You know you’re getting old when you have dry dreams and wet farts. 
As a kid I remember my grandpa taking the newspaper into the bathroom with him. I always was curious why he did that. I mean, going to the bathroom wasn’t something that took very long to accomplish, right? How hard could it be, right?
Note to grandpa - OK, I get it now.
Nope. Refuse to believe it. No way. This cannot be true. Simply impossible. Uh uh. Nosirree Bob.
Dammit.
Yeah, right around the time of the Gulf War . . . 19 years ago. I was prime draft age then. Babies born during that conflict are of prime draft age now.
In the VunderLair, they’re refered to as ‘granny grabbers’.
No matter what your age is, they’re eminently useful when the fur-bearing family members knock stuff into the no man’s land behind the TV or bookcase, or under the bed.
I’m starting to get students whose parents I taught in high school.
I plan to be retired before I get the third generation.
Ha ha!
I was at the bar on Saturday, and they had all these 20th Anniversary coasters about. I read one and it said “Est 1990.” Huh? 1990 was 20 years ago? No it wasn’t! That was like 5 years, tops, you lying coaster!
Mine was when I was lusting after a US Olympic hockey player and I realized that I was old enough to be his mother. Sports just haven’t been the same for me after that. Sigh.
This happened about 15 years ago when I was thirty-mumble. I was having a really good conversation with a woman that I had kind of had my eye on for a while. I forgot exactly what we were talking about, but she said that she thought that the end of innocence for the United States came when Kennedy was assassinated. So, like an ass, I asked, “Do you remember that?” (I was in the first grade and remember it well).
Of course, her answer was, “That was 10 years before I was born.” Kind of made me feel skeevy and old. Since then, I’ve grown inured to those combination of feelings.
I quit my old job as a restaurant manager five years ago, before it got to the point I was hiring kids born after I graduated. Whew! But now I’m a grad student, and it’s entirely possible that there are students in my classes who didn’t even exist the first time I was in college.
I also just realized that as of next month, there will be people born after I graduated high school who are old enough to drink (legally). Sigh…
You shut your filthy mouth!
I just look at my hands and feel my age. I had pretty hands at one time.
The main sign of old age for me was an extreme fixation on Reading Glasses. Multiple Reading Glasses. I almost fainted when I discovered that Sam’s Club carried my strength of glasses in 3-packs. I bought 3 packs:
- Car / Wife’s purse
- Bathroom
- Office
- Kitchen
- Bedside stand
- Motorcycle
- Workbench
- Laptop bag
- 1 spare
The only problem is, they all seem to migrate to the office, where I have 6 pairs next to the computer, and none in the kitchen, car, or workbench. And I’ll be danged if I can find the spare pair, either.
A few weeks ago I was talking to one of those Save the Children girls. I wasn’t going to give her any money, but I figured that as long as she stopped me, she was fair game to hit on. We ended up talking about how long I’ve lived in Boston. I said 30 years. She said “Wow, you’re more of a Bostonian than I am, and I was born here.”
OK, thanks for playing. Don’t forget to tip your server.
I realized I was old recently when I made a joke, puncuted by the comment, “The More You Know,” and instead of laughing, the person I was talking to (significantly younger, of course) agreed with me.
Then there was Schoolhouse Rock with the story about how a bill became legislation and Conjunction Junction.
Oh, yeah. My eye doctor recently offered me a prescription for bifocals. That was incredibly depressing.
I’m only 29 (since 2 weeks ago…), but there have been a few times lately where I’ve felt rather old.
The most immediate one is that I’m currently dealing with back pain (and sciatic nerve irritation) from a herniated disk in my spine. It is a sports injury, but I’ve always associated herniated disks with older people. It makes me sad. Thankfully, the oxycodone helps with that!
I’m also a university student. This is my second undergrad degree - I graduated from my first one in February 2004, worked for a while, hated my job and went back to school. The people in my classes are about 7-8 years younger than I am, which has led to the following realizations;
-
They don’t particularly remember 9/11. They were old enough to know it happened, but many of them have odd ideas about the sequence of events, or seem to believe in bizarre conspiracy theories. It’s like they are so used to movie special effects, they assume any video they see now has been doctored. One person tried to tell me that no one actually saw the second plane hit. Given as I was watching live TV at the time, I had to beg to differ!
-
They weren’t born when the Challenger exploded. In an ethics class, our prof (repeatedly, for some reason) showed video of the Challenger accident, and it was actually new to many of my classmates. I was young, but I remember being upset about it (my mom was a teacher, so it hit home in that sense) and was distinctly uncomfortable with the repeated viewings and the class saying “cool!” every time!
-
I was asked how I contacted my friends during the school day “way back” when I was in high school, since we didn’t have cell phones. My answer - we met up in the hallways and talked to one another, or passed hand written notes around - was met with a mildly disbelieving stare. We got in trouble when we got caught passing notes, so my best friend and I got clever; we used a notebook. That way we could always lie and claim that the passee had forgotten her homework for another class at the passer’s house the day before. Worked rather well.
-
One prof idly asked if any of our families still had a record player. Oddly, only the 28-year-old and I put our hands up. [Aside: my mom showed a picture of a record disk to her grade one class a few years back, asking them what it was. They all screamed out “It’s a CD!”]
So many little moments like that!
And the fact that I’m exactly one week older than my husband. During that week when we “aren’t the same age” he constantly points out how ancient I am.
That’s almost hard to believe. I was about that age when the Viet Nam war ended and Nixon resigned. I’m not huge on the details, but those were pretty major events.
I’ve been on both sides. One time, I was visiting someone with a model railroad on a layout tour, and the owner asked how long I spent in Vietnam.
“Uh, well, I was 13 in 1974…”
ETA: The Big Clue was when I gave up contacts for bifocals…
I don’t know, is it worse to wear bifocals, or to be on the receiving end of “I can’t believe someone your age has never needed glasses or contacts.”?
And of course, there is the fact that the following line is a compliment, “You don’t look much over 40.”
Oh, and there was the time recently when I went to a restaurant and the waitress asked if we had been there before. It occurred to me that I had first visited the place probably about 5 years before she was born. I just answered, “Yeah, coupla’ times.”
Well, I saw Back to the Future almost as long ago as the time that Marty McFly went back to.
Hmmmm…also, I worked with some hot young babe last summer. We were kind of buddies; we were sitting around blabbing about who knows what, and she asked me “HH, do you have any grandchildren?” Not children, mind you…
Same job, some guy asked me what I had wanted to do when I was his age. I told him, 'Something that would help win the Cold War."
“The what?”
Best wishes,
hh