Brain For Sale in Things That I'm Grateful For

I don’t like people paying attention to me. I obviously think I have something interesting to say, clearly since I’ve been writing one of these things since 1999, but I really don’t crave the spotlight.

Richard is running for Vice President of his university’s student body. I don’t know that I ever would have seen him in that position at any point in the last 21 years of knowing him, and even still, I’m not sure that this isn’t where he was heading. Although, I will say that it doesn’t seem like something he thought through very thoroughly. The girl who is running asked him because he’s half asian/latino, legally deaf, gay and old. He is all of DEI in one person, which I have to say I find very amusing when he put it like that.

Of course Richard is not old, he’s 38, but he’s starting to get the thing that we all have to deal with as we get older… and although I dealt with it, I went through it when i was 30, so it might be more extreme for him. People’s perceptions of my age progress further, faster than my own self-perceptions of my age.

I’m not going to lie, I don’t really feel 20 at all. But I don’t see the dividing line between being in my forties and my twenties as thick as I used to. I’m sure that would feel much different if I had children, especially if I had children when my mother had children… I reminded her that if I had had a child when she did, she would have a 22-year-old grandchild.

The smokescreen of “Oh, you don’t look forty!” has never worked with me, mostly because I have felt 40 since I was 17. I really liked that little meme that said something along the lines of “when people tell young people they have an old soul, they are just recognizing that that child went through trauma”.

Honestly, I see people who still talk about all their traumas, and I still have a few of mine that I’ve had to get over, but it’s ridiculous to still be re-litigating my teenage years at this point. It’s been so long that it honestly feels like something that happened to somebody else.

And that’s what I think is what it’s really like to get older. As you grow, you become estranged from the person you were, not just who you were but even the things that you were once passionate about. I came across a video of Edgar and just rolled my eyes and kept scrolling (he was cast in a nationwide commercial for something in America that apparently premiered during the SuperBowl).

I think that’s why nostalgia is so big and profitable. We can remember how much we loved something without necessarily having to spend as much mania as we put into it when that was our whole identity.... “Life was so much easier when I just played video games and watched Star Trek”… yeah, but you had no autonomy, no spouse, no job…

Your unhappiness in this moment makes you miss something you misunderstand as simple and uncomplicated. You were just as miserable during the video games & Star Trek era because at some point you had to turn off the video games and the Star Trek, go to a high school, deal with people who thought they were better than you, adults who mistrusted you, and wrestle hormones that made you think illogically about someone else.

Those aren’t rose-colored glasses, they’re partial lobotomies.