California Dreaming

As I sat getting my toenails painted bright pink this morning, I flipped through a glossy women's magazine looking for some deep insights into life.

There were the usual articles about hair and nails, and standard summer fare about which bathing suits are best for your body type (they never list old, tired, and saggy as one of the body types, so I remain woefully unenlightened). And there was a fascinating article about how our perceptions of beauty have changed over the decades.

Granted, I didn't read the entire article -- I just read the really important sentences, which were magnified and highlighted in bright blue -- and I looked at the pictures. Attitudes about beauty may have changed over the years, but my attention span has never been capable of accommodating a magazine article that jumps to multiple pages.

Anyway, good news friends. Middle aged women are viewed as far more attractive than they were thirty years ago. And guess who thinks "cougars" are hot! Yes, you guessed it, the twenty-five to thirty-five year old male set. Shocking that this phenomenon hasn't spread to middle aged men, who still seem to prefer twenty-somethings to your basic cougar or, certainly, if cougar is to be defined as a woman older than you are, to your basic octogenarian.

I think I've already mentioned some of my own anecdotal evidence regarding twenty-five and thirty year olds pursuing older women, as my cyber dating inbox tends to fill up fairly regularly with cheesecake shots of young studs writing clever messages such as "Hey." As you can imagine, I get pretty excited when the rare fifty-something sends an email; whether it's indicative of maturity, integrity, or bad eyesight, I just think it's a nice gesture for an old guy to pay attention to an old broad once in a while.

Today, I received an e-card from a startlingly handsome fifty-four year old. I checked the map, and San Diego seems a little far for a productive relationship, but you never know when my book tour will take me out that way, so I responded with an alluring and very clever "Hey." I anxiously await his response.

At the rate I'm going, I will still be frequenting computer dating sites when I'm seventy-five

(and getting my toenails painted bright pink and flipping through glossy magazines in a never ending search for the meaning of life, and love). By then, I might kind of like the whole cougar concept -- as long as the fifty-somethings don't include cheesecake shots.