Watch out: these things kinda creep up on you
ONE FIFTH OF the planet’s moms now wait until they are over 35 to start having babies, says a new survey by the BabiesOnline website. Doctors worry that older moms will struggle to find enough energy.
I know the feeling. These days I do weight-lifting only twice a day: I call it Getting Up Out of My Chair.
A reader named Jason, who hits 40 in a few months, told me he hurt all over: “The warranty has expired and all the parts are breaking down.”
I asked other readers to comment. The result is the following:
22 Signs That You Have Finally Grown Up.
1. The numbers in your bank account won’t go up and the numbers on your weighing scale won’t go down. (Christian Fardel)
2. The tunes you used to “rock out” to are now playing in elevators. (Paul Fox)
3. There is less hair on your head than on any other parts of your body. (Farah Huq)
4. It’s Saturday night, you have no-one to see and nowhere to go, and you think: Yippee!
5. “Putting on your best clothes” no longer means choosing between four different pairs of jeans.
6. The end of the movie is no longer when the fun begins, it’s when the date ends. (Joanna Chung)
7. Pregnancy tests no longer pop up as regular scary incidents in your life.
8. You think of chess as a physical sport you will play if the pieces are not too heavy.
9. By the time you’ve finished dialing a long-distance phone number, you are too worn out to talk to the person.
10. When you were young, you could get really high on a playground swing with nobody pushing. Now it’s hard work to get the rocking chair moving.
11. These days you are more likely to wake at 4 am than go to sleep at that time. (Sunita Chau)
12. Your fridge contains items which are not beer. (Yes, this will even happen to 22-year-old Western males.)
13. Taking a nap changes from something you are forced to do, to something you look forward to. (Paul Fox)
14. You eat vegetables willingly.
15. You are thinking about getting an automatic scrolling ebook so that you don’t have to make the effort to turn pages.
16. Every time you forget something you blame it on old age. (Farah Huq)
17. The words “summer holiday” no longer makes you think of an endless vacation, but a snatched break in Thailand.
18. Every time you see an old picture of yourself you think: I used to be soooo thin!
19. You say the same thing about modern music that your parents said about your music. “Where’s the melody?”
20. You can’t remember the last time you slept in a single bed.
21. You use your computer for work, rather than for pretending to work.
22. You eat all sorts of bitter, sour foods like durian, camembert and bitter gourd that you used to think were disgusting.
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A 28-year-old who looked at this list declared herself old, while a 50-year-old claimed none of it applied to her, declaring: “You’re as young as you feel.”
Well, THAT’S bad news. For me, getting old is when you wake up with the “morning after” feeling without having had the night before.
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