I just realized that I’ve had a colonoscopy and managed to forget my anniversary in the same week. This is not the hallmark of a spring chicken.
My boyfriend does not remember Chernobyl, or the Challenger, or Tienamen Square, or… and I’m not really so much older than him! I’ll be 26 next month.
Maybe that’s just “things that make you realize what a cradle robber you are”.
Music. Music makes me feel old. Without realizing it, I’ve turned into a curmudgeon–I hate everything on the radio because it’s loud and jangly. Everything I like is on the oldies station, and stuff that should be on the oldies station isn’t played any more. Songs I think of as ‘new’ turn out to be 10 years old. What the heck happened? Here I thought I was an alternative music listener, and it turns out I’m just old and out of it.
And movies for young teenagers, too. This week I have seen The princess diaries and Ella enchanted (argh, too much Anne Hathaway! And she’s younger than my baby brother, too), and they were both cute-if-vapid but had too much horrible music.
And we just had our 10th wedding anniversary; I’m not sure how that happened either.
Watching a teenager two weeks ago attempting to use a dial phone in my family room made me feel really old.
Not sure what had him more confused, the part about putting a finger into the hole for the number you wanted and spinning it around, or that the part you hold up to your head is tethered to the phone by two feet of wire.
As if people didn’t think I’m weird enough, now I’m sitting in my office singing MC Hammer.
Music hits me, so hard, makes me say, 'Oh my Lord! Thank you, for blessing me witha mind to rhyme and two (hot? hip?) feet…
A few days ago, someone asked me if they could buy me a beer and pick my brain about how they could advance their career and hopefully do some of the things I’ve done. I’m 29 fer cryin out loud! I have a career? Wait, I have a career that other people want to learn about? From me? Yikes.
Browsing through my hometown newspaper’s website, I saw a wedding anouncement with familiar lastnames. I had gone to school with both of their fathers.
Dude, word! That seriously just took me back…cassettes, it was all about cassettes.
What makes me feel old is the music thing. I have several friends here at work who are anywhere from 2-6 years younger than me, and yet for some reason they have never even heard of most of the bands I adored. After having to explain to the 20th person who the Talking Heads are, I feel like I need a walker or something.
And the New Kids! Man, I was huge into them when I was like 11. Now if I bring it up, my friends are like “Oh yeah, I saw them when I was 7, but they weren’t very popular anymore then.” Ouch.
TURN IT DOWN!
Damn kids and your damn punk music. It’s not even music, it’s organized noise.
As of Friday, there will be teenagers who were born during Bill Clinton’s presidentail administration.
I made this observation at a wedding more than 10 years ago:
You know youre’ getting old when the kids take over the dance floor and you don’t ‘get’ their music
Cassettes? It’s all about reel-to-reel tapes.
My class in my alumni magazine is moving to the front of the section at an alarming rate. And stuff I remember living through is in my kids’ history books - and not in the last chapter.
you musta been one of those RICH kids. I had to press play, press stop, flip the tape, press FF, stop, flip the tape, press play. (For you younguns, my walkman was so cheap it didn’t have a motor to rewind, just a post that helped hold the tape in place.
I remember buying a $150 portable CD player and Dad and I listening to the few CDs I had. And thinking I got a DEAL cuz CD decks for stereo systems were $300-$450!
Now the economically unfortunate by portable CD players because they’re $30 at Walgreens, and I have a music collection three times larger than I could concieve of on my iPod. From buying my first two CDs to '34102 items, 200.2 days, 144.48GB’
My music has an evaporation rate. Some small percentage of it just-goes-away. Time was, I knew where and in what condition every one of my 14 tapes was in.
tapes? TAPES? VINYL baby! I’d spend a few hours the first day of each semester grouping and alphabetizng my albums. I had 5 feet of records (not a lot, but it was a small dorm room and I had to pick and chose)
When I was in high school, I had a “mother’s helper” job after school for a family with infant twins. Infants! My mom mentioned recently that the twins had graduated from college. College! I want to track down those twins and kick them.
Working at a college myself, it’s one opportunity after another to feel old. A few years ago, I got a reputation as an Official Crazy Old Lady because I had a mini-freak out when one of the student aides in our office expressed disbelief that Peter Gabriel was once in a band. I cancelled the work tasks and made all the student aides sit in my office and listen to Lamb Lies Down. The entire thing. The sad thing is that now, a few years later, the student aides don’t really know who Peter Gabriel is to begin with.
There’s always a running joke at a college about New Student Orientation making one feel old. The kids look TOO YOUNG to be in college. I knew I had turned a corner when I went to the NEW FACULTY Orientation, and those people looked too young to be there. I have yet to find an opportunity to lock those people in my office and make them listen to Genesis, though.
Zebra, I do the same thing with lists of songs – I have no idea which is the song and which is the band. Good grief!
I’ve made these same observations before. I apologize for repeating myself (that’s ANOTHER symptom of getting old).
I’m 44 now. Over the years, I’ve had several scary “You’re getting old” moments of realization.
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At 23, it was sobering for me to realize that Don Mattingly of the Yankees was younger than me, and that before very long, ALL Of my favorite pro athletes would be younger than me. Even though I was always a terrible athlete, I still had the childish fantasy in the back of my mind that, “When I grow up, I’m gonna be a baseball player.” Seeing guys younger than me on the field just drove home the point, “You ARE grown up, and you’re NOT gonna be a baseball player.”
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It’s freaky when you first start to realize there are authority figures who are younger than you. Around the time I hit 30, I’d occasionally notice a policeman on the street and think, “My God, he’s just a kid.” In my mid thirties, it was equally weird to see airline pilots and clergymen who were my age or younger. And not long aftrward, you start to see Congressmen, Senators, mayors and governors who are your age or younger.
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Up until about 1995 or 1996, I was very up to date on pop/rock music. But by 1997, I’d look at the Billboard Top Ten singles or Top Ten albums and find myself thinking, " I don’t know who ANY of these people are." Around 1997, I realized I was as clueless about current music as my Mom was about Black Sabbath or ELP. (Thank God for the occasional comeback by somebody like Santana… not that I love him, but at least I know who he is!)
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I work very close to the University of Texas campus, and like any male, I’ve done my share of girl watching there. But over the past few years, I’ve started to feel like a dirty old man for doing so. Around the time I turned 40, I realized, “It’s not just an expression any more… you really ARE old enough to be that girl’s father. And if she SAW you checking out her legs, she’d be utterly grossed out.”
Today. It’s my birthday. In addition, having my kids tell me that 1990 was “a loooooong time ago”.
I was being kind. Personally, I was pissed to find the ‘Cantina Scene’ on the Star Wars 8-track was interrupted by the chance from track 1 to track 2.
(And I still have Thriller on a shelf in the Coat closet)
I thought of another one last night that made me feel old. I’m nearly three years older than Kurt Cobain was when he killed himself. :eek:
I am also nearly three years older than my mom was when she had me!
On December 3, 2004, I was the exact same age my mother was the day I was born. For some reason, that scared the living hell out of me.
some years ago, a store clerk who thought she recognized my name asked if I was so-and-so’s mother (I have no kids). The clerk couldn’t have been more than 18, which meant I looked old enough to have a high school aged son. Worse, I was!! old enough to have a high school aged son! :eek: