Something to look forward to
Damn.
Nursing homes just like high school, say sociologists:
Everyone complains about the food. Nobody wants to sit with the misfits. There are leaders and followers, social butterflies and loners, goody-goodies and troublemakers. Friendships are intense and so are rivalries. Everybody knows everybody else's business.
Except for the traffic jam of wheelchairs and walkers, the dining room at the Atria assisted living community here might as well be a high school cafeteria.[...]
The federal government has already made recommendations to improve quality control and correct misleading advertising in assisted living facilities. But only a few sociologists and public health researchers have studied the social organization and daily preoccupations of these communities. Dr. Catherine Hawes, a professor of health policy at Texas A&M University, is one. She describes them as "high school all over again, without the expectations."
Furthermore, the last days of life often resemble the first....confined to a bed in a hospital, largely unaware of your surroundings.
Circle of life and whatnot.
Posted by: djw | January 30, 2005 at 11:58 PM
But do the old people get stoned in the parking lot and make out while listening to Led Zepplin?
Posted by: rob loftis | January 31, 2005 at 09:20 AM
They're not nursing homes, they're retirement communities!
Posted by: Scott Lemieux | January 31, 2005 at 10:45 AM
Something to look forward to. Damn.
--------
too young to that kid. too young.
Posted by: wg | January 31, 2005 at 01:32 PM
rob loftis,
Some Hollywood producer just read this post and your comments and a movie is in the works. I can see it now "Cocoon" meets "Stoned Age."
Posted by: bob crane | January 31, 2005 at 01:35 PM
Mental Note: Die young.
Ooh! A draft! That'll do it.
Posted by: Dr Pretorius | January 31, 2005 at 02:54 PM
Probably like baboons for that matter. You never leave highschool, folks.
Posted by: oliver | January 31, 2005 at 04:00 PM
Prisons are also like high schools, with cliques and teases and studs and gossips and snitches and brownnoses and rebels and so on.
Probably military bases too.
Posted by: John Emerson | January 31, 2005 at 09:41 PM
I used to be confident that I'd avoid both military bases and prisons, but at this point, it looks like it's gonna be at least http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/01/enlist-peter-enlist.html>one or t'other. The way things are going, I'd count myself lucky to die in a VA home.
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | January 31, 2005 at 10:21 PM
Re Oliver's comment:
I worked in the corrections field (industry) for several years. Probation officers sometimes commented on the need for more junior high and middle school counselors to have a background as probation officers. That might do for high school too, but those formative/lifetime awakening 7th and 8th and 9th grade years seem, looking back on the development of my own kids and their friends, to be the most important years of school. In regard to the master article here, there might be a middle school vs. sometime late in life comparison out there - more valid, yet less obvious.
Posted by: Philip Munger | February 01, 2005 at 03:22 AM
this can be a positive. My father-in-law claims recently moved into an assisted living center. He was immediately extremely popular because he's relatively healthy compared to others, and he has a CAR (and an unexpired license). He loves it, because when he was in high school and college (late Depression), he poor uncool and didn't have a car.
Posted by: arthur | February 01, 2005 at 04:12 PM
The real question is whether nursing homes have the same peculiar sexual network pattern (researchnews.osu.edu) that high schools do?
BTW How come this site never remembers my personal data? Was it something I said
Posted by: rob loftis | February 01, 2005 at 05:52 PM
Does this mean I'd get kicked out of nursing homes, too?
Posted by: jeff | February 02, 2005 at 02:44 AM
If I don't get to be a theatre fag again, I ain't going. Hoofing my way through "Guys & Dolls" and "Anything Goes" was just about the only part of high school that didn't suck rocks.
(Now I've got this image in my head of Abe Simpson and his pals at the ol' folks home: "I got the horse right here/The name is Paul Revere...")
Posted by: Uncle Kvetch | February 02, 2005 at 09:51 AM
Rob, this site finds you personal data uninteresting. You should engage in outside activities, volunteer work, sports, the arts, etc., and not just study all the time.
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