After the countdown
So, I’m 30 now. Not much has really changed that I can tell. I’m not exactly surprised by that, but having moved decades has changed my perspective a slight bit. Now, I sit at a restaurant, see a group of guys come in and realize how much younger they are than me. These guys are in their mid-20s, a time in which I resided not so long ago, yet they look so infinitely younger than I perceive myself to be. If a waitress asks for my ID before bring my ordered alcoholic beverage, I thank her for humoring the old man. That usually gets a laugh, and most are surprised when they see my age. So, I like the fact that I don’t look my age, but that number which denotes my presence on this planet, in triple decades, still scares me.
The new John Mayer album, Continuum, has a song on it called Stop This Train which sums up how I am feeling better than I ever could do:
So scared of getting older
I’m only good at being young
So I play the numbers game
To find a way to say that life has just begun
Mayer has always had a way of bringing clarity to what I am feeling in life. It helps that his lyrics often mirror my own life, as he is just one year younger than I. I still remember when I was introduced to him by my friend, Kimmy, who I was major crushing on, that his song St. Patrick’s Day fit our situation completely. It was early in winter, November in fact, and I was so badly wanting to find myself in a relationship with her. Winter is cold and she seemed such a warm person.
The problem is, all I know how to do is be young. I set up a facebook.com account the other day, just to complete out having a blog, myspace and facebook trilogy. For a lark, after I finished filling out the profile page, I decided to look and see if anyone in my highschool class of 1994 was registered there. The scary part is, no one but me was, nor was anyone for 3 years on either side of my class.
The argument here is that facebook is a relatively new site, meant originally for people currently in school, so I shouldn’t expect my classmates to be there. They have mostly set up communities on older sites, like classmates.com and reunion.com, but even then, there are so few people who have done so. True, my hometown is not full of technologically forward or trendy people, most of whom have no desire to have a community outside of what they already have, so they shouldn’t be expected to set up pages.
All that said, it just was another way to show how different I am than those who I grew up with. I tend to chase after the younger things, to keep myself at least semi-current (facebook had been big for over a year, and I had known about it most of that time, although I had never found a reason to create a page) so I don’t feel completely out of touch with the reality of the world. Part of that desire comes from being so technologically minded, in that anything new you can do with technology just lights up my world. Part of me would even love to grow out some big, shaggy hairdo as is seen on so many high school and college kids.
The fact that I just called them kids, also shows my own internal feeling about aging. I’m doing it, and my view of those whose actual age is near my own perceived age (early to mid-20s) has changed dramatically. I’m old. They’re kids. Scary.
The one good thing that came from my birthday is that my vehicle insurance dropped again. When I turned 25 it dropped 40%. This time it dropped 25%. I assume the only drop left for me is probably when I get married. I’m just at that age.
Maybe I should take solace in the fact that I am younger than the majority of people my age. It just seems such a hollow way to find satisfaction, when all I really want is to BE younger than all the people my age.