How old are you, really?

If age is a mental state, then years don’t tell you how old a person is. Luckily, language is an expression of thought and thought is a reflection of mental state. So you can usually tell how old someone is on the inside; when someone is an ‘old soul’ or ‘never grew up,’ so to speak.

I don’t think there’s any way of discerning a person’s exact mental age from their conversation, but there’s definitely major themes that crop up as people start passing into various stages in their lives. Here we go:

1. You start talking about the opposite sex.

   I’m sure you remember older people talking about the opposite sex back when you weren’t interested. You thought that was something for ‘grown-ups’ to consider. Well guess what? If you’ve started talking about them, you’re a grown up.

2. Your conversation revolves around your children.

   This isn’t to say you talk about nothing but your children, just that their actions become conversation pieces for you. A prerequisite for this is actually having children. My prevention against reaching the mental age of stage 2 is not reproducing. Thankfully, my habits and lack of motivation virtually guarantee a lonely, unloved existence. Take that Western conception of the good life!

3. Your conversation revolves around your health problems (worse: bowel movements and vitamins).

   I will never get to this point. I refuse. Flat out. As soon as I came up with this list, I have made it a point never to acknowledge that my body operates in any suboptimal way.

Stage 0 is not on this list, but we can assume it applies to children who talk about their playmates, ask questions, or talk about their feelings and thoughts. It’s elemental philosophy which most people lose interest in as their beliefs are hardened by age, but some pursue as a career. ::cough::

I also didn’t mention gossip as this occurs at every age, whether we like it or not. Furthermore, I thought about including work as a major life change, but this is really a ‘what’s going on’ sort of conversation. People that don’t work still talk about school or their hobbies just as much. It’s circumstantial, not sequential like all the other items on this list.

Ironically, this list doesn’t fit me very well at all. I’m an out-of-work philosopher in stage 0 who doesn’t care to talk much about the opposite sex, doesn’t have kids and doesn’t acknowledge that his actions have any effect on his health. If you don’t feel this list applies to you either, consider yourself lucky. And consider yourself warned.

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Selfish reasons to be environmental

In trying to be an innovator (rather than simply an early adopter), I like to keep my ears open about all sorts of cool things. Especially when these things solve problems you otherwise would have to live with. These are three.

1. Getting rid of junk mail from Green Dime:

Shocking facts about everyday waste in the US

• Only about one-tenth of all solid garbage in the United States gets recycled
• Every year we fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth, halfway to the moon
• Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour
• Each year, Americans trash enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City
• Americans toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times
• Forty-three thousand tons of food is thrown out in the United States each day
• Sixty-five billion aluminum soda cans are used each year
• Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to rebuild our commercial air fleet every three months, and enough iron and steel to supply all our nation’s automakers every day

They send you a packet that you sign and send to various junk mail companies. Presumably, they then take you off their list and you stop receiving junk mail.

2. Catalog Choice employs a similar concept sans the snail mail. Here you get to choose which catalogs you receive that you want and opt out of all the others. The Web site then sends a letter to the catalog companies and the catalogs stop coming. The beauty is you can keep updating your profile so you can list new catalogs as they arrive.

3. Finally, I’ve found my next car. It’s called the Aptera (Greek for ‘wingless’). And you’ll notice from this hotlinked file (from their Myspace site) that it’s not a conventional car. Far from it. The car comes in the all-electric model (which can go 120 miles/200 kilometers on 2 hours of charge) or the hybrid model (which can go 200+ miles on one gallon or 90+ kilometers on one litre of gasoline).

Also, instead of rear-view mirrors, it includes three cameras that let you see behind you and to each side. It comes with GPS and XM satellite radio along with RFID (so that you never have to take out your keys to enter or start the car). My favorite bit is that there’s solar panels that use the energy of the sun to cool down the car so it never gets hot inside no matter where you park.

Sorry, my heart is beating too fast, I need my inhaler.

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