by msmeta of Adventures at Midlife

In a recent story in the NYTimes, participants in a three-hour training program called Xtreme Aging held at an retirement care center were suited up as old folks:

Along with 15 colleagues and a reporter, [33-year-old participant] Mrs. Ramirez, a social worker at the facility, put on distorting glasses to blur her vision; stuffed cotton balls in her ears to reduce her hearing, and in her nose to dampen her sense of smell; and put on latex gloves with adhesive bands around the knuckles to impede her manual dexterity. Everyone put kernels of corn in their shoes to approximate the aches that come from losing fatty tissue.

They then were required to complete a series of tasks which included the fumbling, folding and finding that comprises our daily life. The result? The participants were understandably frustrated.

I say they weren’t frustrated enough, and that the experience fell far short of what we experience now at midlife, much less at antiquity!

How about:

• Packing the participants in heating pads and turning the pads up to HIGH at odd and inopportune moments, thereby simulating one more reason why we enjoy being a girl!

• Having potential employers stop reading their resumes when they observe any indication of advanced age (read that: over 40). Our subjects don’t even have to show up for this one!

• Paying young hotties to push them aside at store counters, aided and abetted by the store clerks, who will — without encouragement — look right through them.

• Encouraging their younger colleagues to plan workplace activities and conduct meetings to which they aren’t invited, and make sure everyone at the activities and meetings is sub-40.

• Instructing their supervisors, when our participants voice concerns over potential workplace discrimination, to say that HR has told them “not to take sides.”

• Paying their spouses/significant others to take them aside at the worse possible moment and say, “Look, it’s not you. I just need some space. You deserve better.”

• Requiring all offspring to express, in whatever form they do it best, how completely out-of-date and incompetent our subjects are, on at least a weekly if not daily basis.

• Taking in all the participants’ clothing about .5 inch overnight, just enough to make the clothing uncomfortable and unattractive.

• Making certain top fashion designers ignore midlifers and use only prepubescent teen-age girls as their muses when creating new clothing lines — Oh, wait. They already do that. Never mind.

• Requiring all media to make mothers-in-law, maiden aunts, “career women,” “cougars,” female employers and other possible midlife models as unattractive, unstable and uncooperative as possible. (See above caveat.)

A bit bitter, eh? Sorry. Sometimes it just gets to me. My only solace, when I sense that a young, stronger, hipper force is gaining on me and threatening to push me out of the way, is the same, mean thought:

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

If you have any additions to the list, I’d love to hear ‘em!