Age

I am 38 years old this month. That is getting dangerously close to 40. There is a lot of pressure to "succeed" before the age of 40, and though I don't usually think a lot about those sort of landmarks, this one is weighing on me. My 20th class reunion will be this summer and I don't think I will be attending. I tell myself that I there is really no one that I need to reconnect with, but I hereby admit that part of me is embarrassed that I am twenty years out of high school and still just plugging along. I never became an actor or a musician or made a million dollars. I still live in the same town, just a few blocks from the high school from which I graduated. I have a wife and three great kids, and I am proud of them, but I have no need to parade them in front of these people hoping that they will pat me on the back and tell me how wonderful my family is. Their opinion of me never mattered all that much then, why should it matter now?

I'll let you in on a little bit of geek truth. Yes, I was a geek in high school. Not a full-blown nerd, though I don't think I was very far from that, but still, I didn't play football or basketball or wrestle. I was in choir and drama, and I did pretty well. I was in the most prestigious choir in school, and my partner and I won the state championship for serious duo in competitive drama. Thanks for holding me together on that one, Traci. I still remember having to cut a couple of minutes out of a scene that we had been performing all season when one particularly competitive coach (TED!!!) timed us and found that we were over the allowed time limit. He threatened to file a complaint if we didn't get under the time limit, and I freaked. Traci held it together, though, and we did it and won state. That was a good year. However, the fact that I lettered in choir and drama was, and still is in some cases, a joke to a lot of people. So the bit of geek truth is, no matter how much we hated and resented those people who ostracized us because we didn't fit their ideal, we still want them to be impressed with us now that we are adults. We want to come to the reunion with better jobs and hotter wives and smarter kids than those jocks that laughed at us back in school. But WHY, for God's sake? Why should I care what they think? My wife loves me for who I am now, and my kids love me because I am their dad, why should I give a rat's ass what a complete stranger that I barely knew twenty years ago thinks about me? It upsets me to even acknowledge it.


But to return to the focus of this entry, when I think about my 20th class reunion, I begin to feel old. Not ancient, but at that point where a majority of people no longer consider me a young man. I have mentioned before that I have always had a youthful perspective on life, and think that I have a pretty young attitude, but if I ponder how old I am, I begin to feel older. So that got me thinking: how much of aging is dependent on how old you feel? I know that I am wiser in some areas of my life than I was when I was sixteen, and I know there are some things that I used to do when I was sixteen that I can't now that I am thirty-eight, but I still feel sixteen in my mind. So at what point to I begin to feel thirty-eight? Is sixteen the age at which I finally became fully aware of myself as a person and therefore am permanently fixed there, rooted in time? I just don't know, but when I'm sixty-four and my mind thinks I'm sixteen, I foresee problems.