Some things I can tell you because I'm old

I love to give advice. I rarely do it, because most people don't actually want advice, they just want you to agree with them. But getting older makes it more acceptable to give advice, either because you're more experienced and hence wiser, or because you care less what other people think of you. Because you're old and what does it matter anyway.

So rather than impose myself on other people, I will offer it up my words of wisdom here. Some of it's actual advice; some of it is just observational.

1. Never run for a bus, but make sure that you'd able to if you really wanted. (The first part is a 2000 Year-Old Man quote, the second is because whenever I do a short sprint I think about this).

2. Baby carrots are not actually babies. They are regular carrots cut into small pieces. You should just know that. They don't even say baby carrots on the bags, they call them Baby Cut Carrots, which is a nonsense phrase.

3. Recognize that sometimes it just hurts to be alive. I think I'm a pretty happy, open, comfortable-with-myself kind of guy and I have a nice life, but I still have moments when being conscious hurts. I can't really tell you what's going on, but it's something existential. I feel it most days and fortunately it's fleeting. But it's not hard for me to imagine how hard it might be for someone with a less solid base than I have. On a related note,

4. Give yourself a break. From what I'm observed, most people are much harder on themselves than anyone else is. If for no other reason than that nobody thinks about you nearly as often as you do (or think they do).

4. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you spend too much time ruminating about the way things ought to be or focusing on how reality is not just like that, you'll make yourself unhappy and have less fun that you might. Speaking of which.

5. Have fun. Every day, have fun. One of my favorite movie lines is in "State and Main," a sadly underappreciated David Mamet film about a bunch of Hollywood types making a movie in a small town in Vermont. At one point, one of them says to a local woman, "I guess you have to make you're own fun around here." And she replies, "Everyone has to make their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it's not fun; it's entertainment." So don't just binge watch, do something.

6. I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that in general usage "random" does not mean anything even remotely like random. But I guess if "literally" can mean "figuratively," all bets are off.

7. And last night I saw an experienced public speaker refer to something as fruitional, which is definitely not a word, though one can argue that it should be. To make matters worse, she used it twice in a 5 minute introduction. Lazy lazy lazy. Easier to make something up that figure out how to use the actual words that are available to you.

I'm sure there's more to come.