Acting Your Age is Overrated

There are things about aging that truly suck, for lack of a more graceful word. They just do. For instance, my knee is all funky today. No reason, it’s just not as young as it used to be. So I decided not to go to the gym. Which reminded me that in the olden days, or rather the youngen days, I could drop 10 or 15 pounds just by switching from bagels to yogurt for a few weeks.

I’ve been working out regularly for nearly a year now, after a long spell of being about as active as a marshmallow that rolled under the couch a few years back and has half-melted into the carpet.

No weight loss. Nada. Please don’t tell me that muscle weighs more than fat; I tell myself that all the time. But wouldn’t you think….

Still, I have changed shape a little, and I can go upstairs without getting out of breath. That’s a good thing.

Sometimes my hip hurts; sometimes my back hurts. I can’t see close-up without reading glasses now. And here’s something – I have wrinkles on my earlobes. ON MY EARLOBES.

But I guess that Mother Theresa had wrinkles just about everywhere, and she did OK. She had a lovely wrinkly smile.

My Birthday is a Big Secret

Regardless, I still love my birthday, which is this week. I want everyone to know about it and treat me extra super special.

But I won’t tell you exactly when it is, lest you then seek out my address, my mother’s maiden name, the last four digits of my social, the name of my childhood best friend, and the nickname of my oldest sibling, with which you could find out all my passwords and bust into my accounts and steal my identity, and then I would crack, just crack under the strain because I would feel so violated and all, and I would start losing sleep because nobody would understand why this was a total intrusion into my actual self, you see, as if someone had broken into my very soul, and then my friends would tire of hearing about it and start thinking I should get over it, and even my therapist would say, “Enough,” and then I would feel isolated and alone and get weird.

And we wouldn’t want that.

Here is a picture of me with a corn chip on my nose.

Parties, not Prose

Suffice to say, it is my birthday week, and I don’t have the inclination to create a truly insightful, spiritually enriching, or even mildly entertaining blog post this week. I have a Monty Python play to attend, dinners to ingest, long lunches to linger over, and parties at which I must embarrass myself.

I’m going to my first “pub trivia quiz,” which should be seriously embarrassing, because some hold the notion that with age at least comes wisdom. They will find out otherwise at the pub quiz. But my buddies and I will laugh, and they will insist on buying me a few drinks and maybe some hummus with pita, and I will feel grateful for the fact that at least I’m still around to discover new wrinkles and experience new aches and pains.

Here is a picture of me in Saint Croix on my 21^st birthday, trying to feed a leaf to a hermit crab.

And here is a picture of my “birthday frog,” which I bought on that same day in Saint Croix, and which I still wear around my neck for the two weeks bookending my birthday. Isn’t he a charming companion? (Charming, get it? A frog charm? HA! Am I not the funniest person you know?)

Cheers!