Well, i’m still barely clinging on to my 20s here, but I am starting to notice that the years are taking their toll.

So this whole post was prompted while here at Narita Airport. A put my boarding pass and passport in my button down shirt pocket. This brings me to my first rule of getting old:

Old people utilize pockets (and clothing) in useful but potentially non-fashionable ways

I think a corollary of this one might be that as you get older you also tend to buy clothes more on utility than fashion. And then also you may even find yourself wearing the same clothes over and over again (as long as they are still clean and all), as opposed to amassing some sort of 15-day rotation or something.

Your Lifetime is Finite

Its sort of hard to explain this one but basically when you are young you can sort of imagine that someday you might die, but in your heart of hearts you just sort of imagine that you’ll always be alive. Or that death is so far away you’ll deal with it then or something like that. But at a certain point, you start to realize that you have very finite abilities and talents. And then…. you realize that there just isn’t enough time to get everything you want to get done… And then last maybe you flip out about not having enough time. maybe freeze yourself in your basement with a note to thaw you out later. Or become a super-villain and search for the fountain of youth. I’m not quite at super villain status yet, but I have definitely realized that there is more things to do than time to do them. And trying to decide what to do is a problem that I’ve been working on lately. (with pretty much zippy results so far).

Inability to Take a Fall

When your young you can fall down all the time. But now that your old, falling is no good. First, when you fall you spend at least a few minutes running through an internal checklist making sure that you still have feeling to all the parts of your body or that you can still move everything, or that no large amount of blood is squirting out. Once you finish that process, you gotta slowly (and i mean slowly) peel yourself up off the flow and sit down somewhere. Then you usually go through your internal checklist process, again checking for blurry vision, slurred speech, bones sticking out. Then you accept that you are gonna be in the hurt locker for some number of days because of this fall.

I know there a bunch more, but I’ll stop now before I get depressed.

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