I rarely use emojis, in part because half the time I can’t make out what they are trying to convey. And it’s not an eyesight issue. It’s more about whether that face is happy or sad or noncommittal. Are you trying to console me or mock me? Why are you sending me a pile of poop? Is that a grimace or did you get new dentures?

Sorry. I’ll get over it. But apparently Gen Z is done with some emojis and cannot understand why boomers are still using them. These are the same peeps who declared skinny jeans are over so you have to take them seriously.

According to research done with 16 to 29-year olds by Perspectus Global, there are 10 emojis that just make you look old. Thumbs up is number one on the kill list. Next is the red heart, followed by the OK fingers, check mark, poo, crying face, monkey eye cover, clapping hands, red lip kiss, and grimace face.

If you think you’re having trouble discerning emoji meanings, it turns out that 78 percent of those surveyed said they innocently used an emoji before learning that it meant something other than what they thought it did. Even they were as confused as I am.

By the way, this surveyed population indicated they used an average of 76 emojis per week. Is it so hard to just say what you mean? Why can’t we just say we’re happy to hear someone’s good news? Or sad to hear of someone’s misfortune? And I still don’t know why you would want to send someone fecal matter (new puppy?).

Twenty-two percent of the survey group indicated that they use multiple emojis in texts in order to make it clearer. Huh. Or should I say, huh? If the recipient is confused by the meaning of the inserted emoji, how does that make the text more clear?

Why am I asking you? You are most likely a baby boomer who couldn’t give 2 you-know-what’s (see…you don’t need a pile of poop). I’m glad I got that off my chest and that there is no emoji for the word chest. Is there??

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon.

We were having a window replaced on a second story room. When the installer arrived, I showed him three different routes through the house to get to the room and the porch beyond. To my surprise, twenty minutes later I could hear sawing and banging but hadn’t seen the guy coming through our home. Curious, I looked outside to find that he had raised a ladder to the roof of the garage and was climbing up and over, and over and down with new parts and old. Wondering if he was worried about dirtying our carpet, I sat on the impulse to ask. After all, you don’t want to interrupt a craftsman in the middle of his task. He might do himself a harm.

But his roundabout way of approaching the task reminded me of an adult-ed class in small engine repair I had taken at the local high school. I had earned a B for my tune-up of a lawn mower engine and was feeling pretty satisfied with my efforts until I learned a classmate had earned an A+. I complained to the instructor. “Oh, that guy, he got extra credit for degree of difficulty. He’s a doctor, you see, an OB-GYN. And he did the whole procedure through the exhaust pipe.”

No wonder I resented the physician, given my fondness for efficient procedures and people who believe quicker is better. I tend to scorn anyone who takes longer than necessary or makes a job more elaborate and convoluted than required. However, as I have aged, I’ve come to realize that not everyone thinks saving time or energy is a great value in life. Maybe ‘thorough and slow’ is the ideal for them. Like the time, invited for dinner at a friend’s house, I could hardly stand it while we shared a glass of wine and watched our hostess slowly and deliberately peel each of two dozen shrimp for our taco dinner and then delicately de-vein them like a neurosurgeon tickling around the lobes of the brain. I had to resist saying, “Here, let me do that. I’ll finish in three minutes.”

I guess that’s why some people make good supervisors, and production-line foremen and jet fighter pilots while others would rather paint landscapes or rent row boats. You might be able to guess what side I favor.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

 

My son nagged me to join a gym for a long time. Retirement nullified all my excuses for not going (such as inconvenient scheduling) that had proven trustworthy allies over the years.

Two weeks into the blissful state of retirement, the perfect opportunity to try a gym for the first time presented itself in the form of a Groupon offering a discounted one-month membership to the swanky Capital Athletic Club in downtown Sacramento. Hearing about this offer from a 20-something neighbor who was availing herself of the club’s many charms, I mentioned it to my Groupon-fanatic husband, and the next thing you know, I was filling out membership forms.

When you’ve been the oldest person in your office for years – decades older than your bosses – it shouldn’t feel weird to join a gym full of youthful individuals emphasizing their ripped-ness with skin-tight body suits, should it? Well, should it?

Maybe you’re old enough, I tell myself, to rise above the petty concerns of vanity. Forget how you look in your new Target workout pants, tight enough to hopefully contain and compress your accumulated flab and cellulite. No one’s looking at you. Throw yourself into a fitness regime, hoping to control that high blood-pressure and improve your core strength and balance.

I have tried several classes, including “Slow Stretch”, “Mat Pilates”, “Gentle Yoga”, and “Pilates on Ball.” (Yes, I am sore – sometimes super sore — after each of them. Thank you for asking.) I have steered clear of anything implying agony, such as “Abs Blast” or any class with the word “Power” in the title.

I swam a few laps one beautiful day in the outdoor pool and have calmed my post-class aching muscles in the (clothing optional) jacuzzi in the women’s locker room

I have avoided the weight room and the acre of torturous-looking machines. I did have a one-hour consultation with a fitness trainer (part of the Groupon deal) yesterday who concluded – possibly with an eye toward liability issues — that I should stay off the machines (whew!). She said I should satisfy myself, for the moment at least, with bench pressing 5-pound weights in various ways. This is good advice, I think. After so many years as a desk jockey, I don’t want to kill myself in my first month getting fit at the gym.

Susan Wolbarst lives in Gualala, CA

 

According to a national survey, 1 in 4 boomers believe that they can’t trust younger generations with an inheritance.

Fine! Keep your money! Are you afraid you’re going to run out of dough and trust issues are just an excuse? Or you really think your kids are too dumb to do the right thing with the money?

Either way, it doesn’t say anything good about A) the way you handle your retirement funds or B) the way your brought up your kids.

Half of the respondents thought it was more important to enjoy life with the cash on hand than leave it behind as an inheritance. Okay, that’s more like it. Travel, play, enjoy yourselves (“it’s later than you think”) and the kids will be fine. When you’re gone, they can have the house and whatever is left in the bank and mutual funds. That’s not such a bad deal all the way around.

Is it too late to mention that close to 45 percent of Gen Xers and Millennials surveyed were confident that they would make good use of an inheritance. And why not? It’s found money. Almost like seeing a $100 bill laying on the ground. Only it’s 50, 60, or 100 thousand of them laying on the ground. Of course they will make good use of it. They could afford a nicer home, a more reliable car, better colleges for the kids and maybe a nice vacation now and then. Wouldn’t that make you happy knowing that your money can make your kids happy? No! You’re dead, remember?

Families and money. It can be a real palaver. In the end (and I mean that in the life cycle sense), all you can do is hope that whatever assets you leave behind are passed on to your progeny and they get some real pleasure out of whatever they do with that money. And if you enjoyed spending it when you were alive, all the better. Everyone’s happy. Unless you wanted to live to spend it a little longer. Can’t help you there.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon.

My father’s name was Egon. Pronounced egg-on. He grew up in Czechoslovakia, so he pronounced a lot of his words wrong, or so I thought as a kid growing up in NJ. I tried to help him with that, and in return he helped me spell Czechoslovakia. I was the only kid in my class who could. We’d go to the International House of Pancakes, me and Egon, and sit across from each other in the booth, like nations at the table.

A language is a dialect with an army, say the linguists, and while we waited for our pancakes I’d drill him in pronouncing all the different syrups, and he’d drill me in C-z-e-c-h-o-s-l-o-v-a-k-i-a.

He didn’t know much about sports. He thought John Havlicek was Czech. But I said no, he’s from Ohio. He thought a home run was something you did when your mother forgot to pick you up after your baseball game.

He died when I was 14. Many years later, after the Berlin wall came down, I visited Prague. It was a sort of home run, to my father’s home, in my father’s honor. They suggested I visit the Castle but I was more interested in the little things, like the doorknobs, which were mostly levers instead of knobs. And the “pater noster elevators” which were left over from Communism and had no doors or buttons and never stopped moving so you had to leap in or leap out when they got to your floor. And the squirrels which were mostly red or black instead of gray. And the blue streaks of the thieving socialist magpies with their clicking metered phrases, which reminded me of their cousins the American blue jays back home. And the fact that everything in Prague just seemed a lot more substantial, the bread for example, and the soups, and the eyebrows of the grandmothers, and the beer, and the coffee, and the buildings, and the rooftops which were mostly red instead of gray. And the heft of the coins, and the blue of the sky, and the beauty of the women, all those beautiful substantial Czech women, none of whom, I’d have bet my return ticket, was headed for the Castle or the Old Jewish Cemetery.

Paul Hostovsky lives in Medfield, MA