Monday, October 13, 2008

Thinking about retirement

I took a test yesterday that measures your calender age versus your "actual age." It calculates how fast you are aging based on your eating habits, exercise habits, hereditary diseases, etc. And, guess what? I'm 8 years younger than the calender says! And, if that's the case, I just got my license to drive a car. But, on another note, that means it'll take me eight more years than the rest of you to hit middle age. Here's a link to the test.

Even though I now know how young I still am, I still can't keep myself from thinking about retirement. And, quite frankly I don't really want to retire. All the men on both sides of my family have pretty much worked up until their dying day. It'd almost be nice to be able to mark it on a Calender so I know when work will officially be over (at least in mortality). But, I can think of certain work impoverished situations that I certainly would not mind.

I would love to live in a cozy cottage overlooking the central California coast. I would have a computer, some pens, paper, surfboards, a garden, and a great kitchen. I could wake up and catch some waves, veg out on the beach a little bit with my special someone, then come back home and write while looking out on the water. Then I could split time with my garden and pull up a bunch of summer squashes, cherry tomatoes, and cucumbers and head back to my awesome kitchen and whip something delicious up. That, to me, would be ideal. I would feel accomplishment in writing, and yet still be relaxed and flexible enough to enjoy my twilight years. However, what it would have to imply is that I am good at writing, and that could be easily debated. But, jumping back to this dream scenario, I don't think it would have to be the central California coast. It could be Cape Cod, or the South Shore area of Massachusetts. It could even be Nova Scotia. Who knows? I think you get the point.

Trying to be as pragmatic as possible, what is your retirement scenario? Talk amongst yourselves.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Berkshires. Or Newfoundland, given the warming climate.

Michael Powers said...

Hmmm. Perhaps. But if the climate is warming? What happened to fall? And why was this summer so mild?

I predict global cooling. And, the central California coast is, for the record, a very, very temperate climate verging on cold for a large part of the year.

Anonymous said...

The climate is definitively warning. I've given reams of empirical info to you on this, without seeming effect.

Day-to-day or season-to-season observations are not accurate indicators of longterm climactic change.

Cali ain't bad, but the culture out there is either a) weird and San Franciscan -- and I say that as a liberal academic who enjoys a good toke but can't stand the Bay Area; or b) LA's weird mixture of frivolity, aggression, dippiness and smuttiness.

Plus, you know as well as I that the Atlantic's the better ocean.

Michael Powers said...

Well, even in aggregate, I see a cooling trend.

I'm not trying to be a prophet, and at best will only end up being a more empirically influenced version of the Farmer's Almanac, but I see it getting chillier for the next 20-50 years. We'll just have to see what the sun does.

I agree about California, except the central coast is rather agrarian as opposed to SF or LA, and it's a calm place, but yes, the Atlantic is much warmer and is MY ocean.