{"id":32720,"date":"2024-05-14T18:04:01","date_gmt":"2024-05-14T23:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=32720"},"modified":"2024-05-14T18:04:01","modified_gmt":"2024-05-14T23:04:01","slug":"brian-j-lets-the-old-man-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/14\/brian-j-lets-the-old-man-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian J. Lets The Old Man Out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ah, gentle reader.  As you might know, I am one of those old men who thinks he&#8217;s holding the line on aging.  Well, not in my popular culture knowledge.  I&#8217;m certainly not listening to new hip hop or pop music nor watching the latest reboots of things I enjoyed when I was younger.  I guess I&#8217;ve always had an old soul when it comes to that sort of thing.  I&#8217;ve always read old books, whether capital-L Literature or old suspense and science fiction.  But, still, I&#8217;ve done martial arts classes with people much younger than me, and I&#8217;ve had my children in school with children whose parents were ten years younger than I am.  So I might have been fooling myself, but I thought as long as I had kids in school, I was young.<\/p>\n<p>But, oh, gentle reader, the oldest has graduated from high school.  And even before that event, I&#8217;ve been letting the old man out by expressing the way we did things in the 20th century.  To whit:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On a recent visit to the dentist, I was confronted by a new hygenist who was young and pretty.  And although I am happily married, it is the way of the Man to puff out one&#8217;s chest a little in this situation.  However, at the end of the visit, she scheduled me for my next four-month-cleaning, and I said it was the easy one since it was in the same year.  The hard ones were the ones that occurred in the next year, because I would not have the calendar yet upon which to write the appointment.\n<p>Silly old man!  In the 21st century, people put appointments in their phones nowadays.  Although I do put appointments in a Google calendar for work, it&#8217;s still not my default for doctor&#8217;s appointments.  I still write them on the wall calendar in the dining room.  I&#8217;m the only one who does, though, so I never know what&#8217;s going on with my beautiful wife or my children.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>One of the organizations for which my wife volunteers had a game night to bring together IT students from various universities with the members of the IT organization.  She had trusted me to buy soda and water for the event, and I bought something like four cases of soda and a couple cases of water for the projected 30-60 attendees.  I didn&#8217;t think it was too much, thinking college kids could easily drink three or four sodas over the course of a three-hour event.\n<p>The treasurer of the organization brought along the big ledger checkbook for the organization to write an expense check for another member.  &#8220;And a big bag of quarters in case we run out of soda so we can pop down to the vending machines,&#8221; I said, ever the jester.<\/p>\n<p>But the gentleman, older than I am and a manager\/executive for many different firms in his career, pointed out that the kids used their cards at the vending machines.  Of course they did.  But I come from an age where Cokes were not quite a dime, but Vess soda could be had for a quarter from a vending machine.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>I mentioned <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/05\/06\/the-clown-at-every-funeral-the-jester-at-every-wedding\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener\">my brother got married<\/a>.  He and his wife also closed recently on a nice slice of land which has a nice pre-fab house on a foundation along with <em>twenty-five acres of land<\/em> which means he has accidentally on purpose, perhaps, but it&#8217;s nice.\n<p>Also, it is a new address, so <em>I wrote it in my address book<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/addressbook.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>The address book was a gift I received when I graduated high school <em>a couple of years ago<\/em>.  I wrote in it the addresses of high school friends and family members with whom I would correspond throughout high school and beyond (I still double-check my grandmother&#8217;s address in the book even though she has lived in the same place for <em>a couple of years now<\/em>.  <\/p>\n<p>The address book itself now contains more scratch-outs than confirmed addresses, and an Excel spreadsheet maintains the shrinking Christmas card list, so it&#8217;s a more accurate and useful representation of street addresses of people with whom I regularly (annually) correspond.<\/p>\n<p>But I still put this address in my address book.<\/p>\n<p>Which makes me think I might need to update the centerpiece of the Family Bible as well with wife and children&#8217;s names.  Which seems fitting as they&#8217;re about to head out on their own.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As if these examples enough were not enough to indicate I might be approaching <em>middle age<\/em>, the wedding videos and photos themselves did.<\/p>\n<p>And I guess I might as well embrace it.  After all, it&#8217;s not like I&#8217;m getting any younger or getting any more sincerely interested in the concerns of the younger amongst us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ah, gentle reader. As you might know, I am one of those old men who thinks he&#8217;s holding the line on aging. Well, not in my popular culture knowledge. I&#8217;m certainly not listening to new hip hop or pop music nor watching the latest reboots of things I enjoyed when I was younger. I guess [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32720"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32723,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32720\/revisions\/32723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}