How Not To Act Old

If you’re on Facebook (and I hope you are) you can now send all your friends gifts to help them not act old.  Perhaps it’s grinding lessons they need, or a tramp stamp.  A nice total body wax — hey guys, have you never heard of manscaping? — or a couple hits of virtual ecstasy.  It’s all right here:

Just be sure that you consult the HNTAO guidebook’s chapter on How Not To Act Old on Facebook. I know you’re doin’ it!!

That pesky Age Policeman, aka Noah Levinson, is on traffic patrol today, chasing down over-40 drivers who dare to drive too slowly.  The director and camerawoman is the ever-inspired Alexa Garbarino.

How Not To Act Old is the Number 2 Bestselling Humor Book on Barnes & Noble’s website and Number 9 on Amazon’s, which is pretty, yes, awesome considering that over at bn.com the only one ahead of me is that bitch hilarious writer Chelsea Handler, who is tall, blonde, young, a former 14th runner-up in a New Jersey Miss Teen USA pageant, and has her own TV show.

Plus, don’t tell anybody, but I hear she drinks and sleeps around.

Right, dude, that’s what it takes to come out ahead of me.  But I warn you, Chelsea, I’ve been at this longer than you and my boobs are realer than I suspect yours are, which we all know is a prime ingredient of female success.  Also, my audience reads more, has more money, and is way more desperate for a good laugh.  You, girl, are going down.

So chuffed about the Wall Street Journal review of How Not To Act Old, which calls the book “as insightful as it is entertaining,” that I may stay up till 10:30 tonight and put an extra wedge of lemon in my seltzer.  Woo!

The Journal piece includes a book excerpt detailing what items of hipster gear you, I mean we, can get away with, and what we’d better leave to the young ‘uns.  So what do you think? RayBan Wayfarers with clear lenses:

Yay or Nay?  Head on over and read the excerpt at the WSJ to find out. Or better yet, buy the damn book!

The Age Police strikes again, apprehending a middle-aged woman innocently dialing her cell phone with her index finger. And fixing to talk too loudly into it.

It was all over for me in 1987 — my youth, that is. At least that’s according to the musical quiz in the Chicago Tribune, which claims to pinpoint the moment you got old by zeroing in on the first year you fail to recognize summer’s biggest pop song.

I wouldn’t say not being able to hum along with the big summer hit makes you old so much as it makes you not young. In fact, this chart pretty accurately identifies when your adolescence started — mine was launched in 1964, with the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” — and when you became officially out of it.

Uncanny, because I well remember the summer of 1986’s big hit, Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” — yet could not hum along with 1987’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2 if you had a gun pressed to my temple. In fact, the only big summer song I really know from that point on is, sadly, the Macarena.

Makes sense, since in the beginning of 1987 we bought our first house and had to face taht fascinating procedure of the United States postal office address change, and our oldest child started school, and I had to make a lot of money. And it pretty much has gone on like that ever since. Hello mortgage and parenthood, goodbye songs of summer.

When did your youth end?

I was going to blame the suddenly-ubiquitous saying “50 is the new dead” on Joel Stein, because he’s the first one I saw tweeting it, but I don’t think he coined this week’s favorite catchphrase.  (Correct me here, Joel, if you dare.)

Googling the phrase yields 100 or so hits, most linked with Michael Jackson and Billy Mays, both dead at 50, though a couple date from earlier.  And on twitter, “50 is the new dead” was retweeted and chortled over thousands of times.

That’s going to mushroom even further, I predict, until everyone looks at you, if you’re over 50, with an expression that says: What are you still doing here?

Wait, that’s right, they do that already.  That’s what they really think: How come you’re making that big cushy salary and hogging that beautiful house when you walk so slow and keep forgetting what you were going to say and have that disgusting neck wattle?  Why don’t you shuffle off a cliff and leave the goodies for us bench-pressing, thumb-typing, baby-having young hot people?

What’s that you say: I’m paranoid?  Maybe, but when tout le monde starts equating your age with annihilation, it can make you a tad touchy.  You know, the way it would if a couple thousand people were standing around laughing and saying things like, “American is the new dead” or “Female is the new dead” or “Jewish is the new dead.”

Yeah, haha, not so funny.  This is not merely ageism; it’s a genocidal wish cloaked in a joke made all the more frightening by its bizarre social acceptability.

How to combat the murderous urges of the young?  Yelling is only going to make them want to kill you more.  Offering them money won’t work: They’ll just think how much sweeter things would be if you’d keel over and leave them all your cash.  They might want to keep you around to babysit when they have kids, but ultimately they’ll figure they can buy that kind of service cheaper at ten bucks an hour.

The ultimate revenge might be to keep on keeping on.  We hate to break it to you, kids, but not only is 50 not the new dead, for most people other than rock stars anyway, but neither is 80 or 90 or even 100.  We’re going to be around long enough for 50 to start seeming like the new adolescence.

For those of you too lazy addled busy to read all the posts on How Not To Act Old, we now offer lessons on video.  Directed and shot by Alexa Garbarino on location at Chelsea Square in Upper Montclair, NJ, the How Not To Act Old video stars Noah Levinson — aka The Funniest Kid in New Jersey — as the Age Police.  The fat old lady is just someone we found on the street, flagrantly violating HNTAO laws.  Look for new installments every week.

Either I’m the last person on earth to learn how to bake a chocolate cake in a coffee mug in just five minutes, or the first — well, the second — over 40 to get in on a “secret” that seems to be all over youtube, with cooking instructions by bespectacled hipsters and nine-year-old boys.

It all started about an hour ago, when I was sitting innocently at my computer, looking, as usual, for some action.  Along came my gal pal Deyna Detroit Vesey, the genius who wrote “I Wanna Be A Toys R Us Kid,” with her recipe for Dangerous Cake.

I thought it was a joke.  But not being one to turn my back on any promise of chocolate cake, I figured I’d try it anyway.  I assembled the ingredients:

and followed the very simple recipe contained in Deyna’s email:

4 tbsp flour

4 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp cocoa

1 egg

3 tbsp oil

3 tbsp milk

bit of vanilla

chocolate chips, if desired and available

Mix dry ingredients in a large, microwave-safe mug.  Mix in egg.  Mix in oil and milk.  Add vanilla.  Add chips (skipped those, but only because I didn’t have any).  Put in microwave for 3 minutes on high.  Remove.

And here’s what I got:

OMFG!  Looks like an actual cake!  The next step is to scoop it onto a plate, whereupon it looks even more real:

And how does it taste?

Before I tell you that, let me just take a moment to answer the other question that may have been nagging at you ever you started reading this post: What does baking this cake have to do with acting old?

Well, if you’re able to hop up and bake one this very minute, as I suspect half of you have already done, it means you’ve got a pantry and fridge stocked with all the necessary ingredients: pretty mature of you.  It also means you own a mug, a tablespoon, and a microwave: again, how grownup!  Plus, unlike your sylphlike younger sisters and bros, you’re probably the kind of person who’s up for eating homemade pastry. at 10 a.m. or 2 a.m. or, really, whenever.

Okay, back to your question about how the cake tastes.  Here’s your answer:

And yes, that’s why they call it Dangerous.

Okay, I’m sorry, all you young ‘uns reading this post, but there’s no way for me to tell this story correctly except via an old person-style long and convoluted anecdote. But first, to tantalize you about what’s ahead and to keep you interested, I offer the following visual clue:

Now that I have your attention, I can tell you that I went last night to a panel discussion on women’s lives across the generations. The discussion, which was amazing, was moderated by the fabulous Sheila Weller, author of Girls Like Us and blurber of How Not To Act Old, and featured, in descending order of age, the stunning group of Patricia Bosworth, Judith Warner, Joanna Smith Rakoff, and Emily Gould.

My point, and I do have one, is that during a back-and-forth on the effect of changing technology on women’s lives, someone raised the issue of backlash and Emily Gould, the ex-Gawker editor who now blogs at Emily Magazine and who was born a few weeks before I got married for the second time, said something about steampunk.

There was a brief silence, punctuated by a few What?s from everyone over 40, after which we figured maybe she said Stephen, or steamtown, or punk rock, or something, and everyone started talking again.

And then Joanna Smith Rakoff, a novelist in her 30s whose new book is called A Fortunate Age, again used the word steampunk — we all heard it clearly this time — eliciting yet more confusion.  What was this mysterious thing called steampunk?  And why did the two younger panelists reference it so naturally while the older ones were utterly clueless?

When I finally got home and googled steampunk, immensely proud of myself for having remembered the word for an entire 38 minutes, I felt as if I were pulling back the curtain on a whole alternative culture that isn’t exactly new but that has remained largely hidden from just about everybody over 40.  Yes, not knowing about steampunk makes you, in the words of the twitter thread started by Rainn Wilson aka Dwight yesterday, #officially old.

So what the hell is steampunk?  Ah, see, that’s kind of the problem: It’s really hard to explain.  It’s a genre of science fiction and fantasy, it’s a fashion movement, it celebrates Victoriana and is anti-technology, yet it subverts elements of technology by deconstructing and reinventing them.

Would some visuals help? Here’s a steampunk laptop:

And here’s some steampunk taxidermy, by Jessica Joslin:

And here is a tutorial on how to make your own steampunk underwear from the flannel shirt your college boyfriend left in your laundry after a Kurt Cobain concert.  But before we go to the videotape, credit for the lace-up lingerie in the teaser shot goes to Clare Bare Collections — it’s not only kinky, it’s sustainable! — whose designer is featured in this video.  More pretty amazing examples of steampunk lingerie can be found at the Louise Black Designs shop on Etsy.  I would have lifted a picture but she has a very scary prohibition against that, and seems pretty terrifying all around, though her corsets are not to be missed.  (Hmmm, wonder if they come in XXL?)