Who ARE these people?

I spend my days desperately trying to avoid hackers and phone scammers.  They know I am a retired person and they are absolutely determined to come between me and my money.

Multiple phone scammers call our house each and every day.  I no longer answer the phone if I cannot identify the caller.  Instead, I look at the phone when it is ringing to take a look at the name and/or number of whoever is calling us. I pretty much know that any call from area code 407 without an identifying name displayed is from a hardened, psychotic criminal. Who else would be calling me from central Florida? My daughter and husband text me. My son-in-law and his parents email me. My 3 year old grandson has recently figured out how to contact me via Facetime on their iPad (sometimes as early as 7:30 am if his parents are out of the room), and my 11 year old granddaughter tries to avoid communicating with me via modern technology at all costs. Those are the only people I know in Central Florida. I think I am safe in assuming everyone else is psychotic.

The other day I picked up on a phone call from a number with a Southern Florida area code.  That particular number had been calling every day (sometimes more than once a day) for weeks and I have to admit I was curious to see what this particular scam was going to be.  I did not get the satisfaction of yelling at someone because it turned out to be an automated call.  It was malicious Mr. Robot Man telling me he had been trying to get a hold of me to settle our account (never saying what his business name was) and if I did not get back to him he would have to take me to court.  Then Mr. Robot Man gave me the choice of either pressing 1 to call him back or 2 to leave a message.  Hilarious.  If only I had magical powers to create a third choice:  press 3 to send unbridled bolts of crackling hot electricity through the phone lines to burn Mr. Robot Man's sorry robot circuits to Hell. 

The phone rang while we were eating dinner last night.  If got up and walked over to the land-line phone to see if it might be a normal human being trying to get in touch with me. I live in hope. Instead, the caller ID screen on our phone revealed it was from "Voter Consumer."  Whatever that means?  My husband said it should have read from "Consumer Harassment."  I concur. But that reminds me. As the general elections approach we will now start getting political phone calls, too! Ouch.

I also get a ridiculous amount of email spam, even though I try to filter it out. I also try VERY hard not to click on any links or open any emails from sources I do not recognize.  I am kind of proud of how distrustful I have become. But they are so tricksy, those computer scumbags. The other day I got an email from Federal Express, or that is what I thought.  When I opened the email it said to click a link so I could track my package. Well, I sometimes order online, so I thought it was real. I clicked, dammit! It turned out to be just another trickster scam to get me to buy something I do not need nor want.  And now my big fear is that legions of demented hackers are sending pornography related email to everyone in my contact list because I was foolish enough to click on that one miserable link. Sheesh. If you get pornographic emails from me, please know they are not really from me, okay? That particular virus is THE one I have always hoped I could avoid. 

A kind and gentle man I know was victimized by that virus a few years ago.  I think there are still people out there who fear he is a raging pervert.  Poor guy.  I also know a high school teacher who was victimized by it.  Can you imagine how awful that would be? No doubt she had students in her email address list. Just think of the horror and embarrassment innocent people have suffered because of that virus. In my alternate universe the person who created it would have his/her knuckles removed and then be forced to write "I am sorry for the trouble I caused" 100 times before getting them back.  Yes, in my alternate universe knuckles can be removed and then re-attached.  There are amazing surgeons there.

I suppose now I should just never open any emails I get. Where will it all end?  Mr. Natural (old R. Crumb alternative comic character and mystic guru) would have answered, "In the grave, my boy, in the grave."

Wow, I just now got an email from Wells Fargo Bank telling me that a hacker has been trying to hack into my account and if I would just click on the link they provided they would reinstate my account.  Funny thing is, I do not have any business dealings involving Wells Fargo.  True story, just happened.  Unbelievable.

It is odd imagining this is how some people make a living or get their kicks, by deceiving and humiliating innocent people. You have to wonder why they do this?  Of course, they are probably some of the narcissistic sociopaths I wrote about last time.  Or maybe they hate old people because they had mean grandparents who pinched their childhood cheeks and wrote them out of their wills.  Perhaps they were raised in damp caves by drug addled parents who never hugged them or gave them any encouragement.  Or, I suppose they could just be the spawn of the devil?  Who knows.  Armchair psychology is an imprecise science.

When You're a Stranger

It has been a year and a half since I retired and a full year since we sold our house and moved to Central Florida.  T and I gave up many things during this time period.  We gave up our jobs, our friends, our gardens, Wegmans (!) and more.

The people in my NYS life knew me and what I was capable of.  I was respected, appreciated, sometimes disliked, occasionally loved.  I was someone specific and unique. I was not a stranger.

In considering retirement it is important to know giving up your job means giving up your identity.  Be forewarned so you can be prepared.  For our entire adult lives we define ourselves by the titles we hold and the work we perform.  Like many retirees, not only did T and I retire but we moved to a strange, far away place where no one knew us, where there was no external memory of who we had once been.

It is true that we live close to family now. That was the purpose of the move and the biggest joy of my post-retirement life.  Living near family provides roles to perform rather than a personal identity.  Our daughter and her family have a vague idea of who we are and the work we once did, vague being the key word.  We are their parents, in-laws, grandparents.  I love having those roles.  They suit me well. 

We are also a husband and a wife.  So yes, we still have a variety of roles to fill, and they are satisfying and enjoyable roles.  However, I have yet to redefine myself for myself.  I once knew how to do that.  I am not quite sure how to do that in retirement, but I trust it will happen over time. The fun comes in wondering who I will end up being.

What I learned from experiencing change is this: if you keep going eventually life settles in and evens out. I trust in that notion because in spite of some initial discomfort, I have always acclimated to the cultural norms in each new situations.  In the course of those struggles I developed new ideas and learned to adapt and become flexible in my views of what normal might be. Those were valuable real-life lessons.  In spite of the underlying sadness and very real loss brought on by each change, I learned to trust my abilities to rise to the occasion. But in my work years, I did not have to be particularly pro-active.  Life came to ME.  You take a new job and stimulating challenges happen all around you.  The outer world takes charge of you.

The difference in retirement is that there are no ready made communities provided by the job you are taking on.  Sure, there are institutions I could join and places I could go to build a community, I just have not wanted to "go there" yet.  For now I savor the freedom of being an outsider, of being a stranger.  In theory, I guess it seems too much like work to join or belong to an institution. In practice, it would take some effort on my part.  For now, a day that I have something I must do still seems like a day that is lost to me. I guess the identity one cultivates in the post-retirement years is more personal and private.  As we age, it makes sense that we exert more energy exploring our inner life rather than our outer life?  There are fewer distractions.  That's a thought.

What Next?

I got an email the other day from a newly retired friend.  It was actually her very first day of being retired and she did not know what to do next.  Ha!  I told her to do nothing.  That is the hardest part of being retired, learning that you no longer have to define yourself by being productive. "Have to" being the key words.  It is a totally different way of thinking, and it takes some getting used to.  

At the risk of being outed as an old hippie, let me say this post reminds me of a late 1960s-era Blind Faith/Stevie Winwood song, "Do What You Like," the last verse being:

"Open your eyes, use your head, 
realize that you're not dead
Take a look at an open book,
let it cook
That's what I said, do what you like" 

Real Life

Have you ever heard a retired person complain about how busy they are and how they do not know how they ever managed work and homelife when they had a full time job?  Yeah, the young me was always rolling my eyes to the back of my head when I heard that.  When you ARE balancing work/family/relationship/home it is too cruel to hear a non-working person complain about being busy.  Imagine my surprise to discover when you stop working "real life" moves in to fill the void.  Still, real life beats the hell out of working for a living.  I am not gonna lie.

I sincerely do not know how I managed to conduct my personal life while working outside the home for 37 years.  In fact, I think maybe I did not have a personal life then.  Something had to go to make time for work.  Working outside the home is all consuming.  The workplace is unforgiving, demanding, and pretty much devours the majority of your daylight hours.  I remember coming home from work and plopping myself on the couch just staring into space, night after night.  "Shaken, not stirred" is how I felt.  It inspired me to start making martinis.  At least that got me up off the couch. 

The last few years of working full-time I was unable to read a book because I was too stressed to focus on a page of text.  Towards the end of my work years I rarely read an email word for word, skimming each one for the punchlines in order to get through them all in a timely fashion.  Weekends were spent cleaning, cooking, shopping, catching up with friends and family.  I guess I was lucky that we did not live near our grandkids then, because when would I have seen them?  Would I have really wanted to add babysitting to that mix?  There was never anytime for myself then.   I ached for retirement so that I could relax and do all those things one is never able to accomplish on a measly weekend.

I went through the working mother routine, too - the years when raising children was supposed to be your top priority.  And I only had one child. When do working mothers sleep? Actually, when they do lay down to sleep they are unable to relax because they are wracked with guilt for not spending enough time with their kids.  But I had my kid when I was 20.  I had an abundance of energy back then.  I felt like I could do it all. What about the mothers who just start having children at 40?  How do they keep from jumping off a cliff? 

Aging is the issue.  I simply do not have the energy I once had.  My mind is going 100 miles per hour, but my body is meandering along at 20 mph. When I was young it was all a game, and I reveled in the challenge.  Now the thought of being challenged makes me want to throw up.  I want time. Lots of time. All to myself.  

Getting Down to the Wire

Looks like the house closing will take place next Friday.

When I chose the title to this post, it seemed perfect to describe where we are in the house closing process; however, it occurred to me that the phrase “getting down to the wire” made no sense at all taken at face value.  I wondered where the phrase came from so I looked it up in my handy on-line phrase checker, http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com, to learn where it came from:

“Usage notes: In a horse race, the wire is a metal thread that marks the finishing line.”

Then I realized because of my crappy working class education, I did not know what an idiom was, so I looked that up in my computer-based dictionary.   An idiom is:

“a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (e.g., rain cats and dogs, see the light).

I could not help but notice how close “idiom” was to “idiot” so I checked “idiot”, too.  They both come from the Greek word “idios” which means: “own, private.”  Apparently in Ancient Greece an idiot was not someone with a mental disability, it was someone who was considered selfish.  It was a person who was perceived as overly concerned with their private, individual life and ignored their public duties as a citizen of Greece.   Yep, a person in Ancient Greece who did not vote or participate in public duties was an idiot.  

This is what makes retirement such a pleasure.  I have the time to dabble and delve – wasting time in the most delicious ways.  Wait – I am not “wasting” time, I am “taking” time.  Big difference!  I own my time now.  I am using time to my own private advantage.  Some of you may think, “She has too much time on her hands.”  But there is never too much time. When I was working, for 40 long years, most of my time was not my own.  I sold my time to earn money and make a living.  I was not doing what I loved.   I was simply doing the best I could.  Now, my time is finally my own and I use it in my own, private, selfish way.   After today, I will never think of the word “idiot” in quite the same way.  

Anyway, getting back to that wire…I will believe it when I see it.

Enough already!

Are you getting tired of reading about how happy I am since I retired?  I am almost tired of saying it.   I am going to stop real soon.  I promise.  It seems like I am bragging, but apparently “feeling happy” just never gets old.  The stated purpose of my blog is to explore my thoughts about aging.  Consequently, I am going to share some thoughts on the subject of making the decision to retire.   It is, after all, a personal decision - and although I am writing about what worked for me, it is not for everyone.  So, please continue to humor me while I ramble on.

I was talking to T at dinner about how good I felt.  He said, “yeah, you feel relief, right?”  I thought about it and decided it was a tripartite process, this "happiness in retirement."  First there is relief.   Then there is a sense of freedom, followed by the feeling of possibility.   That is what I mean when I say I am happy.   Could it be that mind-numbing boredom is right around the corner?  Financial concerns?  Lack of purpose?  Probably I will experience all of those things at one time or another.  For now, I am just trying to figure out this thing called retirement as I go along.  I was not prepared for it.  I did not expect it.  Truthfully, I did not think about how I would feel once I was retired.  I retired because I was done.   I had an epiphany last summer.   Some lame crisis came up and I, of course, had to find a way to resolve it.   It occurred to me while solving the problem that the thrill of “Problem Solving” was no longer present in my work life.   As my friend SH S would say: “Bam, Pow.”  I was over it.   I was over my job.  Damn!  Time to retire.  

Problem Solver was a role I loved.  I was the administrative manager in an academic department with over 100 people.  I had minimal control over what would happen next, and maximum responsibility for resolving it.   That pretty much defines office jobs everywhere.  I was not the only office worker in the department doing this kind of work.  Office workers are heroic, self-sacrificing, and extremely productive.  Many people do not seem to appreciate how hard office staff work and how much they care about others.  Add to the office mix all the management stuff and you have some idea how I have spent the last 37 years.  During my working years I genuinely loved whatever job I had; however, in recent years it all started to get old.  One of the only things that made it worthwhile towards the end (besides the people) was the rush I felt when problem solving.  It was creative.  It was fun.  It was challenging.  However, by the time I made the decision to retire my shoulders were constantly up around my ears.  I took only shallow breaths.  My brow was furrowed. My hair turned gray.  Okay, okay, maybe the hair turning gray was just a natural part of growing older.   Still…the hair turned gray.   I gained a ton of weight by stress eating, and I drank like a fish.  A couple of years ago I developed a mysterious rash on my face and hands.  I ignored it.  All of this seemed acceptable as long as I still got a creative rush from the job.  So when I had that particular epiphany last summer and realized the thrill was truly dead and gone, I knew it was time for me to retire.  Because if I was not having fun, then I would not be creative.  And if I was not creatively inclined towards my work tasks, then I would not be doing a good job in the future.  After that the decision to retire was easy and obvious for me. 

My Mom retired in her mid-70s, and then only because she had Parkinson's Disease.  She loved her job.  She did not retire because she wanted to and she was certainly not happy to make the decision to stop.  I am still sad she was unable to continue doing what she loved and wanted to do: work.  I have other friends and family who worked into their late 60s and early 70s. They did so because they loved working, or because they needed the money, or both.  All excellent reasons to avoid retirement.  When to retire is, like I said, personal.  You will know when you are "done."  We are all so different.  There is no-one-size-fits-all model for human behavior.   Do what makes you happy.