Be cautious trying on power yoga pants

Have you noticed that a lot of people have been telling you how great you look this year? That’s because you have reached a certain age and they know another birthday is around the corner. One look at you and they just assume everything has gone south, so why even get into it.

People are falling all over themselves to let you know, “You look good, sorta.” I don’t know what happened or when this started to present itself, but I’ve been getting this a lot lately. It might have been about the same time certain store clerks stopped referring to me as lady and instead called me “Madam.”

Sometimes I think there is a rumor going around that I have been in a major car wreck. Okay, I may have started that myself, but there are reasons that I can’t discuss here. And I’m familiar with the Jaws of Life; I could have used this device when I made the mistake one time of trying on Power Yoga stretch pants, quite a rush; it was like descending from 30,000 feet to 5,000 feet in seconds and without the added safety of an aircraft.

At my age, we always think we look the same, especially when we have to pull out a driver’s license. We are told in ads we are the new 40. It’s not that we consider ourselves to be getting older, just that we have ungrateful children who insist on having birthdays also.

But thank heavens we are in a political year where people’s rights are explained, touted and bantered about. We know that the Constitution, according to some candidates, demands the right of a citizen to have smooth skin and to be any age they want to be regardless of DNA confirmation. Just ask any lawyer on television who sits behind a desk in front of a lot of cardboard books and he will tell you this right goes so far that you can sue the nearest investment bank if you have walked in there in the last year with dry skin.

Or for that matter any company that has Inc. after its name.

This political year has become so repetitive and boring that it affects your outward appearance. What we really need is a candidate who subscribes to the platform of the song, “Faster Horses, Younger Women, Older Whiskey and More Money.” That would wake everyone up in a landslide.

For now, though, it will just have to suffice to know our rights, and I believe this comes on the heels of the Miranda warning, so you can show up at various functions and hold your head up high.

I used to get a lot of dialogue when I met people at these social events; the conversation went right into important stuff like the rain forest, the stock market or career choices. Just kidding; nothing that intellectual. I’m just trying to add a touch of class to my mundane existence. OK, usually it was about a lotto ticket being missing or some petty cash gone around the office, but hey, at least it was never about my appearance.

Well, that’s not true either; often the very fact that I actually gave the appearance of working on something other than solitaire on my computer was discussed also.

Perhaps it is the cold weather, or maybe global warming or the economy. You know the texture of your skin changes in proportion to the number of analysts picking apart polling data.

I was in the supermarket one day when I heard this noise behind me. I thought the floor was giving way. It sounded like a windshield shattering into a million little shards of glass. Fortunately it turned out that the woman behind me had just had part of her face crack; it was just lying there on the floor.

The woman got up, dusted herself off and apologized. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I made the mistake of watching the debate last night.” And so it goes.