I am mildly obsessed with self-improvement, and this mild obsession manifests itself in clicks on links to any one of the torrent of ads that promise ways to “determine your real age” or show you “five ways to ingest kale that you never thought of” (spoiler alert on that one—three are rectal). One day whilst navigating my way through the deluge of dubious self-help ads that now get served to me because of my predilection for clicking on self-help ads (stop hounding me Google!), I chanced upon a link for a hearing test, specifically one that would tell you how old your ears were.

I simply couldn’t resist such a potential windfall of personalized evaluative data. I clicked on the link and prepared for an aural awakening. You can imagine my despair when I discovered that I couldn’t hear anything above 12,000 Hz, which meant that I had the ears of a person in my mid-forties, which is of course what I am—but let’s be honest—no one likes to find out that they are average. I immediately decided that I would improve my hearing, as that’s what people who are mildly obsessed with self-improvement do.

But there’s nothing that can be done. There’s no lifts you can put in your shoes, no smoothie regimen to choke down, not even kale can help—once your hearing is gone there’s nothing that can be done. You see, inside your hear holes (or ears as, most laymen cal them) there are hairy cells that transmit Nickelback songs and other sounds to your brain place. Over time these hairs get broken and destroyed, and as more hairs get clipped, the less you can hear high frequencies. AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. Well, you can get hearing aids I guess, but as I mentioned before, there’s no kale-based solution, which is really what I was hoping for.

This is sadness of getting older—losing one of your precious senses due to expose to Nickleback and their ilk. But aging means coming to terms with tragedies like this. It also means realizing what you are no longer capable of. For instance, I can no longer: day drink, dunk a basketball (never could, but that’s beside the point), listen to Nickelback (never did, but you get the picture) or race a bike like a young person. But I am at peace with this situation, I still have a few tricks left in my bike bag, and I will use them to the best of my ability

The Weight Scale

My shame-based weight monitor has returned. (For those new to the log, I post my current weight to this page, in order to publicly shame myself and to keep from ballooning to an unmanageable weight. In years past, I’ve used scales based on rodents and Val Kilmer and the like.) Someone suggested in a comment that I use it again, and I am honoring this request. The commenter suggested using Oprah as my weight scale, but I think that would be a little too obvious, so I’ve decided to use Steven Seagal, the Nickelback of people, as my fat talisman. As an aside, I will tell you that finding slim pics of Mr Seagal really pushed my Google image search to its limit—and now I have an ad feed based upon searches of Steven Seagal and Nickelback—the horror.