Farfromgeneva wrote: ↑Sat Nov 25, 2023 9:06 am
How to Avoid Being Boring at 60 - WSJ
I needed to figure out a way to turn this around. I vowed to take that big, upsetting number 60 and remake it into something positive: I decided I would do 60 things I’d never done before. Maybe that would force me to forge new neural pathways in the dog-eared map that was my brain.
Now maybe you don’t relate and are someone who’s constantly taking on new adventures. For the other 98% of us, read on for a primer in how to reclaim novelty and acquire some great stories along the way.
I began my journey with a set of rules. I vowed I would not do:
• Obvious midlife crisis things such as jumping out of a plane, driving a Ferrari on a racetrack or having a fling with a traveling saleswoman and/or Pete Davidson.
• Anything that would cause injury so that I couldn’t do the other 59 things on the list.
• Anything too simple, like “eat a kind of pork dumpling I’ve never had.”
• Anything too complex, like “raise a pig, fall in love with it, then force myself to kill it to make a new kind of pork dumpling.”
• Anything that just requires paying a lot of money to achieve, like going to the Galápagos or hiring Usain Bolt to run to the store for me.
To begin, I needed to start putting together a list of unusual and challenging items. I started canvassing friends, and every one of them got interested, wanted to pitch ideas and had questions, such as: “What’s the most dangerous thing?” “What’s the thing that you were most afraid to do?” and “You’re really only 60? I thought you were much older.”
I’m continually adding to or subtracting from my list of new adventures, but in the hopes of inspiring you to follow in my footsteps, here are some highlights of things I did:
Attended a megachurch.
Though I’m a skeptic about all organized religion, I went to a 2,000-person-strong service at one of America’s largest evangelical megachurches and, honestly, saw what the hype is all about. Young, very attractive singers in Bonobos pants and white sneakers launched into soaring rock songs on stage. The pastor was a charismatic woman who told us how, in the story of Joseph, his brothers decided not to kill him but to sell him into slavery. She said, “They thought, ‘We won’t be murderers, we’ll be human traffickers!’” Not John Mulaney-level comedy, but solid stuff for an evangelical church. The disappointing thing, though, was that the crowd just filed back to their cars after it all ended. I wanted to get inside the heads of these people who had such a different outlook on life.
Set up a table at an autograph convention.
Behind a placard saying I’m a writer on the “Simpsons” (true!), I signed autographs alongside a host of B- and C-level celebrities. Christina Ricci signed hundreds. I signed…nine. I engaged with everyone from the 80-year-old woman who had been “the most photographed nude woman of the 1960s” to the couple who’d come by cruise ship from Canada just to get pictures with Linda Blair from “The Exorcist.”
Cruised a leather gay bar.
My gay son offered to take me to a gay bar. I asked him what I should wear, and he said, “Leather, if you want to be hit on.” I’m 60, not dead—of course I wanted to be hit on! At the bar, I met a “pup”—someone who puts on a dog mask for his “owner” partner—and soon this pup was philosophizing about life and the freedom of letting go by, say, eating dinner out of a bowl on the floor. Safe to say, that was a point of view I’d never been exposed to before. I liked that!
Took a sound bath.
I traveled to Palm Desert, Calif., to listen to quartz crystal “singing bowls,” keyed to the “chakras of the body” and played in a building designed by a man who said he was abducted by aliens—all accompanied by the sound of my Midwestern parents turning over in their graves. Sure, my third-eye chakra intuited I’d never do it again, but it was unlike anything I’d ever heard.
Made an announcement on an airplane.
On an unnamed airline (let’s just say I was headed in a Southwesterly direction), I asked if I could make one of the announcements. An hour later, a flight attendant handed me three hand-scrawled pages and said, “Go.” In show business, this is what we call a “cold read,” and with shaking hands, I dove in: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve begun our descent to Los Angeles…” The whole plane applauded! OK, they were told to by the flight crew.
Made a shirt.
I taught myself how to work a sewing machine and made a shirt that I wore to work. One colleague took one look and said, “Oh, it’s terrible. Well, it would be stupid if it looked good.” Another had kinder words: “It looks like your second or third effort, not your first!” And, employing classic parenting language, my boss said, “I can see you worked very hard on that, Rob.”
Bid at an art auction.
My goal was to raise a paddle to bid but not actually win a piece of art—because that would involve spending a lot of money. This was much harder than it sounds. After I lifted my paddle and bid on a drawing, there were agonizing seconds of silence, during which I envisioned coming home and explaining to my wife why we couldn’t afford our next vacation. Then another bidder raised her hand. The auctioneer looked back to me: “Sir?” I tried to feign a casual, “No, that’s OK, if they want it that bad, I’ll let them have it,” while sweat coursed down my shirt. If art tries to make you feel something…well, by God, I was buzzing.
Cooked dinner.
To my shame, I’d never made a real (i.e., not microwaved) dinner for my whole family. So I went big and made a “timpano”—a gigantic Italian dish that took a day to cook and a night to prep. It was, against all odds, pretty good. My son Johnny said he felt the same astonishment at my having done it “as if a fish climbed a tree.”
Went on a police ride-along.
The night before, I got a text from the cop I’d be riding with saying, “Wear a T-shirt because you’ll be wearing a bulletproof vest over it.” I decided not to mention this to my wife. The next day, when we showed up at a domestic dispute, he went to the door, and I stayed in front in the cruiser. An enraged woman ran from her house to her car and grabbed something out of the glove compartment. At that moment I learned something about myself I’d always suspected: I’m a hider, not a fighter. I sank down as low as I could, peering over the dash to see that she was just getting her cellphone. As for my cop, despite looking like he came out of central casting, he was a fan of an anime band (I didn’t know that was a thing), enjoyed dressing up in Victorian garb with his family for cosplay balls and had an autistic adult child, just like me.
That ride-along underlined the big takeaways from my list: Every time I set out to tick off an item, the experience always turned out to be dramatically different from what I had expected, often in ways that were hilarious, fascinating and sometimes even moving.
And now I have 60 shiny new stories to tell friends over a meal of potentially lethal pufferfish—number 29 on the list.
Rob LaZebnik is a writer and co-executive producer on “The Simpsons.” You can suggest items for his list at @rlazebnik on Threads.net.
