Quote of the Day

"For many boomers, turning 60 is a fairly significant shock," said Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University. "The generation that believed it would be young forever, clearly will not. ... The boomers are having a hard time with the existential reality of life not being one open-ended opportunity after another."

His comment in response to Chimpy turning 60 this week.

And I'm still turning 40 next month.. which is bizarre to me. I feel the same as I always have. I look pretty good I think, and my outlook is the same as it's always been.. so I don't know what the effects of aging are, because I've still not experienced any negative consequences yet.

But that turning 40 thing sucks, because it's where the potential of your life becomes the reality of your life. I'd imagine that by 40, a person is going to have accomplished whatever it is they were destined to accomplish, so it's sort of a ride out the rest of your life from there situation.

I do know, however, that much of the perception is based solely on a person's frame of reference. If you'd ask chimpy if he'd like to be 40 again, I'm sure he'd be on that like Duke Cunningham on a drunken prostitute. So, it's incumbent on me to realize that even though I'm not 20, or 30, 40 is a great place to be.

The one bummer about aging though, is loosing some of that connectedness with people in their 20's, and that's probably the fault in the way somebody my age looks at it, rather than somebody in their 20's. Then again, I've been to clubs or concerts or whatever, where there are a lot of people in their mid 20's, and it does appear that people my age or older are invisible to them. It's not that I have the mentality of a 25 year old and would prefer hanging out with them.. Quite the contrary, I tend to identify much more with people over 35 or so - always have. It's just that in certain situations you just don't want to stick out like a sore thumb.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say.. but it's just weird when you've been "young" for so long, and you're so used to being the youngest in all things, and then you're not.. and you stop and think, aging from 20 to 40 went by really fast.. which means going from 40 to 60 is going to be really fast.. and each passing year increases that disconnect from the newness feeling.