Checklist for Senility

I have written here on a number of occasions about issues that affect us seniors and how to make our "golden" years more meaningful. Important challenges such as how not to be dead stress us at every turn. But none plagues us more than the worry over losing our mental faculties. We have explored some of the techniques you can use to enhance your mental capabilities, but there always remains that nagging worry, "Am I losing it?"
Today I would once again like to address this topic of concern by laying out a diagnosis tool that you can use in the privacy of your own home to find out if your loved one is getting senile or not.
First of all, let's define our terms.
I find that there is nothing worse in self-help articles than when the author fails to define terms and leads the reader off into a wasteland of ill-conceived advice. I mean, when you are talking about intestinal bloating, wouldn't it be a good idea to know that standing near an open flame would not be a good idea? Hello?
Some authors are just irresponsible.
Anyway, the main definition we need to be concerned with here is for "mental faculties". The simplest way to think of this is to imagine your brain is like a university. As with most universities, it is divided up into different faculties. And like at university, each of these operates independent of each other, getting together periodically for usually boring but sometimes contentious meetings where Prof. F. goes on and on about his plans for the department that have already been dismissed as stupid and untenable ten years ago.
But I digress. And while I am digressing, did you read about that guy who was brewing beer in his stomach? No joke! Now THAT gives a whole new meaning to "beer belly"! Ha ha!
Getting that out of the way, we can now proceed to the test. Keep score on a piece of paper, so you can add up the results at the end of this article.
1. Does your loved one sometimes walk into a room and forget why he went there? 10 points
2. Is he over 60 and doing #1 above? 0 points
3. Is he under 60 and not drinking and doing #1 above? 10 points
4. Does he sometimes misplace items, putting the car keys into the cat bowls and the cat food into his pocket, for example? 10 points
5. Does he repeat himself? 10 points
6. Does he tell the same stories or jokes to the same people again and again.  10 points
7. Does he repeat himself? 10 points
8. Does he start a project and then get distracted half-way through and abandon it, causing it to fail? (I am thinking of something like baking a cake, not brain surgery.) 10 points
9. Oh! I almost forgot! Did you read about that guy who was brewing beer in his stomach? No joke! Now THAT gives a whole new meaning to "beer belly"! Ha ha!
10.