The New 88

I learned yesterday that I'm 88 years old.

And here I'd been enjoying these latest formulations--like 40 is the new 20, 60 is the new 40, and the like. And now this 88 stuff!

The calendar says I'm 71. But one of those "quizzes" on Facebook has other ideas. Yesterday this quiz popped up on my page: Can We Guess Your Age Based on the Books That You've Read? (Link to the quiz.) I confess that I sometimes take Facebook quizzes--which is probably a very bad idea (who knows what those quiz sites are doing while you're trying to remember the capital of Vermont?). And I usually post the results, too, unless I haven't done well. (Silence Is Golden.)

Anyway,  I couldn't resist a book quiz--and was actually truthful in my answers. And that was how I learned that I'm 88. (I wonder if there's an older number--and why didn't I get it!?)

I'm pretty sure how the quiz works. Every time I answered (confessed) that I'd read Shakespeare or some other classic work, I added a decade or so to my age. (Only Old Guys Have Read Old Books!) I actually do read many recent books--but the questions were generally set up to see whether I preferred Hamlet, to, say, The Hunger Games (I exaggerate--but not all that much). So although I have read the first book in that Hunger Games series (just to see what is going on), I'm not really the audience for those books, and I prefer the melancholy Dane to Katniss. So sue me.

As I've gotten older, I've found I have been reading a lot of the old "classics" that I'd never gotten around to--from Thackeray to Smollett to Trollope to Eliot and on and on. And confessing that sort of thing on a Facebook quiz is near-fatal.

I was somewhat comforted later in the day to see that a couple of my Facebook friends were also 88. (Both are chronologically younger than I.) So that was sort of comforting, though I have to confess that I was a little annoyed by seeing all those other test-takers bellow that they are 25.

Oh well ... I learned yesterday that 71 is the new 88. That's excitin'.