Today I am officially Old

[drwex]

No, it's not the gray hair, nor the arthritis, nor the decaying vision.

It's learning that I was writing code, for pay, before my coworkers were born.

Comments

[rigel.livejournal.com]

Decaying vision makes me sad.

[drwex]

me too. I thought for a while it was my eyes switching dominance again - I've gone from right to left to right to left in my adult life and probably swapped in childhood. Plays holy hell with archery, which I used to love to do.

But both my PCP and the eye doc confirm that, no, this is the standard thing that happens to men after age 40 - the eye muscles just lose a lot of their flexibility and so can't focus down as well on small things or things with low contrast. Which makes reading maps in the car at night an UTTER BITCH.

[rigel.livejournal.com]

That's started on me early. It's really frustrating. Worse still that most people who aren't eye doctors or people a good bit older than I don't believe me.

[msdaisy.livejournal.com]

Isn't the decaying eyesight weird? I remember when my parents started needing reading glasses, and joked that their eyes weren't going bad, their arms were getting shorter (so they had to hold the newspaper in an outstretched arm). I've noticed I'm starting to have that problem. Someone hands me something to read and I have to move it closer and farther until I find the spot where it comes into focus.

I wouldn't worry to much about feeling old though, at least until your sons can code circles around you and laugh that you haven't learned to use whatever slick new interface they take for granted.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Huh. My vision has been decaying since I was 12, so I never thought anything of it.

The sudden appearance of wrinkles in the corner of my eyes six months ago - THAT makes me sad. It's funny; I know a lot of people 10 years younger than I am who have way more wrinkles, but it's still just a sign of the inevitable decline.

[ariesd.livejournal.com]

break out the "Back when I started coding we only had 1's and 0's" jokes. :-) Sorry you are feeling old, you really aren't you know. Physical age is really an inaccurate representation of how old one feels.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

You had 1's?

[sweetmmeblue.livejournal.com]

Ok, you owe me a new keyboard as I just spewed my tea. DAMN YOU!

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

You'll never be that old to me...

(Yes, mainly because I not that much younger than you and I refuse to see myself as "Old". ;-)

[drwex]

Yes dear.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

For me, that moment came when I was teaching at Bentley College and had a student whose MOTHER was younger than I was. I was 36 at the time and her mother was 35. Yes, it was an unintended teen pregnancy, and her mother was 16 when the student was born, but still....

*shudder*

[stevie-stever.livejournal.com]

That does kind of press buttons, doesn't it?!

[unclebooboo.livejournal.com]

15 years ago when I was a young assistant professor, I knew more about the latest trends in music than most of my students. I could walk into the student radio station and immediately identify whatever was being played. This was the obvious consequence of all my years spent doing radio in college. At the time, I could easily pass for a student, and was often asked "What's your major?"

Now the students play music from the late 90's and consider it "oldies." A very wide cultural gap has opened up between me and them.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

In the early '70s, anything from the late '50s was considered an "oldie". And for decent reason, given the post-hippie prog-rock sound and the pre-hippie doo-wop sound. (Okay, it was probably pre- and post- Beatles.)

But if you set the way-back machine for twelve or fifteen years now, you still haven't gotten as far back as Nirvana's Nevermind. I find it difficult to consider Linkin Park to be all that much stylistically different than today's music.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

Every year, my husband gets a memo that a professor at some other institution passes around, telling when this year's incoming freshmen were born and what they'd never experienced.

First I felt old when 18-year-olds weren't alive when we landed on the moon.

Then I felt old when 18-year-olds hadn't been alive for Nixon's resignation speech.

Now those times of feeling old are LONG in the past -- this year's freshmen have never known a president who wasn't named Bush or Clinton.

Geeze, IKE was in office when I was born!

Well, back to the rocking chair....

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I'm younger than you are, because I fit into the first category you named. But that list really made me feel old, too!

I have friends who, technically, could be my kids, if I'd gotten knocked up the first time I had sex. That makes me feel all weird.

[ciani.livejournal.com]

old or not, you're totally hot and don't we all have arthritis and decaying vision now?!

I'm surprisingly old compared to most the developers here, but youngish in my dept.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I'm older than almost everyone I work with. There are perhaps four people in the office older than me; only one of them is over five years older than me. I think, in total, there are seven people in the office who are within five years of my age on either side. It's definitely odd.

[drwex]

Thank you dear.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The thing that actually makes me feel old is losing my dad. I have a lot of friends who are my age that still have not just their parents, but some or all of their grandparents. Before I graduated high school, I was down to one, and I lost that grandparent when I was 21.

I guess - well, it's like life is this conveyor belt leading to a cliff; the conveyor belt drops you into the abyss, and there's no way of getting off. Your parents and your grandparents are on that conveyor belt in front of you. The more of them that are on it, the less likely you are to notice the abyss you're heading toward. I've only got one person left who's standing in front of me (and she tells me several times a week that she's about to go off it), so I've got a pretty good view of the abyss. It's not pretty.

[drwex]

I'm sorry you feel so down about this.

[rintrahroars.livejournal.com]

Wow. I was just about to write this encouraging reply to cheer you up -- to remind you how sexy experienced men are, and how competence and wisdom are desirable criteria for some people. And how YOU are HAWT!

But after reading this thread, I just have this urge to drink too much red wine and watch a depressing movie. *sigh*

[drwex]

Thank you for the kind words, though I wasn't really fishing for compliments. Yes, it's true the comments have gotten a bit more downer than I'd anticipated - not sure what's up with that.