When I got pulled over for a random breath test the other day (happens a lot around Christmas/New Years) and the cop administering the test looked about 12 years old, and I had to fight down the urge to ask him "Does your mother know you're out this late?"

Even more frightening, I said something to my husband a month or so ago and immediately thought "Gosh, I sound just like my mother..." which was a cold-water-down-the-spine moment.

Disclaimer: I am 37.

I'm 48. Fuck, I can hardly remember turning 30. But you know what? I still feel like 30, I still act like 30 and, as far as I'm concerned, I am 30.

I must admit my faith was shaken somewhat a while ago when the Optometrist suggested that I get multi-focals and that this was pretty normal for someone my age. My age! Still, I got over that and I'm back to being the oldest ever 30 year-old around.

As far as I'm concerned, you only get old when you act old (yeah, I'm sure it will catch up with me eventually, but I'm not going to go gently). Sometimes people tell me I am too old to race boats and I tell them "You don't give up racing because you get old, you get old because you give up racing". Substitute your youthful activity of choice, keep telling yourself that and you'll never grow old.

*sigh* You're still young, hadjiboy.

I might've first felt old when I pulled on that hair that seemed to be growing from my head -- the one that's wiry and thick and is actually coming out of the top of my ear. I shave that lone little bugger twice weekly, along with the hair inside my ears and nostrils. I've given up shaving my nipples -- I just trim them.

And I'm fair-haired and mostly not hirsute.

Did that give you a chuckle?

Seriously, I just turned 44 and my friends tell me I'm 25 to them, but my neck is starting to get those slight vertical lines down from the Adam's apple. I think that's really a sign that I have to look my age and accept being it, along with the gray hairs that might eventually give me wise white temples.

But, yeah, as dg says, you're as young as you act. And as young as you live.

Oh, and, Avatar is hocking fast-food kids' meals, just like Terminator 3 hocked Humvees. I won't pay to see either. If I want to be sold fast-food I'll walk past a sidewalk hotdog cart.

Um yeah, I guess I should have mentioned that 30 is young, not old. Young. it may not seem to to someone approaching it, but it is.

Bugger that rubbish. Forever young!

Being the parent of an adult child certainly makes you realize how old you are. Not to mention the baldness, grayness (only my beard though), bi-focals and general physical degradation.

On the other hand, I end up hanging out with a lot of 60 and 70 somethings who sometimes seem younger than I do. They're always off doing stuff, building stuff, protesting stuff, etc. A friend of mine in her sixties can't run as much now because of her knee so she joined a crewing team and is out on the rivers on weekend mornings during the warmer months.

I'm hoping that I'll be like that in my sixties and beyond and not sitting home watching the 2020s version of Murder She Wrote.

For me, it was being in an establishment that sold CDs, and looking at the rack of "Hot Sellers". I realized I had no idea who 90% of the artists were.

When Kurt Cobain dies, some old fogey wrote about "the curious experience of reading the front-page obituary of someone I'd never heard of".

Then when the DJ AM business happened, I realized the old fogey was now me.

I still mostly feel young, but whenever I hear a baseball player who is younger than me (ie. most of them) referred to as a veteran, my young gland shrinks three sizes.

This morning I woke up with slighly stiff knuckles from the copious amount of housework I did yeseterday. Sure, it was alot of squeezing a sponge and scrubbing, but ten years ago there would have been no stiff knuckles.

That, plus I have a white streak in my Eve thicket.

Dude, don't be all "30 is OLD", because then the rest of your life is going to suck. 30 is nothing. 40 is nothing. 50 is nothing.

I don't realize old anymore. I realize stuff I can do. I make things happen. Why live like a statistic and start telling yourself stupid little subtle put-downs and copouts?

Make them catch up to you and never look back.

At 43 I'll say that I have greatly enjoyed getting older. My eyes aren't as good as they used to be, my back gives me some trouble, and a a few back-to-back late nights do more damage than they used to, but everything else has been pretty cool. As others have said, I don't really feel like I'm old. I think that a lot of people "get old" because they they think they're supposed to. Maybe we're all just fooling ourselves and living in denial, but we're having fun doing it.

But I will say that when I signed my first mortgage I was suddenly hit the the fact that I wasn't a kid anymore.

I am thirty. I am not old. Indeed, I'm just *finally* getting the hang of things. Maybe. A little bit.

My friends all told me, when I was in my twenties, that your twenties universally suck. This is something they don't tell you when you're in school, because they don't want you to ditch the diploma that will eventually land you a soul-sucking job.

No, you don't find out until you're twenty-four or so, at which point Life inevitably puts up a bunch of blockades.

My theory is this: My thirties will be so much more fun than my twenties were. Because I've made it past the blockades before, I can do it again.

Also, yes. You're always older than you were before. When you were sixteen, didn't you find eleven-year-olds to be completely unbearable? When you were eighteen, didn't you think sixteen-year-olds were silly? Now, don't you think that eighteen-year-olds wear the most ridiculous clothes? If you had a lawn, wouldn't you tell them to get off it?

But hadji, being thirty only means it's time for you to change your nick from "hadjiboy" to like, "hadjiman," or something. You know?

Embrace your thirties. I'm telling you, they're going to rock, if you let them.

Indeed, I'm just *finally* getting the hang of things. Maybe. A little bit.

Yes. I feel this way too.

Although I wouldn't say I am old (just turned 34), I did feel like the stereotypical older person the other day in the supermarket in my hometown. I was talking to the clerk, who looked to be about half my age, about all the traffic in town around the holidays (it's become a shopping destination with a lot of high-end "lifestyle centers") and I said, "When I was a kid, this town was all corn fields and apple orchards."

And now that I typed that out, I think I may have told that story here already. Early senility.

You aren't old yet. People generally don't really become adults until our late twenties or thirties, and most of us don't accomplish anything of worth until we're at least forty, anyway. Many never do.

You have your most fruitful years ahead of you.

I am 59 (holy crap!) and in a lot of ways I am in better shape than I was 20 years ago.

The 20's sucked. The 30's were better but I sorta got my midlife crisis out of the way in both good and bad ways. The 40's were a blur, raising a young kid. The 50's are still going on so I'll get back to you.

One of the only sucky issues is my eyebrows. . I am starting to get Andy Rooney eyebrows. . less fine short hairs and more long, scraggly ones.

I'm 38 and still quite young, thankyouverymuch.

You're not getting old, you're just developing a better taste in movies.

I don't understand the question.

While in every other way, I was thrilled to vote for Obama, it was a little sobering to realize that I was old enough to be voting for a president who was younger than me.

I realized I was getting old when I so totally agreed with Bill Maher, who said "Movies today are made for brain-dead idiots who don't understand either plot or dialog. I just wish they'd just make ONE movie that I'd like to see, before I die." Then it struck me that I'm the same generation as Maher. Huh.
30 is nothing. My Mum, with her usual tact, called me up on my 30th birthday, to reassure herself that I "was not going to do anything stupid." By which I infer that she thought I'd top myself because I was 30 ... :-)
Even at 30, I thought that was stupid. Your 30s are the best decade: you're no longer so self-conscious that you daren't complain about bad service and you no longer feel foolish meeting new people. You have the sense of self-worth that makes you do stuff you never dreamed of doing before. You meet interesting people, just because you poke your head out of your shell for the first time.
Enjoy your 30s - they're great!

When I was up to 7 pills a day for high blood pressure, cholesterol, etc. I found out that the human body does require periodic maintenance.

I'm not?

The day I realized I was talking to someone born in a year I vividly remember.

I turned 43 a few days ago and I feel the same as I did when I was 30. Hell, I feel the same as I did when I was 20. I'm still me, you know? Whatever it is that makes up the being I call me is ageless.

However, my body is telling me something different - in the last year or so I've been unable to read the really small writing on labels. My next pair of glasses will be bi-focals. Yikes.