Old Age

 I've been thinking a lot about old age, lately, and have decided it is having a deleterious effect on me, because the longer I think about it, the older I get. I don't know about neural plasticity and all that, but I perceive a trend here. Just kidding. I'll throw in here that if you're not old yourself, you will be, someday, if you're lucky.  And I say that advisedly if not slightly sarcastically. 

To get to the whole point of this post, however, we must veer away from this irrelevant introductory paragraph. I'm talking about editing text. In addition to authors and journalists, bloggers and anyone who emails all do at least some editing on what they write. I do. And it bothers me when I find really stupid mistakes, and it bothers me as I wonder if there are some that I don't find. I'm getting old, I lament. Damn it. I don't think I used to make this many errors, let slip this many grammatical errors and wrong words. Wrong words especially with the advent of auto-correct. 

Then I realized that I actually see a ton of all of these when I read news articles on the Internet. I must assume that all the professional editors behind these articles are not nearly as old as I am, since I am well past the typical retirement age. This makes me feel better. It's NOT just me. Then, as I breathe a sigh of relief, it dawns on me that we are all getting stupider because of the Internet, regardless of our ages, and I begin to worry again. 

It's always something. It never ends; and if I can say that, I must not be that old after all.