This Saturday I was invited to a party, a friend's 40th birthday party. I was kind of excited, kind of not, the main problem being I knew the friend but didn't really know that many other people there, or knew a few but not that well. As much as I love going to parties, especially at this age when they're few and far between, i don't like going to parties by myself where I don't know that many people. I'm just not that socially adept to fend for myself at these things and have realized that I'm much better in small groups than big parties.


So all Saturday afternoon and early evening I tried to figure out whether I wanted to go or not. The way I saw it, is that it would basically come down to whether or not I wanted to beat myself up afterwards for being lame and staying in or beating myself up for going out and not being socially adept to have a good time.

My choice- I went the third way- dawdled for so long about what to do that it was too late for me to go out and rented a DVD instead.

Now why am I bringing this up? Because while flipping through the channels this morning, I saw a story about a young professor who is studying social circles at retirment homes in Florida. As he studied how the old folks lived, he started to see certain social rules and norms established.

The swimming pool was the big hang out place and most of the old folks would spend all their time there, or at least the social ones. And those when went would quickly find their social cliques and hang out with them. The pool was the place to see and be seen. It was also the place where people would try and meet people of the opposite sex (lots of widows after all and probably the occasional divorcee) and there were quickly established hierarchies of who's dateable and who's not. Apparently, if you owned a car and could still drive at night (ha!), you were golden.

The rest of the day was pretty much spent going to early-bird dinners, playing bingo, and dancing. Again, everything was determined by what the group was doing, which group was going where, and what the in places to go were.

Which is great, because this means what we have to look forward to in our golden years at Del Boca Vista is High School. All over again. Or like everything else we deal with, full of social awkwardness, social hierarchies, and social morays. So we have that to look forward to.

And yes, what it will probably mean is that for those still reading Hooray in, like 2026, it'll pretty much be exactly like this right.

PS- once, in my younger days, I started a short story about some Yuppy who gets in an accident and awakes to find himself back in high school. Which he thinks is great, until he finds out that he really died and had to spend eternity reliving high school as a loser, never able to go to parties he hears about, never able to go date the women he wants to, and constantly beat up by the shop kids.