brilliant minds at Apple just drew a line in the sand at this nonsense.

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Urban Dictionary says both “ka-ching” and “cha-ching,” my son’s preferred pronunciation, are cash register sounds. For the record, “ka-ching” has over four million more Google hits than “cha-ching.” Ka-ching, baby!

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Evolutionary biologists have even called this the “grandmother hypothesis,” wherein females, no longer fertile, survived because of their usefulness in raising young children. Wouldn’t you just know it, even middle-aged
Homo habilis
females were struggling to remain useful and visible in society.

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Suggesting to him that teenage pregnancy isn’t the
worst
thing that could happen is probably one of the most egregious age-related parenting faux pas I’ve committed to date.

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If you are intent on furthering the canard that forty is the new thirty, you’ll need to do better than the blank stare I gave my son when he inquired what kind of computer I brought to college with me.

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The brilliant Lena Dunham, who appears to disdain even remotely flattering clothing when she deigns to dress at all, is often photographed in rompers.

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I should have recognized this truth at least ten years ago. That I failed to see this is no doubt an age-related delusional fantasy propagated by repeated exposure to the “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better” Clairol commercials in the seventies.

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Recent studies say that 65 percent of grade school kids today will go into professions that haven’t been invented yet. I take pride in having succeeded in making the perilously unpredictable acting profession look unattractive enough that my son appears to be inoculated against becoming a thespian.

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Don’t even get us started on the pattycake-playing French cats.

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This is the same venue where Julia Roberts hooked her way into Richard Gere’s heart in
Pretty Woman
.

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The W Hotel chain, with its hipster appeal, uses a micro-mist diffusion system to infuse the atmosphere with a scent that’s uniquely calculated to encourage the spending of lots of dough. W’s scent, named Bling, calls up champagne, stainless steel and sex. Perhaps they harvested wrist sweat from Sean “P. Diddy” Combs during a VIP event and worked from there.

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Because very little in the way of updating has been done, my house provides visitors with ample opportunity to enthusiastically celebrate its “good bones.”

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I have friends who work as massage therapists. They tell me hotels are usually staffed by novices who’ve recently become licensed and receive low wages despite the whopping hotel fees. I feel like I should offer the attendant a foot rub or at least a cut orchid.