Every now and again, my wife likes to remind me about how she is so much younger than me — two weeks younger in fact. It started when I hit 30 and she was still 29. She would have a little boast about how she was still in her twenties but I was seemingly over the hill in my thirties.
So you can imagine her delight when I turned 37 years old. What is the significance of turning 37? Well, in my country, Australia, 37 is the median age of the population. All of a sudden, I found myself in the old half, while my wife was still in the young half — for two more weeks anyway. I am now older than 50% of of the people in my country. Or, to look at it another way, more than half of the people in my country have been born while I have been alive.
How the heck did this happen?
So, now that I’m officially old, I decided to write my A-Z of getting old so that when my wife joins me on the “old side” she will know what to expect. Happy aging everyone!
A is for adjusting the font size on your computer screen so large that it could actually be used for a billboard
B is for Bedtime and the fact that your children’s bedtimes are all later than your own
C is for candles and the fact that the space required for the the number of candles needed on your birthday cake far exceeds the size of the cake
D is for ‘Dad Jokes’ and laughing uproariously at your own wit while your children roll their eyes at you
E is for the existential crisis that you have pretty much every second day when you wonder what the heck you have done with your life
F is for forgetfulness — forgetting people’s names, forgetting where you parked the car, and forgetting how old your are
G is for the glasses that you can’t find anywhere because they’re on the top of your head, stupid.
H is for “hanging up the phone” and the fact that you’re still using this phrase even though no one has hung up a phone since the early nineties
I is for getting more invitations to funerals than to birthdays and weddings nowadays
J is for the jacket that you always take with you when you go out, even if it’s a hundred degrees outside. You just never know…
K is for knees and remembering the good old days when you referred to your knees as “right and left” instead of “good and bad”
L is for how you avoid lifting pretty much anything these days. Your exercise mainly consists of picking up the cat and moving it off the couch.
M is for your mortgage and the fact that you still haven’t paid it off. Oh well, I guess you can bequeath your debt to your kids… right?
N is for the nose and ear hair trimmer your kids gave you for your last birthday. Take the hint.
O is for the optometrist who tests your failing eyesight only for you to realize she is young enough to be your daughter
P is for the phrase you’ve started using: “Back in my day” often prefaced with “This never would have happened…”
Q is for quick dial — A list on your phone that includes your doctor, your pharmacist and your gastroenterologist (along with your children)
R is for the retirement village advertisements that keep popping up on your Facebook news feed (Maybe you should stop Google searching them?)
S is for sex… the lack of it, that is. When your partner says, “Do you want to go upstairs and have sex?” your response is, “I’m too tired to do both.”
T is for the TV that you are no longer smart enough to independently operate and so you ask your 10-year-old for help
U is for how unimpressed you are that the new manager at your workplace is half your age and calls you “bro”
V is for vacuuming up all the the hair that you find around the place, only to realize it came from your own head, and not the dog
W is for walking into a room, immediately forgetting why you walked into that room, turning around and walking back out and in again, hoping that it jogs your memory
X is for the X-rays that you got for your bad back, your stiff neck and pretty much everything else in your body that’s failing
Y is for the year that you were born no longer being available on drop-down menus — you have to scroll waaaaay down to find it
Z is for the Zzzzzz and always falling asleep on the couch before the final scene of the movie and never finding out what happened in the end
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This post was previously published on P.S. I Love You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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