Saturday Tweets: Where Do You See Yourself in Ten Years?

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  1. Thank you for posting the link to the article, “The Death of Household Productivity.” I have seen these sterile “neighborhoods” and would never want to live in one. Several years ago, I visited someone who lives in such a setting. They proudly showed me their postage-stamp-sized yard, covered in fake grass.

    • I couldn’t agree more with you or with this article. It brings to mind that old song about ticky-tacky, which, by the way, often comes with a very expensive price tag these days; frankly, there are trailer parks here in Vermont with more character. It seems to be spreading, too: the part of northeast Pennsylvania where we used to live had been, not long ago, a lovely, mismatched, rural farming area. Since the 1990’s, emigrants from urban New York and New Jersey have brought with them this awful trend of humongous, trendy, houses with every known, now-essential, amenity. There are now entire neighborhoods in which all of the homes are one of only three or four styles. We had to get out. Our life is too messy to fit into this emerging pattern. It seems like a disease and I sometimes wonder what this is doing to our souls.

      By the way, it doesn’t matter if you only have a postage-stamp size lot with fake grass if you never spend any time outside. We rarely saw kids playing outdoors in our former area of PA, they were probably indoors on their iDevices. Safety, you know.

  2. Years ago, shortly after graduating college, I heard one of the most popular songs of my high school years on an oldies radio station. It gave me a feeling of dislocation: how could something that (to me) was contemporary, ordinary, and such a part of my life now be something old, maybe even exotic?

    I had that same feeling when I watched the dish washing video. Lloyd Kahn is cleaning up the same way my grandmother did, and my mother, and the same way we do dishes every single day at our house – minus the really cool dish drying rack. When did this mundane chore become something that needs a YouTube video? How did the method of doing dishes by hand become uncommon knowledge? Have I already lived too long?

  3. I have a friend who lived in one of these ‘senior communities’ and whenever I visited, I felt like I was visiting her in jail. Having to report to whoever was at the gate before being allowed in was annoying when they couldn’t ‘find’ her name on the list because they could not listen long enough to hear the correct spelling. Or she had not called ahead to ‘authorize’ me. She said it made her feel ‘safe’. Being there was a realization of AGE and I found it disconcerting that there were never any young people or children around. Her and her husband’s health began to decline and they finally left but I think being surrounded by aging people had something to do with it. I would never live in a ‘community’ like this. Another friend lived in one of these communities and wanted to be able to hang her laundry on a line so she decided to ‘hide’ it on her patio. She got reported by the neighbor behind her even though she only put out the towels and sheets. She said it wasn’t like they had to look over the wall at her skivvies. She also moved out but by then had to take a great loss on her house. Living in these senior communities limited your ability to sell to anyone you want.

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