Middle Age

I am 47 years old. To be honest, in many ways, alone in a room, I still feel pretty young, in the sense of having much to learn, excited about new ideas, on the verge of adventure. But when I am around people younger than me, I can tell that, oh yes, I am middle-aged, that is clear. I have been thinking about some other ways in which I am demonstrably middle-aged.

1) The first, knee-jerk flash image of a car in my mind is a rectangle with two shorter flatter rectangles on either side—the tall one is the passenger cabin, and the shorter ones are the hood and the trunk. That is what a sedan looked like in the 1980s when I was a child and though I know that currently a sedan looks like a sideways teardrop or at best a smeared blurred version of the above that mushed into a teardrop, in my mind it looks like the above, and that is what it really should be.

2) I don’t know what anything is supposed to cost and it makes me anxious about money. I remember in about 1990, when I was in grade 7, the price of gas jumped from 40 cents/litre to 50 cents/litre. There was a geopolitical reason this happened but I don’t remember what it was, if I ever knew. My friend’s dad commented that even if whatever the geopolitical thing stopped happening, gas prices wouldn’t go back back down because they never did. He was right, and after that I always sort of thought the price of gas was “wrong.” Now gas costs approximately 3x what it did in 1990 and some of that is appropriate inflation and some of it isn’t and I don’t know which is which and it makes me nervous. A single-serving bag of chips used to cost about a buck in my childhood and now you can easily pay $3 for the same amount of chips, which seems like too much to be just inflation and also no ever *needs* a single serving bag of chips, so the whole purchasing of a treat becomes ruined by financial confusion. There are countless items like this. What are eggs supposed to cost? What is the right price for a t-shirt? What? What? I would be way more materialistic if I knew what was and was not a “good deal.”

3) I am angry at being catered to by nostalgia films and tv shows but I also don’t know who any of the current stars are. There are more and more movies and TV shows where the stars of my youth are implied to be frisky young things—I just watched Murder Mystery where Jennifer Aniston (56) and Adam Sandler (59) have been married 15 years, have no kids and live on little money in a not very nice appartment. The movie is about them going on a wacky adventure (the movie is very silly and I lost the plot almost immediately—is there a plot?) but the set up strongly strongly implies (but never outright states) that these are people are about 15 years younger than they are, not approaching retirement age. I’ve seen a few of these and they are odd. I want to learn to like new stars and appreciate them, but I keep getting sucked into this nonsense (I don’t have this problem with books because books are my whole world, and I have given up on most new music after a huge effort to discover new bands and finding, even if I didn’t know their work, I liked the stuff from 25 years ago better anyway somehow??? Let the musical nostalgia tide wash over me!)

4) I have been humbled. I think this is the main one. Life is one big Dunning-Kruger graph—people have the highest estimation of their skills with the least knowledge and experience, then over time as they learn more their confidence drops—we discover how much there is to learn and how little we know relatively speaking—and then on the right side of the graph confidence begins to crawl upward again tied to real learning. I am squarely in the big dip right now, both having learned enough about the world to notice my own tiny place in it and having had some more major kicks lately. I don’t even have confidence in how much confidence I should have, often feeling useless and like I should have shared more insight and offered more advice when I’ve remained quiet—why not at least try to help? I know some stuff, and folks can decide for themselves what is useful!—and equally useless and tedious when I speak up—who cares what I think, it was probably wrong or irrelevant anyhow. It’s a fun phase of life. I am shocked when I hear younger people confidently asserting exactly how the world is, but I’m glad they feel like they know—it’s the first step on a long journey, I suppose. (Note: the real Dunning-Kruger graph is not even that big U shape I’m saying it is, but a more subtle criss-cross, where the line of perceived ability arcs way above actually ability until ability hits a medium-high level, where perception coincides, and then ability starts being under-perceived. I’m glad I’ve learned the truth about the DK effect, but that old imaginary graph makes more sense for my metaphor in this case so I have decided to leave it all alone for now).

5) My body hurts all the time. Sometimes it is consistently the same body parts—my neck bothers me regularly—sometimes it is new and surprising—one day a single elbow, another day, the opposite hamstring, the day after that, my front teeth. Another, later part of ageing would I imagine be resigning myself to all this, and I am still not quite there. I’m always trying to find a logical explanation for a specific ache or pain: did I work out too hard or forget to stretch? Or conversely, was I too sedentary? Did I bite down too hard on a nut? Surely it couldn’t be that my entire body is falling apart all at once or piece by piece but in slow motion…right?

6) I care exactly the same amount. I have heard a lot about when I got older I would be less vulnerable to having my feelings hurt, would not be as affected by other people’s little problems and quirks, wouldn’t drawn into dumb arguments, etc. I believe this is termed, “Having zero f*cks to give.” Friends, I have so many f*cks to give—practically infinite. I have had my feelings hurt by almost everybody at one point or another and it seems to have jaded me not at all—what else are feelings for? Maybe this is something I will learn in my 50s.

Speaking of ageing, my lovely old website, also called Rose-coloured, which I loved very much, bit the biscuit this past summer. I had a friend design it, it was beautiful and exactly the way I liked it but it was getting increasingly hard to maintain and finally it crashed permanently and unrecoverably, or at least without a lot of time, effort and money. I have been letting it ride for a bit but last week someone I hadn’t spoken to in a while got in touch after trying to for a while and said I was HARD TO FIND on the internet, which hasn’t happened in 20 years. This will never do. I have tried and failed to get this newsletter into my google results and for some reason I cannot so please, allow me to reintroduce my blogger blog, a third thing called Rose-Coloured. It will be my home-base on the internet until I figure out something else. Please click on the link and enjoy briefly/help me with my quest to get SOMETHING into the google rankings, if you would be so kind. What a steadfast friend is blogspot. Note the date of the 2nd most recent post.