You’ve all heard of the Bermuda Triangle. As per Wikipedia, it is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean “in which a number of aircraft and surface vessels are alleged to have mysteriously disappeared… Popular culture has attributed these disappearances to the paranormal, a suspension of the laws of physics, or activity by extraterrestrial beings.”
What happened to those vessels? It’s something even women 50+ — who know everything — can’t answer.
Here are five other things the women 50+ I know have yet to figure out:
- How is it possible to have a jobless recovery?
Economists, financial advisers and the media are a-twitter about how great we’re doing. Wall Street is back, the banks are optimistic, bonuses are unprecedented, the disaster has been averted, the future is promising.
There’s only one shadow: those multi-millions in our country we know who are out of work, facing foreclosure and messing the pretty picture up by spending less this Christmas than we were expected to.
“Recovery,” according to Webster’s online, is a “return to an original state.” And we women know that while the economy may be coming along just fine, our “original state” is anything close to being restored. Jobless recovery? If women 50+ can’t figure this one out, it belongs — along with Flight 19 and the USS Cyclops — in the Bermuda Triangle.
- How long will you live?
On a closely related topic, all of our personal financial planning scenarios are based on one critical question: at what age are you going to die? Everything depends on your answer. Should you take early retirement from Social Security? How much do you have to save? How much can you spend? What kind of returns do you need? Which financial instruments will serve you? And while we’re at it, what diseases are you likely to get? How long are you going to need assisted living? And so on.
The financial and insurance advice machinery switch is locked on hold until you spit out the answer to the question that has defied humanity’s best efforts to predict since the beginning of time: the prediction of the time and circumstances of your own death.
Your final answer, and every single thing predicated on it: might as well dump it into the Bermuda Triangle, too.
- If Global Warming isn’t real, why are the polar ice caps melting and polar bears treading water instead of hopping from iceberg to iceberg?
Put the entire Arctic and everybody who questions the data because “it’s cold in Chicago this week” into the Bermuda Triangle.
- Why didn’t it work out for Jay Leno on NBC at 10 p.m.?
Women 50+ are his key market and I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t try to get to bed early. What? We won’t watch television before 11:30 p.m.? Throw 10 o’clock — the whole darn thing — into the mysterious western region of the North Atlantic.
- Sophia Loren at 75.
Did you see her at the Golden Globes? Wow. Absolutely nothing sags. Cue the sci-fi music and join me as we skip the spa and head, along with the amazing Ms. Loren, straight for The Bermuda Triangle, searching for this and all things having to do with the suspension of the normal laws of gravity.
As for everything else? Just ask us. We’ll know.
Agreed. I never thought I was vain until I had a mastectomy at age 39. I was devastated and told the doc I wanted to wake up with implants. Now at age 60, I am lopsided and wondering if I was just avoiding the inevitable. You get what you get and you
Sounds very interesting.
Spike, you are awesome! Love your perspective, thanks for sharing.
Sophia Loren at 75.
What about MEEEEEEE!!!!! Drop by my primetime series “White Collar” sometimes.
Sincerely yours, Miss Diahann Carroll, (75 in July 2010)
INDEED MS CARROLL!