I'll Be 85 When I Go To That Mansion In The Sky--Find Out How Old You'll Be


I was born in 1949 and the Life Clock, located on the World Clock, claims I will live until the fairly decent age of 85.  I'm still shooting for 103 as long as I stay in good health.  I expect to be traveling around the world Couchsurfing until I'm 97.  Here:  Look at these actual Couchsurfing statistics by ages of travelers who only need a free crash on somebody's couch somewhere on one of the seven continents:

It's free.  No charge.  And so many of them speak English.  I am trying to take an email refresher course in French, which I studied in college and couldn't talk my way into a glass of wine with in Paris, but I still can't roll my "r's" and it's probably hopeless.  I studied Spanish in high school and finally gave up trying to roll my "r's".  So I took French, and they wanted the fancy tongue moves I seem incapable of performing in a standing or sitting position.  (I wonder if we lay down?)  If only they accepted French kissing as a language skill.  Everyone speaks English in Europe it seems.  And everyone hates you if you don't even try to speak their language.  They can get mean, even vicisious like one German postmaster in Munich that I thought my slap me for my poor Deutsch.  What did he want?  I took a four night crash course in it--one hour once a week--and I was ready, "Ein glass bier, bitte,"  That was all I cared to learn.  Oh yeah, and Danke.


    


Ages 50 to 5963,656 2.2%
Ages 60 to 6921,305 0.8%
Ages 70 to 792,856 0.1%
Ages 80 to 89516 0.0%


Want to see how old you will be when you move on to that greener pasture?  Go to Life Expectancy Test at Life Clock.

I hope you know your cholesterol numbers to get a more authentic reading.  Hell, I have such good "good" cholesterol for some strange reason that they hardly docked me for smoking.  Unless, of course, they would have said I'd live to 103 except for that.

I'm quitting June 10.  That has been my "Q" date for weeks now.  I got my shrink to take me off bloody awful Topamax that helps "maintain your mood" (yeah, one long nasty depressed one).  It was just featured in yet another study that proves people really do lose weight when they take it.  I'm only on 50 mg. but I keep wondering if the weight I lost this year and last will be right where I left it when I look behind me after a few months off of it.

Here's what the study I read yesterday said.  Even though 7 out of 10 people participating in the study were losing good amounts of weight, many elected to drop out because of Topamax's nasty side effects like tics, numbness around your mouth, strange leg and arm movements which can become a very bad condition called Tarditive Dyskinesia, but, I think, most of the people probably had the same big complaints as I:  It's like trying to function on some kind of crazy psychedelic somebody whipped up in their bathroom and put lots of cyanide and other goodies in.  I had some of that.  It was called, fittingly,"UFO's."  It hurt your cells when you were coming down off of it.  It was nasty, nasty shit.  The people who knew I had taken it before and asked me if they should take it and I said "Go for it," were very mad at me.  There were only one downer in the house, a Seconal, and the men all agreed that as much as they would love to have it for the horrible whips and jangles it should go to the lady of the house.  Nowadays, as feminism has made some progress since the 70's, that would never fly nor would I allow it. (That's a bloody lie. I'd gobble that sucker up before anyone knew we had it.)

Anyhow Topamax will put you in size 8 leather pants but you will be a total space cadet.  You can't think or focus even the day after you take it.  I can barely freelance write anymore.  I keep starting over until I have about seven rough drafts going and then I lose them or can't figure out which ones I've edited and which ones I haven't.  It's rough trying to concentrate on anything when that shit has been in you.

So as of today, Dr. Eyeball (close enough) told me I can stop the Topamax and instead take one of my favorite anti-depressants, Wellbutrin, which doesn't cause weight gain and can help you quit smoking.  I also have to take the second dose early in the evening because as I put it oh so professionally to the doc, "It will jack me up, huh?"  Yes, and that's always good news to a stimulant seeking heat missle like myself.

But for now, I'm living to 85 and I put this old body through some tricks, hairpin curves, chemical and alcohol benders where I didn't come up for air, addictions to everything from codeine, to Seconal, to Tuinal

I entered this old mixed bag blog in the Top 100 Sober Bloggers Directory.  So now the blog needs more booze, drugs and recovery in it.  Just as well. I am itching to write about all the things I have been finding and researching and thinking about on those topics, but I give up, as of tonight, on the Chicago Alcohol and Recovery Examiner pub tool which will not let me even make a simple link or paste my copy from my original to the tool.  And it really is a Capital T Tool. My first week on the job I left my article on the Tool and wrote a note to my supervisor/manager that she'd have to finish publishing it if she wanted it because they didn't pay me enough to deal with that crap.  She told me she had so many thousands of reporters that she manages and couldn't possibly, but she did it.  God love her. Maybe she wants to do the article that has been molding on the Tool for a week now.  We are all just slaves on the Examiner's content farm.  Yeah, they hate Google's new algorhythm which leaves their kind of content farm content written mostly by inexperienced writers who, no shit, write about "Alcoholism and Addition Problems" more than a few times to let you know that they really think that is how addiction is spelled.


  • If you want to read good writers, the cream of the formerly sotted crop, stick to reading "The Fix.:  Addiction and Recovery Straight Up."  They always have interesting stuff and information you don't see anywhere else.  It's how I found out about the Sober Blog Dir. and the new blog I'll be reading now "Stark Raving Sober."

HOW BIG OF A RISK TAKER ARE YOU? MORE ABOUT YOUR PERSONALITY THAT IS FASCINATING.

Photo: raYmon's Creative Commons Flickr Photostream
No title given:  Suggest:  Henna Hand (Take a walk on the wildside.)

Have I got some goodies for you today, all brought to via the kindness of the Universe and Intuitive Inner Wisdom gone wild on Internet research.

These aren't your "Magic 8-ball" gimmicks (free question at 8-ball Web site.)  They are scientific, Carl Jung, Myers-Briggs psychological/personality tests and you cannot believe how much interpretation you get, as well as advice for more successful living in reference to your type. 

The test takes about 10-15 minutes.  All are free except for one looking at whether or not you are the entrepreneur type, which is five bucks.  You get pages of interpretation and scores all from taking the Carl Jung-Briggs test.

I learned that I am way up there on the introvert charts, nary an extroverted cell in my body, but don't think I get walked on.  In terms of taking risks, measured at 0-100 percent with the lower the percentage being the lower the desire to take risks.  A real by the rules guy or woman is around 32 percent.  The mean is 53 percent.  My risk taking and desire for cheap thrills puts me near the top of the heap at 78 percent. 

The most interesting part, I thought, was reading about what type you are depending on your score, and famous people who share that type with you, and I'm talking Gandhi (me) category famous, not Lady Gaga or some other flash-in-the-pan using up the end of their 15 minutes of being famous.  I am first of all an "Inspired" type (I must have followers for my world view.  Sign up where it says followers.  Don't worry about the specifics of my view.)  I am #2 the Adventurer type, who in the old days were knights roaming castles and kingdoms, swashbucklers, and the crazy guys who didn't have to do it, but volunteered to fight lions when things were too slow for them.  Today the Adventurer type is most likely a terrorist, drug smuggler, revolutionary or conspirator, all personal dreams for my future.

Excited?  It is absurdly fascinating, unless, of course, you are a 0.3 percent on the risk scale and find it too scarry or revealing.

The main test is the Jung Typology Test.  I won't waste my clicks to tell you what little I know.  The info is there when you click it.  Although I did read some synchronomous (is that a word--"coincidental by divine plan") background on Jung's theories of introverts vs. extroverts while reading "Man and his Symbols." Google it for more, or read this book or any of his other books.  Right now I'm still on dreams and their interpretation. (I have no readers because I write at a 12th grade readability level I learned after finishing an article tonight.  That means I have to completely rewrite, but I have help. If you go to this great little readability utility Readers' Digest writes at a 8th grade level.  The lower the readability, the more the readers.)

Check out these readability stats:
Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid are reading level algorithms that can be helpful in determining how readable your content is. Reading level algorithms only provide a rough guide, as they tend to reward short sentences made up of short words. Whilst they're rough guides, they can give a useful indication as to whether you've pitched your content at the right level for your intended audience.

Website address

This service analyses the readability of all rendered content. Unfortunately, this will include navigation items, and other short items of content that do not make up the part of the page that is intended to be the subject of the readability test. These items are likely to skew the results. The difference will be minimal in situations where the copy content is much larger than the navigation items, but documents with little content but lots of navigation items will return results that aren't correct.
Philip Chalmers of Benefit from IT  provided the following typical Fog Index scores, to help ascertain the readability of documents.

Typical Fog Index Scores
Fog IndexResources
6TV guides, The Bible, Mark Twain
8Reader's Digest
8 - 10Most popular novels
10Time, Newsweek
11Wall Street Journal
14The Times, The Guardian
15 - 20Academic papers
Over 20 -

Over 30              You know the government is up to something. 
Only government sites can get away with this, because you can't ignore them.
I'm pleased to say this blog comes in at a 7th grade reading level.


I've got to run.  Hackers/Google fooling with my Web page.  Margins are all over the place.