How Not To Act Old

HNTAO afficionados know that the whole point of this blog is to point out new ways of not acting old. We don’t warn against stereotypical granny behavior — covering your furniture in plastic, sucking on hard candies — because, duh, we all know we’re not supposed to do that, right? Right???

So why are you still complaining?

Your defense might be that complaining is done by people of all ages, and of course you might be right. Last night, in a desperate end-of-holiday-weekend attempt at finding something we all wanted to watch on TV (and if you detected several complaints hovering around the edges of that statement, you would be correct), we tuned into the ten-year-old movie Prozac Nation, in which a beautiful young person complains about: 1. Having to go to Harvard 2. On a scholarship! 3. At the encouragement of her too-involved mother 4. Where she is oppressed by all the attention she attracts because of her magnetic sexuality and amazing writing prowess 5. And then is forced to go home for the holidays where other people cook her too much wonderful food.

At that point, rather than complain about how much the movie sucked and (for the edification of the beautiful young people with whom I was watching the film) how obnoxious and ungrateful the character seemed, I simply passed out.

But if you’re young, gorgeous, successful, and complaining, you’re simply a brat. Or troubled. If you’re, you know, our age and complaining, you 1. should know better and 2. start to sound like a granny.

Gretchen Rubin’s wonderful Happiness Project newsletter landed in my in-box this morning — and for those of you who haven’t yet read her book, you better rush right out and buy it — reminding me of all the reasons not to complain.

And hey! Right after you buy Gretchen’s book and stifle all your incipient complaints, run over and check out my new site, Ho Springs.

(Question: Does anyone even know what “bellyaching” means anymore? I think of it as a relic of such Depression-era films as The Little Rascals, in which some young tough would inevitably say, “Aw, quit yer bellyaching.”)