DO I REALLY NEED TO LOSE 45 POUNDS? LET'S TALK ABOUT INSTAGRAM

  

A few years back, I signed up for Instagram in order to enjoy family photos and maybe share occasional pictures of my garden.  This went well until Instagram figured out that I am a grandmother of a certain age, and started clogging my feed with ads aimed at what its algorithm perceives to be the concerns of my demographic.

 

Just today, I had to wade through messages telling me that I need wrinkle cream, a more supportive bra, sleep gummies, a mascara for aging lashes, an adult sleep sack, exercises aimed at seniors, a serum that will take 15 years off my face, a pillowcase guaranteed to prevent wrinkles, pills that will reduce bloating and hot flashes, mushroom coffee, a supplement that will help me to lose 45 pounds, teeth whiteners, a product to make grey hair shine, and a cortisol supplement.

 

Has the algorithm met any women my age?  Not everyone is trying to look younger.  I’m not saying I no longer care about my appearance – vanity dies hard – but, most of the time, I am too busy reading, writing, gardening, walking, helping with grandkids, getting together with friends, spending time with family – in short, enjoying retirement, to concern myself with aging eyelashes.  (And has no one told the algorithm I am a tea drinker?  Also, if I were to lose 45 pounds, I would be in the hospital.)

 

Sure, I would accept a product that that promised to make my half-grown-out hair grow faster.  And, if you want to advertise chocolate, I am your target audience.  But, mostly, I just want the haranguing to stop.  Aging is not negotiable, yet these ads work very hard to make us women of a certain age feel that aging is shameful, and can and should be pushed back by an endless stream of products.

 

Spoiler alert:  We will age.  More or less gracefully.  Less, if we let these ads get to us.

 

And how about the ads that require the viewer to watch a "short video"? I fell for this only once.  Okay. Maybe twice.  These short videos are up to a half-an-hour long, and generally consist of a guy in a white coat, claiming to be a doctor, singing his own praises and describing his life-changing discovery in excruciating detail.  

 

Do not go there.  There is no way to get to the punchline without watching the whole thing.  (And the punchline will not be worth it.) If you’re not careful, you just might be found with your cold, dead hand clutching your phone, as an endless video plays on and on.  

 

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

 

Here’s another piece of unsolicited advice.  Don’t buy clothing advertised on Instagram (or Facebook).  Sure, it looks good in the ads, but you will likely wind up stuck with a flimsy, wrongly sized, unwearable, and unreturnable item.  So, do as I say, not as I did. 

 

And don’t get me started on parenting advice. Am I getting these messages because I have grandchildren?  Too late for me.  I’m not raising my grands—just hanging out with them.  But I feel for the young parents who are barraged with advice—often conflicting—about the “correct” way to do nearly everything.  Leave them alone, for God’s sake.  Most of them have good instincts, and, in any event, there is no “perfect” way to raise children.

 

Before ceasing this rant, I will confess that I am occasionally drawn in by the endless recipes that appear in my feed, and I will sometimes go so far as to use the “save” function to hang on to these.  This is pretty silly, given that I have so little interest in cooking, but it does demonstrate the power of the beautiful photos.  I confess I have never once gone back to look at any of the recipes.  In fact–here’s a little secret–I have no idea where saved items are stored.  Are they in an undisclosed location with Dick Cheney?  

Just in case I choose to look over my lost recipes, can anyone tell me how to get to them without having to deal with him?

 

Please.

                                                                     Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

THE VIRUS MADE ME DO IT: Cooking in the Time of a Pandemic

I am not much of a cook.  (Go ahead; ask my friends and family.)  In saying this, I don’t mean to say that I can’t cook – I can get a meal on the table – or that I don’t cook – I do.  It’s just that it isn’t a passion or even a pleasure most of the time.  True, there are rainy days when I enjoy making a big pot of soup, but most of the time cooking is just something that has to get done.

Like many other uninspired cooks, I have a small but sufficient repertoire of meals that I rotate through. And although the rotation may be limited, we eat well.  My husband doesn’t like to cook either, but he can chop – we eat lots of salads, lots of fresh stuff.  

I have even been known to cut out interesting-looking recipes from the paper and put them in a notebook—a notebook that, I confess, mostly stays closed until I have to figure out what to take to a potluck or some such event.  

So, this isn’t a cry for a meal service; it’s just a report that, to my great surprise, I have, since being homebound by the virus, taken an interest in cooking.  The other day, for instance, Bill announced that he was going to the store, and I heard myself say, “Let me get out my recipes.”  

These are not words often uttered in my house. 

I made a list.  He brought home ingredients.  I started to cook.  

I cooked new things.   

I don’t know what to make of this.  I look at myself in the mirror and wonder whether I have been replaced by a pod person.

Pod person or not, though, it has been—dare I admit it—kind of fun, punctuated, of course, by other more familiar kinds of fun, such as gardening.  (I wouldn’t, after all, want to go overboard with this cooking thing.)

Let me pause here to note that most of the gardeners of my acquaintance seem also to be enthusiastic cooks.  I don’t know why I don’t share that enthusiasm.  I have often thought that cooking resembles gardening in this regard:  If you don’t enjoy the process, the whole business generally feels like drudgery.  After all, gardening, like cooking, is never finished (although you do get to take a break for much of the winter.)  

Still, I love everything about gardening.  I don’t do it to reach a final result.  I do it because I find the repetitive tasks to be relaxing and rewarding.  I do it for the beauty and peace that I experience along the way.  My garden will never be finished.  I will never be “caught up.”  And that’s OK.  There are whole days and weeks and months of glory to be enjoyed before plants die back or go dormant or lose their leaves or their lives.

Cooking, on the other hand – such an ephemeral outcome. All that work and the food is gone in minutes.  So, I will say it again; you have to be in it for the process. And for most of my life, on most days, the process has left me cold.  

Those of you whose interests are the opposite of mine are in a better position than I.  After all, if you don’t like gardening, you can just plant junipers in a sea of bark dust and call it good.  But, if you don’t like cooking, well—you still have to cook, unless you have the means to hire a chef or go out to eat every day.

I, for one, cannot afford a chef (nor would I want one hanging around my house) and have no interest in going to restaurants on a daily basis.  In any event, we can’t go restaurant hopping during a pandemic.  So, I am delighted, if baffled, by the sudden and unexpected uptick in my interest in food preparation.  

Will this enthusiasm outlast the pandemic?  If I were a betting person, I’d bet not.  You know what they say about old dogs and new tricks.  Still, cooking is helping to solve the existential dilemma during this time of social isolation and giving me something to look forward to as evening approaches each day.  

Maybe being a pod person isn’t such a bad thing, after all . . .

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

(Stay safe, everyone!)