Aging doesn’t concern me much. Sure, I’m aware in terms of health and wellness, and I tailor my routine and lifestyle as needed, but what I mean is I don’t go around “feeling” my age. Thus, when I recently started getting spam like this:
and this:
…in my email, it kind of threw me off.
When I got the first one, I blinked and re-read it a few times, and then it was like, Seniors! Okay. I get it. Then I thought, But why did this spam come to my email? Followed by, Oh… right. Duh! I was born in 1968, which my email knows, because when I’d created my account, it demanded that I enter in my Date of Birth. “Seniors” generally refers to the 50+ crowd,* so I guess once you’re within five years of it, you get picked up by the radars that detect your impending age-based qualification for the senior dating scene. Qualifying as fresh meat a potential member of the senior dating pool means that you qualify for all the spam and junk mail that goes along with it, including the junk mail warmly welcoming you into the AARP fold.
(I snort, but I do plan on joining AARP when I’m 50. Discounts all over the place as an achievement award for 50+ years of surviving life’s… ups and downs, shall we say? Sign me up!)
My Ex was 10 years older than me, and when he started receiving AARP stuff in the mail at around age 48-49, he was not happy. I, on the other hand, thought it was cool.
Anyway, the trickle of senior dating site spam into my email inbox has begun, to my great amusement. At worst, it’s disconcerting. I just don’t feel or think of myself as belonging to an age demographic that would prompt spam from senior dating sites.
I’m a “near-senior,” and the spammers know it… because they know everything about us.
If I was single and looking to meet people on dating sites (senior or otherwise), I would have to go all out and embellish my profile with inelegant, poorly-lit, mirror-reflected selfies, like these ones that I took yesterday:
At any rate, I think I’ve decided that I’m over the “plotting my mid-life crisis shenanigans” thing. It was more fun to think about it than anything, though getting behind the wheel of that Corvette was assuredly very fun, and my mid-life crisis window of opportunity is still wide open. That being said, the time has come to anticipate and plan for SENIOR STATUS mayhem!! I have been alerted by the spam in my email.
What should I do first? Maybe I’ll carry out my life-long threat to train for and enter amateur figure competitions, because now I could compete in the “Masters” level category (in bodybuilding and in other sports. “Masters” in athletics means “Seniors”). Heheh.
Happy Friday, All!
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*I don’t think there’s a standard, across-the-board age requirement for “senior status” in the States. I think in order to qualify as a “senior citizen” in the U.S., you have to be of retirement age, which is still 65… but you only have to be 50 in order to join AARP, whose acronym yet stands for “Association of American Retired Persons.” (By the way, adding on to that contradiction, could someone please explain why an organization calling itself the “Association of American Retired Persons” has a section called “Job Resources” in its sidebar, with links to pages like “Job Hunting Tips,” “Job Search Tool,” “Start a Business” and “Life Reimagined for Work”?)