I've got a birthday coming up this week. I won't tell you how old I'll be. Just take my word for it, it's old.
I usually don't do much for my birthday because I really don't care much about them. It's not like you magically feel different when you wake up the day you officially turn a year older. But as you age you do find that your birthdays seem to come with an increasingly alarming frequency.
When you're a little kid and somebody asks how old you are, you often say things like "I'm eight and a half" or "I'm nearly nine" or something like that. When you're an adult you start being "ish" or "something."
"I'm 30-ish," you'll say. Or, "I'm 40-something."
Trust me, this is the way things work. You'll all find that's true in time.
After the "ish" and "something" phases, you regress back to your childhood pattern, saying things like "I'm 76 and a half" or "I'm nearly 80." This is for a similar reason to why you do it when you're a small child. Those little slices of time become more and more important — not because there are so few of them behind you, but because there are so few left ahead.
I've not personally got to that point yet, but I know it will happen eventually. Since I'm still in the "ish"/"something" phase, I've got a bit of time to worry about that.
When you're a kid, time moves so slowly. That actually lasts all the way through your 20s for most people. It speeds up as you age, making birthdays less and less important. I, for instance, still sometimes think that the 1990s were just 10 years ago. I've found that a lot of people my age think that way. (There's even a Facebook page devoted entirely to that phenomenon.) I can tell you that I've watched the look of horror in my friends' faces when I point this out to them, and they too are faced with the horrifying truth that the '90s were, indeed, 20 years ago.
But conversely, getting older isn't really that bad, considering the alternative. I know a lot more than I did back in the day. I get to decide my own bedtime, and I can eat whatever I want — as long as I don't mind getting fat.
When you get older, you often find that the things that used to bother you don't really matter that much anymore. Unfortunately, you also discover that there are a whole lot of other things that never used to bother you, that now drive you up a tree.
Some of the things that let you know you're getting old are that music seems so much louder than it used to. You don't understand why kids would dress the way they do now. You find yourself saying things like, "Well, back in my day," and "When I was your age … "
You know, what I said about getting older not being that bad? Forget I wrote that. I don't know what I'm talking about.
Don't get old if you can at all help it.
Sean Vale
Editor
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