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34, physically. But I'm an old soul. I think in a previous life I was a Jewish guy from the Bronx who OD'd in the Fillmore East bathroom. Or something.
2. dark dark blue
3. pizza
4. broccoli
5. when I was 17
6. divorced, but engaged (wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles)
7. long walks on the beach, italian girls, and dancing to nasty music
(I'm hurt you that you don't remember me, jonmc. And it wasn't the biting I objected to as much as the Kancho.)
Ah, that was you. Well, I was mixing Robutussin and paint thinner waaaay too much in those days. But, man, you had a body slam worthy of Tito Santana back then. Must be those strong muscular arms...
You know I've spent my life being the youngest except when I wasn't. I suspect I'm the oldest here having just missing being born in the last half of the 20th century. My grandmother was born 126 years ago. When you start thinking in those terms age ceases to matter. Gee and I'm older that quonsar too. I think I'll just go shoot myself
No. no, mss! Do not shoot yourself, my comrade-in-being-older-than-quonsar! Join me on the porch, as we rock gently, sipping sarsasparilla, and share memories of the waning days of the Eisenhower administration! (And thwap these young'uns in the shins with our canes...)
katallison - waning days of the Eisehower administration, Kennedy stickers on the books, 3 TV channels, and the spinning' plate guy on Ed Sullivan. Now that was entertainment that beat the hell out of this interweb thing.
When I was born Johnson was in the White House, F-Troop and the Monkees were on prime time TV, Walt Disney died, and Herb Alpert was correcting people with "that's GRAMMY AWARD WINNER Herb Alpert to you".
i always sounded like a 45 year old
i may be Rhoda
an angry asian rhoda
i honestly don't care and i think i can honestly say that
once i missed being published with world wide acclaim at 15, i kinda jumped off the track
i see 40 looking 22 yr olds and 38 looking 60's so
i can't tell worth a damn and neither do i care
except there is something to having made use to time on the planet, like paying attention
i don't know anyone who doesn't think they got their shit together in their 40's unless they think the 50's was it but then--
some people start law school in their 30's, some in their teens.
and so it goes.
it's really about making it past rock star death age
after that you get pie
Thanks Feisty, that makes me feel much better. Not. My Grandfather retired at 82, my Mother is still working at 67. I will have to live to be 100 just to retire at this rate, which may be a good thing.
40 may be the new 30, but 30 seems to be the new 18, because kids never seem to leave home these days.
i see 40 looking 22 yr olds and 38 looking 60's so
i can't tell worth a damn and neither do i care
except there is something to having made use to time on the planet, like paying attention
posted by ethylene 15 June | 23:44
Every year is better, I swear to God. I was just thinking how cool being 47 is. It's like being an onion- no, wait, it's like being a rose (I like that a LOT better). Layers get peeled away and you get closer and closer to who you really are and what you really want and less and less "stuff" matters. I get happier all the time. Lalalala.
Physically, however, it's been downhill since 25. And I miss Quaaludes (random thought on aging).
40 may be the new 30, but 30 seems to be the new 18, because kids never seem to leave home these days.
posted by dg 16 June | 00:19
Shoot, would you?
On my entry-level salary I have less than $100 a month left after bills are paid for my studio apartment, that has to cover food, gas, and something that resembles a social life.
If my parents didn't live eight hours away I'd be sorely tempted to move back in with them.
Everything keeps getting expensive but the salaries stay the same.
Yeah, the basic cost of living seems to have increased over the past few years everywhere, without any increase in earnings. I don't know about where you live, but here it is tied to massive increases in the cost of real estate - the house that we built just over 3 years ago is now worth almost double what it was, which is fairly typical in this area. This means that rentals also go up, so the cost of providing basic housing for families increases for everyone, except that, for the rich, it is still a relatively small proportion of income, uinlike the rest of us who are paying 50% or more of their income just to keep a roof over our heads.
Welcome to Bush's version of trickle downup economy and "tax breaks".
I miss The Bubble. I was making like 42k a year, and I'm a HS dropout with a worthless AA in commercial design who just happens to be a life-long self-taught computer/tech dorkus.
I have a feeling it's only going to get worse, a lot worse. Peak Oil or not. It's just getting more and more crowded on this little globe, with less and less to go around.
###
Though, on the other hand, I sometimes wish the global economics excrement would hit the hegemonic air conditioning so we'd all get slapped around a little and realize we don't have any collective or singular entitlement to cheap gas for ginormous SUVs, cheap electricity for big-ass air conditioners, TVs, and computers, and all the attendent resources that the illusion of "The American Dream(TM)" requires, with it's faux-pastureland lawns and it's individual (but always so same-same) faux-castle dwellings.
Then maybe we could get on with the business of destroying the stigmas associated with smart/alternative housing, forgetting the fallacy of antiquated building codes and zoning laws, and get on with trying to rebuild something smart and useful.
Please, I just want a simple rammed-earth semi-underground house, with a small and efficient well-planned garden, a composting toilet, passive water recycling and filtering, solar and wind generators, cheap LED lighting, a passive heat sump for the 'icebox', and low cost and lower power networked computing - preferrably on an ad hoc global wireless grid network to talk to the rest of the world with.
I want to live more in harmony with the earth, and the rest of the people of the earth, not just the people of the USA. I want smart, efficient technologies - and I'm damn tired of living in a society where it's deemed eccentric or 'cute' or worse to merely want them, much less try to apply them.
I want to live with people that realize the inherent beauty of science and the power it holds, people who find an array of solar panels on a truly-well-designed-for-it's-local-enviornment house much more beautiful than the facade of some long-ago time where only nobels and elites owned anything, born on the backs of the broken.
I don't want to devolve into some pre-industrial agrarian society, but I don't want to just keep on keepin' on in the face of a failing, brutalizing economic system filled with too many strangers and not enough love, laughter and play.
I don't want more clinicism and sterility, I do want more dirt - more Earth - but not more squalor and poverty, be it poverty of the stomach or mind.
I don't need any stinking Ikea. I don't want any more Wal-Mart. God forbid I ever set foot in The Gap or Crate and Barrel. McDonalds can go take a flying fuck at the Moon. The fossil fuel corps can choke in their own effluents, but not until we bootstrap off of them into renewable polymers, fuels and energies derived from plants and other self-perpetuating biomass.
In-n-Out can stay, along with Trader Joe's, and I have a hard time imagining a world without something like Fry's or Radio Shack, but they'll probably have to morph into local co-op chapters - but those local unions could wholly control larger public collectives for making our magic chips and other hard to make stuff.
I want to know who makes my food, and clothes, and if possible, toys. So I can go talk to them and offer my direct feedback about how it might taste better, or fit better, or function better, and not have my one voice aggregated with millions of others, and lost. Only to be rewarded with the lowest common denominator in return.
I want to be able to go to a creative specialist to design the reusable case for my laptop - placing the keys just so - here, and the buttons there, and there. For my bread I want to go to an artisan who bakes my bread with such skill, craft, and love it would make a transplanted and translated John and Jane Doe weep with previously undiscovered joy. I want my house forged from the earth by yet another artist, one who sculpts the very ground into structure, function and beauty with brute force applied as deftly as a painter applies the last 'hand' to their latest work. And I want to be an artisan among all these artists, contributing in my own fashion as only as I can - in a niche of my own.
I want to be More Than Human. But I'll never be able to do it alone.
Late to the party, had to get my walker out of hock. 42 and not loving it. Not looking it either, but not loving it. Old, old, old. . . but I did enjoy the slash fiction, guys! Hee. . .
Loquacious, put that rant somewhere I can link to it, will you? It's beautiful. And I agree with you.
Lately, when conversing with friends concerning the eternal 'Oh, if I was only younger, knowing what I know now' conundrum, the consensus on said ideal age seems to be 30. Indeed, Merle Haggard's 30 Again is a song that often comes to mind these days:
I know that thirty seems young to a child
But to me it seems crazy and wild
And there's so many places a young man ain't been
And I wish I could just be
Thirty Again
As for the Grim Reaper, it found me to 33. The pimple presently on my butt skewed the results, methinks.
38.6. And although I don't consider myself to be vain, I'm always pleased that people guess at least 10 years younger. Best year was 32 (1999). And I can't find the Grim Reaper. Should I be nervous?
The Grim Reaper.
Sure, jonmc, let's get married. Friday good for you?
*thinks happy evil thoughts about total eradication of Blue Oyster Cult and Aerosmith and Van Halen through judicious application of constant spousal nagging*
It pegged me at 22, despite being most interested in tea (pegged age 55 -- a close second for me was "style" which would have been age 30) and best recognizing "Killroy" which pegged me at 50!
Jeez. And being a "50" for feeling "reflection" though my usual state is "escape" (age 15).
Actually, I can't figure out how they came up with 22. But shave off my facial hair and I'd pass.
Grim Reaper says I am 20, which makes me annoyed. I think that not having watched man first walk on the moon skewed something - we didn't have TV at school, so I had to listen to it instead. Oh, well.
I am (pleasantly) surprised that the group here is so oldmature experienced. I would have expected most to be 20s.
Yeah, me too. I like the mix. The younguns and the ahhh, coolest (thank you matildaben). The sane and the insane. The funny and the lame. The bold and the beautiful.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
