Adult Home Arts: Fill & Download for Free

I would not presume to give a list of three books you “must read” before you die.Here are three I think might prove helpful to some people.Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.AdultingHome Maintenance for Dummies.The first will enlighten you (maybe). The second will help you get your shit together. The third will help you keep the place where you live from falling down around your ears, since you can’t rely on landlords to do that for you.

I think— no, I believe that standardised testing and unfettered rote learning to pass standardised tests kill a child’s desire to learn.I believe that removing physical education and recess from public schools destroys a child’s joy and strength and undermines the building of fundamental communication and social skills in children who then become adults who cannot speak to each other in meaningful ways.I believe that underfunding or cutting the arts—- be they music, home arts, painting, or martial—- kills the creativity that makes learning essential in a child’s life.

First of all, you got your math wrong.Independent life begins around the time you finish school, start working and being relatively free. That happens around 25. So by the time you hit 60, you’ve had 35 years of independence and you still look forward to at least 15 more, probably 20 or 25, so in terms of your productive life, you have about 30%-40% of your free life ahead of you. That’s a lot of doing, traveling, loving, learning, writing, listening to music, shagging, exploring, doing and living. If thinking you’re old means your mission in life is to hang around the waiting room of death, it would be mighty stupid to feel old.Then there’s the fact that 60 today is more like 40 by the mid 20th century.When I was young, people in their 60’s were old. Illness had gotten to them, society rejected them and expected them to be unobtrusive and inconsequential. Today, people in their 60’s and 70’s are playing music (oh, say, can you see Keith Richards over there, and Springsteen… and Cohen died without ever becoming old…) and writing, and painting, and working out in the gym and doing things, real things, not like old-home arts and crafts. People in their 60’s and 70’s are not puzzled by technology as the cartoonish view would have it. They created the technology, they’re Bill Gates and The Woz and Tim Berner’s-Lee, and Ken Kutaragi (the guys who created Microsoft, Apple, the World Wide Web and the Playstation, in case you’re wondering); they’re gamers and programmers and have been for a long time, they know about comics and probably got the first issue of X-Men brand new when it came out. I had the first Spiderman, I recall. Seemed a good twist on the superhero thing. They saw Star Wars on the first run of the original film. And Blade Runner. They can beat you at being a nerd as soon as in a marathon.In fact, a recent discussion has sprung about the age group we’re supposed to belong to. We’re past adult but we’re not “old” in the sense that was understood in the past. Just as the category “teenager” was popularized in the 1940’s where before you only had children and young adults, to denote a certain way of being that did not exist before the 20th century, we might need some word to denote people beyond their 50’s but who act and live in a certain way that was basically impossible or notably exceptional in the past. (Edit: my pal Alejandro Pisanty calls us Silver Surfers).Better medicine and research, better care, better food, better outlook on life have made the change. It’s not only that life expectancy has expanded enormously, it’s that the quality of that extended life is incredibly better. When you can take a 90-year-old person and give them two new hips that allow them to dance for 5 more years, you have a different kind or person than the one who was immobilized in a chair growing bitter while life passed them by.So, we’re not really old because we don’t feel, act or think old. Vintage, maybe. Classical. Time-honoured. Masterclass. Versed. Inveterate. Or some other less pompous word. This is a time when you feel old only when you choose to act like you’re old. Me, I’m planning three books while I write one, discovering new music by very young artists and enjoying it immensely, writing in more places than ever, doing radio and looking more towards the future and what I am going to do than concentrating on the rearview mirror and pining about the past and what I already did.And the best here is that you’ll probably have it even better when you reach your vintage years.