This is already my life.
Thanks for the advice. I was a little leery that I was going to be the butt of a joke.
Scene- guy laughing uproariously as his roommate arrives home.
“What’s so funny?
“I convinced some old guy to touch his taint every time he pisses”
“ No fuckin’ way”
This is so true. I went food shopping the other day, and after coming home and putting the food away, I was so exhausted that I just collapsed in bed for a while. I was pretty much worn out for the rest of the day.
And lately, I’ve noticed a change in my hearing. Though my hearing is, in most respects, excellent, I’ve noticed that certain instruments like trumpets and trombones now sound jarring to my ears.
aside from the psychological aspect … there’s the "rice-krispies" effect (snap, crackle, pop in joints) … also, the body doesn’t heal as fast as when young.
Definitely the “weird pain in weird places”; my knees sound like rice krispies some of the time.
Things don’t work as well as they used to. The gut, the joints, etc.
Vision: Night vision is definitely not what it was when I was younger (though better since I got the cataracts dealt with a couple years ago).
Gray hair. Not that it’s graying - but that my hair is only graying in ONE PLACE - a patch on the left side of my forehead. To be fair, that spot has grown a little over the years, but I can hide it by parting my hair on the right. I refer to it as my Bride of Frankenstein streak.
How old other people look. I mean, I’m pretty much the same as I was 20 years ago, but every now and then I’ll see a photo, wonder “who’s that old guy”, and realize its a high school classmate.
And people keep dying. When I was younger, it was a rare thing to have a friend or parent pass away. Now, they’re dropping like flies.
My mom has that. She embraces it; she got her first gray hairs all in that spot as a teenager, and even as she’s taken to covering some of her other grays, she’s kept the streak. It looks really good on her, and makes her very recognizable.
That’s what I was going to say. In my teens and 20s I was one of those people who could eat pretty much whatever unhealthy things I wanted and just stayed perpetually skinny. Then gradually through my 30s I grew bigger around the middle. And now I’m 40 and am finding that I can’t wear some of the shirts in my closet anymore because they’re too tight. And for that matter I maybe should actually try stuff on before I buy rather than just looking at the size. A few weeks ago a got a couple of shirts off the clearance rack at Kohl’s. One of them, although it’s a size L which is what I normally would wear, I failed to notice is also “slim fit”. It’s rather snug around the middle.
[Tired_and_Cranky checks whether nose hair has been adequately covered. Sees that it has and quietly exits.]
What about drafts? Is it cold in here? Drafty? Better crank the radiator to magma.
Ear, nose and eyebrow hair growth. I mean, what the fuck?
At 73, arthritis is making me its bitch, especially in my back. Lifting things means almost instant pain that goes on for hours.
Because of the meds I take, sex is a distant memory.
I drop things more (another arthritis benefit), which is really annoying to someone who has always had superior manual dexterity. It actually makes me inordinately angry.
Dude, loss of manual dexterity is what is aggravating you? Priorities, man, priorities.
Oh yeah, thirded.
Since I do sports basically every day, and I’m tall, it made logical sense to me that I should be able to eat whatever I liked within reason.
Then in my mid / late thirties it took seeing my noticeable belly in group photos to appreciate that exercise would no longer be enough.
It’s OK though in most ways, as my appetite has also dropped, so as long as I eat to satisfy my hunger, instead of as some kind of leisure activity, I’m good.
But of course I do have to make some small sacrifices like holding snacks like chocolate or ice cream as infrequent treats.
I still have sex, but it’s a whole lot different than the kind of sex I used to have.
And temperatures. I used to be the guy who’d be sweating like a pig when everyone else is wearing sweaters. Now I just feel chilly most of the time, especially when I first get up.
I’m 66 and can still get pimples. If I don’t clean my nose off every day, I’ll get them there. I usually just scrape off the oils with my fingernails while I’m in the shower. Occasionally I’ll get pimples elsewhere like the area just above the bridge of my nose.
I used to be warm all the time. Then I hit menopause, and in-between hot flashes, I often got cold. Not… as much as a lot of my co-workers, but I wasn’t warm all the time.
Then I went on an estrogen patch for various reasons. (ama) Now I’m usually warm again.
We used to freeze whenever we went to visit my parents. To be fair, this was usually in December, in Pennsylvania, and we lived in NC at the time. But I think a big part of it was Mom felt warm all the time.
I’ve been lucky on the hot-flash side of things - very few of them, which is a pleasant surprise. I remember once about 10 years ago, I was dealing with a really nasty case of bronchitis, went to the doctor, got steroids and antibiotics, and was just starting to feel like a member of the animal kingdom again… and my body decided to celebrate by throwing a hot flash every half hour for a day or so. Really, body? Really??? WAS THIS NECESSARY???
I love your screen name. I wish it was mine.
You might think Honey Badger will be flattered by this, but Honey Badger don’t care.
Yeah, this.
I’m the primary caretaker for my 87-year old father. I have been for about five years now.
His downward slide started when his second wife died, about six years ago (his first wife, my mother, died decades ago). Up until then, he’d been fine. Something of an intellectual, a judge (US District Court), many other things. And then he fell apart and slid fast into dementia.
I had to take over his financial stuff. Get a power of attorney. Health care proxy, and so on. Make sure he ate. Took medications. Etc. Eventually see him every day, check on him. And it just kept getting worse.
Now he’s in a “memory care” facility. My choice. I had to find the place. Choose among several. Do all the paperwork (and personally guarantee the payments!).
He’s okay now. But it was very, very hard for a few years there.