I could not spell boulevard this morning. Just now it came right out.
My record is two weeks but that is much more likely to be because of the brain injury (slams my word-finding) but to an onlooker it appears to be old age. A lot of brain injury is like that so I guess I should be grateful that it didn’t happen to me til I was already old (67).
[quote=“Mijin, post:133, topic:922620, full:true”]
DUDE!
I was just going to write this. Except that there were times when I didn’t eat that much, but while in my early 20s I couldn’t gain weight at all even if I wanted to, since my 30s I have had a beer belly and it’s somewhat bigger now at 41.
Ha! You think you have a belly at 41, wait till you’re in your 70s!
You’ll be up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night no matter what time in the day you stop drinking liquids!
And remembering people’s names is a luxury.
At 63, I can relate to all this stuff,the aches and pains and “senior moments”.
But I have experienced something a little more existential, as it were and it’s something that’s difficult to articulate.
At some point around 60 I began to have moments when I became overwhelmed by the weight of my experiences, the depth of my memories.
It can come over me when I’m thinking about or discussing something that happened in my past. It’s not that I’m having trouble accessing the memories, but I’m distracted by the thickness of the book I’m thumbing through.
The funny thing about this one is that it happened all at once. It’s not like I became aware of this in an incremental manner. It’s more like being in a pool and walking towards the deep end and reaching that place where you can’t touch the bottom anymore.
I really struggle to explain it and I’ve never found anyone that “gets” it, but most of the people I’ve asked are younger than me. But it’s not an unpleasant sensation, it’s actually sort of cool.
I helped! Yay! 
YES. My 12-year-old dog will sometimes knock a bit of dog food or a Mike Bone under the bed or the couch. When she was a puppy it was no big deal, but these days it takes noticeably longer to retrieve those things…especially the “getting back up” part.
Last week I had to have my garbage disposal replaced, and the guy who installed the new one squatted in front of the cabinet the entire time!! His age was hard to guess but he didn’t seem to be that much younger than me. I was in awe. And I might have started to develop sympathetic knee pains… 
Sorry for the double post: I tried to edit the previous one to add this, but I took too long!
I’m only 49 and this isn’t the same thing, but I find that sometimes I have trouble remembering things from high school or earlier…which doesn’t bother me until I do the math in my head and realize/remember that high school was more than 30 years ago! Something about three decades always gives me pause*.
*Even though I’m just a whippersnapper compared to some.
I noticed a vitally important issue as I approach retirement age: permanent sock lines on my legs.
The hair just ain’t there anymore, and it leaves a visible horizontal line.
I don’t have much body hair anyway, and my legs especially were never noticeably furry. But as sparse as my hair is, it’s now even lighter down around my ankles.
Nature normally doesn’t do anything in straight lines…But I have one on each leg, at exactly the same height.
Now, creating a straight line ,as a part in the hair on your head is okay. But on the legs, it looks kinda funny.
Life ain’t fair.
Yet another good example of why men of a certain age shouldn’t wear short pants.
Nothing good comes with age…
I was one of those people who could eat anything and not gain an ounce.
Later in life, in my 50s, I could put my mind to it and lose 5 lbs, in a week, to make a dress look nicer. I have been trying to lose 5 lbs now for 8 weeks, and have only lost 3 lbs. (I’m 74)
Of course, I don’t have kids home now to keep me constantly on the go, I retired 2 yrs ago, and now with COVID restrictions I’m a lot less active.
Another thing I noticed is everyday something hurts…could be very minor, but it is rare to have a day where nothing hurts, and I look forward to those. Back, leg, foot, shoulder it’s always something. I make sure to always have Aleve, Tylenol or Motrin on hand.
I never really thought of myself as a “man”, just as a “person”. Until one day, around 45, I looked in the mirror and saw someone with the same kind of belly as my dad had. And thought - that’s what a man looks like. Actually a little bit of pride there.
Melbourne: I remember a personal event somewhat similar – it was when I realized I smelled like my dad. That was when I could no longer deny I was a “grown up.”
(Physically, if never yet emotionally!)
I’ve thought for some time that there must be some sort of genetic component for liking coffee. How strong or influential it would be, I don’t know. My paternal grandmother, my father, and I all liked coffee the very first time we ever tasted it. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I know I was still in the single digits.
I finally got my maternal uncle’s hair – er, lack of it, really.
I’ve noticed two things about aging (I’m 37). The first is that my eyesight is now absolutely terrible, and I mean shockingly bad. I can’t read 24 point type 18 inches away without my glasses. The second is that my sex drive is actually higher than it was in my teens. I always felt like I had an unusually low sex drive when I was younger but that seems to have self-corrected in the last few years.
Relatedly, my dad’s eyesight has actually improved recently. He’s 71 and he’s been short-sighted ever since he was a kid, but recently he noticed that he can read the (very small) subtitles on the TV from about 5 meters away without his glasses. This time last year he couldn’t read them from two feet away without his glasses if his life depended on it.
I have always loved sleep, but starting in maybe my mid-30s (I am now 52), I started having insomnia issues. Sometimes it was stress-related, sometimes I just had no idea what it was. I had no problems falling asleep, but I would wake up between 2 and 4 a.m. and take hours to get back to sleep, if I could do it at all. It made me BONKERS.
Finally, I went to a sleep clinic, and after a very thorough intake to rule out various other physical causes, we decided that I would keep a sleep diary for several weeks. The doc concluded that I was actually going to sleep too early, and that I was better off going to bed at midnight and getting 6 hours of good sleep than going to bed at 9 to try to catch up at getting 9 hours of crappy, interrupted sleep. So he advised me to stay up later, but keep my alarm set for 6 a.m. And as it turned out, he was absolutely right. I now rarely sleep more than 7 hours consecutively unless I am sick (or, of course, after a nasty concussion, it seemed like all I wanted to do was sleep for months. I am finally coming out of that phase, more than a year later.) My 25-year-old self would never have imagined a time when I literally would not be able to sleep 12 hours on a Sunday, even if I wanted to.
Regarding the memory issues mentioned several times by various posters - my grandfather told me the reason for that many years ago. According to him, when we are born we are given a brand new notebook and pencil to use for storing our memories. It takes us a few years to learn how to write, so our memories of the first years of our life are rare to non-existent. When we do start writing things down, we have the whole notebook at our disposal so we print in large block letters, double space the text, and leave wide margins.
As we get older and learn cursive our handwriting deteriorates and gets smaller. The double spacing thing goes out the window. In our forties or so, life is pretty busy so we start just jotting down notes instead of writing in whole sentences. At some point, maybe in our sixties, we reach the back of the notebook. That’s when the fun really begins!
From then on, we go back to the front of the notebook where we skipped lines and left wide margins and we write our memories in whatever empty space we can find using sometimes rather cryptic key phrases that we hope will give us a clue as to what we were hoping to remember.
So, when you’re in your eighties and someone asks you what you had for breakfast that morning, or you’re trying to remember if you took your pills, you start flipping through your notebook looking for where you wrote that particular event. But while looking for that one thing you find all the stories from your youth written down in glorious detail and you take a quick side trip down memory lane until you forget what it was you were looking for in the first place. And even if you do find where you wrote it, you probably can’t decipher what you wrote or figure out what that abbreviation or shorthand notation means.
The older I get (I’m now in my sixties), the more I agree that he had unlocked the true nature of how our memories work.
Well, a good surprise.
I got a cataract replaced with a multi-focal lens. And in my other eye, I now have a multi-focal contact lens.
I’ve been wearing glasses or contacts and or reading glasses since third grade. Did the LASIC thing as well. Now I see better than I ever have in my life. I put one contact lens in one eye every morning (and really don’t need it). All for the cost of about a dollar a day.
It’s really nice to not have to shlep around reading glasses or regular glasses that I did all my life.
We also loose the first notebooks. “Can’t write” is a good metaphor for the first couple of years, but the second set of memories is also re-written. By the time you finish high school, you’re on your third set of notebooks, and you only retain that stuff you copied out.