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Old 2004-04-26, 10:05 p.m. I feel old. A girl I used to baby-sit was just elected Prom Queen last weekend. There’s a woman who works in my office who is extremely attractive, but I find myself thinking “if only she would not wear so much make-up, she’d be beautiful.” My joints are stiff when I roll out of bed in the morning, and getting tanked means two and a half glasses of wine, not twelve beers. My closet is full of sensible shoes and basic pieces – nothing trendy, nothing that might go out of style in the next three years. There’s a row of black pants and black skirts, a row that has camel skirts and pants, followed by gray skirts and pants, and then rows of sweaters, shirts, and jackets that go with at least one of the above. Nothing navy, because I might mix it up with black in the mornings because I don’t see very well in dim lighting anymore, and also, I kind of hate the way navy looks on me. I’m old. I find myself tsk-tsking at thirteen year-old girls who are trying to look twenty-one, thinking to myself “if I were her mother, there’s no way she’d leave MY house looking like that!” I regularly fall asleep at 8 p.m. on Friday nights. I spend a lot of time trying to understand personal finance and researching IRAs and 401(k)s and what it all means when you change jobs and OHMYGOD what will I do when I retire and I have no money because I spent it all on Lush and The Soap when I was twenty-four? My language is plenty vulgar, but occasionally, I’ll hear somebody call somebody else a bitch on Friends or see an old man’s naked ass on a crappy ABC drama and think that it’s inappropriate for family hour time on television. I watch the Food network nonstop during weekends, and I take notes on all of the kitchen tips and recipes that sound interesting. I watch TLC shows and file my ideas in a color-coded, labeled binder so that when I own a house with a spiral staircase, I will know exactly how I want to stain the banister. I plan out menus and grocery lists and I spend more time reading the real estate section of the paper than the entertainment pages. I try to figure out how soon I’ll be a millionaire and when I can retire and how many kids I can afford to have. I learned how to knit baby sweaters, and I found myself spending way too much time reading about homemade baby food in the waiting room at a recent dentist appointment. I recently replaced a lot of my make-up to more neutral colors that are appropriate for a woman my age – and then I wondered if I made a mistake because I am twenty-four, not sixty-four, and maybe twenty-four year-old women can still wear pink eyeshadow when they go out to the bar (down to once every four to six weeks from three nights per week). I only own two pairs of jeans. I collect cookbooks and purses, not phone numbers and bottle caps. I get up early on the weekends, I keep a reasonable balance in my bank account, and I keep track of who has the best prices on Diet Coke and fresh spinach. I voluntarily eat spinach. Bring on the red hat and the purple dress - I’m old. When I start feeling like a senior citizen, I remember that I’m still the same person that has a stack of coloring books in her desk, and I like to swing on the swings whenever I walk by a park, and cannot resist the samples with glitter at beauty product stores. I’m still the same woman who wears Superman underpants sometimes and I pop every square on used bubble wrap. I like to play Clue just as much as I like to play Scrabble, and I would go nuts if turned loose at Archie McPhee. I consider it all to be part of my charm.
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