Graham

Graham will be a non-profit for older folks. We focus on friendships, and share what we learn along the way. And this blog is where we share things we love about time, aging, and elders.

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The idea that a human went and cut this down makes me nauseous -- but this is a beautiful way to visual and consider time. 

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There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.—Wittgenstein

— Graham (@ForGraham) December 17, 2015

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This is a great question, and there are a few levels of answer to it. Before I start I want to distinguish between types of "bad language" --...

The user ‘BoobRockets’ on Reddit asks:

What kind of language would a sailor use to actually curse, i.e. how would one literally curse like a sailor?

And ‘jschooltiger’ responded with an excellent answer. The beginning of his answer interested me most, emphasis mine…

This is a great question, and there are a few levels of answer to it. Before I start I want to distinguish between types of "bad language" -- roughly, we can draw a distinction between profanity (taking Gods's name in vain, or cursing God -- often called "blasphemy"); obscenity (sexual or scatological language); and vulgarity (coarse or crude language that might not rise to the level of vulgarity).

I didn’t know the nuance of these terms. And I love how they’re being explored.

My brain has its own classification system. It goes something like this, from worst to best:

Words that are only used in sad circumstances, like malignant or suicide.

Words my mother doesn’t like.

Words I wouldn’t say in front of strangers.

Words I would think about saying to strangers when cut me off in traffic.

Words I would say so teenagers would mistake me for cool.

And, of course, the words I’m using and choosing not to use connect and collect us into social groups. All forms of slang and personal vernacular help us relate to others and, in turn, become accepted by them. Our words are the window-dressing for our soul. They let people peek-in, but never truly reveal everything that is inside.

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For Women, Income Inequality Continues Into Retirement

Lydia Smith, 87, is one of the 2.6 million women ages 65 and over living at or below the poverty line. Older women are more than twice as likely as men to live in poverty.

Ina Jaffe for NPR:

[Lydia] Smith never saved for retirement. It didn't occur to her. And with the kind of money she made working as a clerk in a department store and a cashier at a restaurant, there wasn't much left over anyway.

This is the story of most of the 2.6 million women ages 65 and over who are living at or below the poverty line, says Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center.

Over a lifetime, she says, "women earn less than men because their wages are lower and they're more likely to take time out for caregiving." And, she says, women live longer than men, so "they have to stretch these lower benefits over a longer life span."

And Lydia Smith isn’t the only one. This is common.

"The poverty [rate] of single women [living] alone is 18 to 20 percent," Hartmann says. "Many of these women may not have any relatives. They might not have had children. [Or] those children might not be in a position to help take care of them."

This is something our country is going to have to discuss and consider, and the discussion won’t be pretty because it will be about people’s grandmothers and grandfathers—the people who’s knee they’ve bounced on, the ones who knit them blankets.

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Today I learned that the Latin phrase ab ovo usque ad mala translates to from the egg to the apple. Those were the traditional items eaten at the beginning and end of a Roman feast.

Does anything else cover the beginning and end so quickly and eloquently?

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I love this photo of a woman looking at a picture of herself. I remember finding this photo on reddit, but can’t find it now to credit anyone.

I think the caption rad that this woman was a little over 100 years-old and looking at a photo of herself in her 20s or 30s.

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In case you needed reference about what currently constitutes old in the woman- and man-made world.

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Interview with Sarah Nicole Prickett

The writer, editor, and co-founder of erotic journal Adult Magazine let’s us in on her skin care secrets and why she’s deleting her tweets.

To us, she wins the cliché “voice of our generation” badge she never asked for, but deserves nonetheless. There’s a lot about her online, which she hates but also seems to have moved past. Besides, a lot of it is suspiciously broken. Her tweets auto-delete every week, adult-mag.com is down following a hack, and many of her widely shared blog posts are no longer visible. 

This bit made me think about what I’m/we’re leaving behind.

I learned recently that the term legendary comes from the term legend, in the sense of a legend that people used to keep notes in. If something was worthy of being written down, it was legendary.

But I wonder what’s being written down now, and how it’s being collected.

Take for example this blog, it’s essentially a funnel for the things I find online that feel related in someway to to time, aging, and elders. I try to post things that cause me to spur or reconsider how I think about those topics.

And the indented quote above did just that.

What will be our living record? Can social media actually function as a memory? Or what I’m really saying: will my theoretical grandchildren be able to glean anything of me from flippant remarks and asides and echoes of things other people post? 

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Small aside: I loved this…

I do understand that other people don’t think this way about the Internet. They’re like, “The internet is public.” A lot of things are public, but it doesn’t mean they’re for you. For instance, you can walk down the street and you can look into all of your neighbors’ windows should they have chanced not to draw the curtains. If you really lean in, you can listen to all kinds of conversations that are too quiet for you to just overhear. You can do all kinds of things in public that you should not do. Are you walking down the street, interrupting random twosomes or threesomes of people to add your two fucking sentences? 

(Via the excellent Imp Kerr)

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From Reddit user ‘jcepiano’:

One of my piano teachers passed away last month. This is one of his final performances he gave back in July at the age of 88. His body might have been failing him, but we're lucky that his mind, soul, and hands were in amazing shape.

He begins playing around the 3:30 mark.

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The website of the Huang Twins!

The Huang Twins made a beautiful site about scale in the universe, and this particular bit snagged me…

The universe is 14,000,000,000 years old. If something were more than 14,000,000,000 light-years away, it would take more than 14,000,000,000 years to reach us, which is more time than the universe has existed.

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"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."– Vladimir Nabokov

— Graham (@ForGraham) December 8, 2015

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These Japanese Companies Have Stayed in Business for Over 1,000 Years

After centuries of stability, why are some of them now dying out?

Joe Pinkster for the Atlantic:

Century-old American companies like General Electric and Ford appear ancient when viewed alongside modern upstarts like Google and Facebook. But there are a number of Japanese firms—some of which have been around for more than a millennium—that exist on another scale of time entirely. Japan is home to some of the oldest continuously operating businesses in the world, among them a 1,300-year-old inn and a 900-year-old sake brewer.

[…]

[Japen] is currently home to more than 50,000 businesses that are over 100 years old.

These businesses have been around longer than many people can trace their family tree.

I feel sorry for the person who is running this business. Imagine that immense pressure, from not only your family but the culture with pride rooted in longevity.

This almost feels like a new form of longevity. Or we need a new way to think about it.

These businesses reveal a significant bit about us too, emphasis mine…

For one thing, these companies tend to be clustered in industries that never really go out of style. Kongo Gumi specialized in building Buddhist temples—a pretty dependable bet in nation with a strong Buddhist history. The company's first temple, near Osaka, was completed in 593, and has been rebuilt six times since then (by Kongo Gumi, of course). “There’s a pattern,” William O’Hara, the author of Centuries of Success, told The Wall Street Journal in 1999. “The oldest family businesses often are involved in basic human activities: drink, shipping, construction, food, guns.”

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When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Will Rogers

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A potentially immortal jellyfish species that can age backward—the Benjamin Button of the deep—is silently invading oceans, swarm by swarm, a recent study says.

Ker Tan for National Geographic:

A potentially "immortal" jellyfish species that can age backward is silently invading the world's oceans, swarm by swarm, a recent study says.

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About as wide as a human pinky nail when fully grown, the immortal jellyfish (scientific name: Turritopsis dohrnii) was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea in 1883. But its unique ability was not discovered until the 1990s.

[…]

Turritopsis typically reproduces the old-fashioned way, by the meeting of free-floating sperm and eggs. And most of the time they die the old-fashioned way too.

But when starvation, physical damage, or other crises arise, "instead of sure death,[Turritopsis] transforms all of its existing cells into a younger state," said study author Maria Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.

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Cover Story: Moving Images - The New Yorker

For this week’s cover, Ware enlisted the help of Ira Glass, Nico Muhly, and John Kuramoto to create an animated story.

One of my favorite illustrators came together with Ira Glass’ This American Life to tell a story of a a mother and daughter.

I hope the mother and daughter re-tell the story in 40 years and it’s completely different.

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Saint Fred

Mister Rogers, the iconic television host, was a Presbyterian minister—but his show touched people of all faiths.

Jonathon Merritt for the Atlantic, emphasis mine:

Rogers affected the lives of millions of children, and I count myself among them. On many afternoons, I sat in front of a television screen where Mister Rogers told me that I was lovable and I was enough. He said he was my friend, and I believed him. My life still bears the fingerprints of his influence.

I can still hear him signing off his show similar to the way he concluded his letter to Amy Melder: “You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.” Some have suggested that this message sought to instill children with a sense of self-importance, but to believe that is to fundamentally misunderstand Fred Rogers. At the core of Rogers’ mission was the paradoxical Christian belief that the way to gain one’s life is to give it away.

Bingo.

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"If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age."—George Burns

— Graham (@ForGraham) November 19, 2015