Fraternal Organizations for Retirees

In high school, I desperately wanted to be a cheerleader. Desperate is the operative word; I couldn’t execute a proper cartwheel, much less do a full split. I wound up in the marching band, where I made many good friends, several of whom I’m still in touch with. I didn’t join the band in college, though I considered doing it. I was too busy keeping my head (and grades) above water. I had no interest in sororities; the cheerleading failure probably scarred me for life.

I mention this because my once guilty pleasure (but not so much anymore) The View briefly discussed sororities and fraternities in the Hot Topics segment recently. One faction liked the fact that you could travel the country and be welcomed by sisters (or brothers) from other chapters as one of their own. Another faction decried the idea that the very concept of a fraternal organization was based on the notion of exclusivity and, by extension, exclusion.

Suddenly I had one of my flashes of inspiration: there should be fraternal organizations especially for retirees. Ones like Tappa Kegga Beer, but geared to the interests of folks our age. Naturally, I set to work identifying suitable candidates. Organizations that would be welcoming, inclusionary and not exclusionary. Organizations with catchy names that could be screen printed on bowling-shirts and embroidered on canvas tote bags.

Say for instance, Takea Nappa Day, the senior snooze fraternity. It’s unisex, so both men and women can join. The initiation rites include a mid-afternoon nap that must last at least 20 minutes, but not more than two hours. There isn’t a retiree out there who should have a problem meeting that requirement.

There are three sororities for those who might consider joining a garden club. There’s Planta Lotta Flora, and it’s sister sororities Weeda Bita Day and Oma Achin Back. Some chapters of this last one don’t even require you to have a garden. Talk about being inclusionary!

Retirees generally find that they have a lot more time to engage in sports and other physical activity. There are a number of fraternal groups for active types. Those who practice the minimum of exertion may want to join Walka Milea Day. For the slightly more strenuous, there’s the sorority Yoga Cobra Dog, or Yo Co Do for short. And for seniors who are into truly challenging exercise, we have the senior crew fraternity, Rho, Grampa, Rho.

Some of the organizations draw their members based on what they wear. Chief among these is Polli Esta Slax. Sisters and brothers take an oath to never wear pants made out of natural fibers. One of the hazing rituals involves a blindfolded test wherein the pledges must feel six pieces of fabric and decide: polyester or natural fiber? Get more than two of them wrong, and you’re out. Or rather, not in.

One of the fraternities I uncovered caters to men who feature themselves to be what my mother would have called “dandies.” Eligibility includes always being impeccably dressed, with hair combed perfectly and wearing far too much cologne. If you know someone who believes more is not enough, suggest that he join Spritza Bita Aftashave.

If you have at least three grandchildren, consider pledging Nana Bragsa Lot. You’ll need to have a smartphone with a top of the line photo sharing app. Chances are one of your progeny has already provided you with this, the better to see their own offspring.

Finally, some fraternal organizations celebrate the riches that a well-planned retirement affords the retiree. There’s the self-explanatory Gotta Primo Condo, which has a high concentration of membership in Florida, North and South Carolina and Arizona. And there’s the equally self-explanatory Takea Trippa Year. It’s membership is concentrated in metro areas around major universities.

Finding it hard to choose among all these exciting prospects? Don’t worry. They’re so non-exclusionary that—unlike typical fraternities and sororities—you can join more than one.  I’m just glad none of them requires members to do a cartwheel or a split.

 

Crazy Holidays for Retirees

Kelly Ripa announced on Live with Kelly and Michael that September 9 was National Hermit Crab Awareness Day. Until that moment, I wasn’t aware of this holiday. I felt like the woman in the Prego commercial who is surprised to learn she prefers that brand to the one she’s been buying for years. An audio thought bubble opines: “I wonder what other questionable choices I’ve made…” And she flashes back to show how she’s picked nerdy-looking men, or horrific hairstyles, or too-trendy clothes.

My thought bubble read: “I wonder what crazy holidays for retirees I’ve been missing out on…” After all, some restaurants give you a free dessert on your birthday. Who knows what exclusive treatment could be available for retirees on holidays that are off our radar? You’ll be happy to learn that I’ve researched this and I’m sharing some special days with you, in calendar order.

Dowager’s Hump Awareness Day occurs the second Wednesday of each month. People who are still working get to celebrate Hump Day every week. All the dowagers get is one day a month. We’re still researching appropriate ways to celebrate this holiday. For starters, skip the camel jokes altogether, no matter how cute you think that GEICO commercial is. Free pudding at all restaurants would be nice. It seldom has any lumps, much less humps.

National Mismatched Plaid Day coincides with St. Patrick’s Day. Many people wear plaid for that holiday, Lord only knows why. It’s the Scots who make a big deal of displaying the plaid of their clan’s heritage, not the Irish. No matter. Retirees who wear mismatched plaids on this holiday get free beer at any bar with a name starting with the letter “O.” Which is to say, there’s free beer at virtually every Irish pub for retirees who wear plaid, period. Older folks never do plaid right.

Be still my heart! There’s an entire week set aside to celebrate Quaint Expressions (like “Be still my heart…”) It begins the third Sunday in April, with Cat’s Pajamas Day (my favorite expression of the group.) Retirees get to stay in their jammies all day, even if they go out to eat. And not just for brunch, for any meal. You can check out the rest of the week (including free honey on The Bee’s Knees Wednesday) on line.

National Velcro Appreciation Days are June 19 and September 13. This invention is so fabulous that it’s celebrated twice a year: first on the birthday of the inventor (George de Mestral) and then on the day he filed the original patent. We commemorate these happiest of retirees’ holidays by giving them a 20% discount on any article of clothing or household item that uses hook-and-loop fasteners (Velcro is a trademark) in any way whatsoever.

After a long battle, National Nap Appreciation Day was declared to be the summer solstice, June 20 or 21. Check your Farmers’ Almanac each year. The other faction wanted the winter solstice, December 21 or 22, the day with the most darkness. June aficionados won out. How can you expect retirees to get through about 15 hours of daylight without a late-afternoon nap? Retirees get to take a snooze wherever they are that afternoon. This includes in the driver’s seat of their car, at a stoplight.

National Cranky Pants Day is celebrated the Monday after Thanksgiving. We’re all in a lousy mood by then, even if we didn’t fight the crowds to get some early holiday shopping done. We were probably stuck in traffic, or in a line someplace we had no choice but to go at some point that weekend. You might think that this holiday should be for everyone, not just retirees, but it’s not. We’ve earned the right to be cranky. Others haven’t. Give us a wide berth on Cranky Pants Day.

Medicare Post-Enrollment Exhalation Day happens every fall, the day after the deadline to enroll in or change retirement healthcare plans. As an added stress, it can move from year to year, but it’s often December 7. If you’re not sure when it is, listen for the collective whoosh of retirees sighing in relief that the deadline has once again passed. On this day, retirees get to cut in line at the pharmacy. Come to think of it, let them cut in line wherever they are. Or else be prepared to listen to all their ailments.

No doubt there are other holidays well-suited to being celebrated by retirees, but these are the first seven that I turned up. Be sure to take some time to observe every one of them in a memorable way. If you’re not retired yet, do something appropriate on each of the days for someone who is. A blogger friend, perhaps? Just sayin’…

The Skinny on Getting Skinny

For those of us who are constantly struggling with our weight, there’s been some encouraging news lately. One piece is straightforward and for women only. Another is a complicated study with implications for everyone.

An onerous standard that I had been eying was that a woman’s waist should measure no more than half her height. I’m so short that this meant I should have about a 30” waist. What’s more, I’m at that point in life where I’ve started shrinking. So my ideal waist measurement has become a moving target. It’s a bit like the age for collecting full Social Security. By the time the younger boomers reach the age it is today, the bar will have been moved farther down the horizon.

The good news is that a recent health segment on morning TV noted that a woman’s waist should be no more than 35”. I still have a distance to go to see that number, but every month I’m inching closer.

The study that addressed weight was interesting in the abstract and exciting in its potential for those of us who can pinch way more than an inch. It came on my radar through a report by Gina Kolata in the New York Times.

In the shortest, simplest laymen’s terms, researchers put poop from a fat twin into the gut of one mouse and poop from a thin twin into another mouse. Fat-twin poop led to chubby mice; thin-twin poop yielded skinny mice. The report gave far more information and in more scientific terms, but I wanted to get your attention before I put you to sleep.

The Times article began with a premise that I found questionable. Is there really a “growing fascination with gut bacteria”? I don’t know about you, but I don’t sit around wondering what type of microbes are down there and how they might be spending their time. True, we hear a lot about irritable bowel syndrome on TV. But Facebook is more subject to what we used to call “diarrhea of the mouth.”

Let’s accept the Times premise and move on to the methodology. The researchers found sets of twins where one was fat and the other was thin (apparently a rarity). The study write-up in Science magazine tells us they transplanted “uncultured fecal microbiota” from each and gave it to twin mice raised in a sterile environment (meaning no gut bacteria of their own). They were fed a diet of low-fat mouse food.

In five weeks, the mice gifted with fat feces had 15% to 17% more body fat than the ones who got skinny gut gifts. The next phase of the research involved “cohousing coprophagic mice.” I looked up “coprophagic” in my Webster’s unabridged. It means they eat one another’s droppings. The outcome, surprisingly, was that skinny droppings helped the chubby mice lose weight, but fat scat had no effect on the thin mice. (So much for the recent theory that your fat friends will make you fatter.)

In what may be the understatement of the day, a nationally-renowned program director said: “This is all weird and wonderful.” Close behind in the “you-don’t-say” department was the senior investigator’s hope that “people can be given pure mixtures of bacteria instead of feces.” Ya think?

For those out there who feel that a “fecal transplant” might be worth it, I need to share one additional detail. The study was extended with an overlay of diets that were either low in fat or high in fat, with both types of mice co-habiting. In this phase of the research, the mice with the fat gut donations did not benefit from eating the thin mouse droppings. Conclusion (from the report in Science): “Invasion and phenotypic rescue were diet-dependent.”

Simply put, if you don’t eat a low-fat diet, the skinny scat won’t help. Nobody said it would be easy.

Say What?

The older I get, the more I find myself thinking: “Say what?” Sometimes it’s because I read something incorrectly. Other times I heard it wrong. I think I suffer from audio-dyslexia. Pieces get switched around and what I hear bears very little resemblance to what was said. Still other times it’s not my fault. People just say and write the most bizarre things.

My audio-dyslexia manifests itself several ways. Sometimes I flip vowels. Sometimes I flip consonants. Sometimes I flip entire syllables. I’ll even insert or eliminate letters altogether. More often I just plain mishear.

I had lunch out with friends yesterday. The husband wondered what was in the prime rib omelet. “What an odd combination,” thought I. Actually not so odd, because he was looking at a fine herbs omelet. Let me explain how this works. My brain audioed an almost-rhyming “prime” for “fine.” Then it audio-dyslexia switched the “e” and the “r” in herb (the “h” was silent), giving “reb,” which became “rib.” Really quite logical, for a brain gone haywire.

My husband (whose store is near several colleges) told me the other day, “The students are back.” To which I replied, “You glued your aunt’s black what?” Here we have another principle operating, that of inserting audio word-breaks where they don’t belong. So, his statement sounded to me like: “Stud (long “u”) ents black (inserting an errant “l”). You can take it from here. By the way, I never met any of his aunts; they were all deceased long before we married. Go figure.

My visual dyslexia is rather like the autocomplete on a computer, only my brain is doing it as I’m reading. For example, there was an ad in the right margin of my email screen recently with the query: Mortgage Underwear? “Say what?” I asked myself. Turns out it said: Mortgage Underwater? My visual dyslexia switched the “a” and the “e” in "water" and deleted the “t” for good measure.

Swapping out vowels in words I read seems to be one of my more regular visual problems. I was reading a map of North Carolina and chortled when I saw the town of “Old Fart.” I know a lot of people retire to North Carolina, but did they have to name a town after these “old farts?” Turns out, no they didn’t. The town is actually Old Fort.

One category that can be counted on to provide fodder for the “Say What?” list is email subjects, especially those that are spam. Take for instance one I received a few weeks ago, titled: “Be the man you used to be.” Newsflash: Despite those who will swear I have a pair of brass ones, I never was a man. Besides, time marches on. There’s no way I could ever be the woman I used to be. I could aspire to be the woman I’d like to be. Or to be like the woman I used to be. But technically, I think, not ever to be the woman I used to be.

I’ve seen some other things online that drove me to a “Say What” that might be typos. Or they might actually be Freudian slips. First there was “athlettes.” A typo? Or a more delicate term for female athletes? You be the judge.

My favorite one of these is a recent Facebook item from a friend who encouraged us to share her post on our own pages, because it would bring us lots of money. She admitted that she didn’t know exactly how it worked, but it definitely had something to do with “the Chinese art of Fungus Shiue.”

After my initial “Say what?” I figured out she must have meant Feng Shui (which is pronounced Fung Shway). Too late. I kept picturing that poster people hang in their office. The one that reads: “I feel like a mushroom here. They keep me in the dark and feed me lots of bulls - - t.” I admit that I consulted a Feng Shui book before I put our house on the market (fat lot of good it did me), but most folks think it’s just a load of bs. So, Fungus Shiue might have been a Freudian slip after all.

The next time you hear me mutter: “Say what?” don’t think I didn’t hear you. I heard you perfectly clearly, as far as I was concerned. Just not necessarily the way you meant to be heard. If that bothers you, go fry a bike.