Dang It, I'm Getting Old Too! (Another 30-year-old rant)

While browsing recently I was reminded that, like an unstoppable tide, time is advancing, turning bright, vivacious twenty-somethings into shocked thirty-somethings who aren't twenty-somethings anymore. This isn't a big deal to, say, our parents. If you try to complain to your parents about turning thirty you'd better be ready to dodge the snot stream from the biggest scoff you'll ever witness.

But to the thirty-year-old themselves it's pretty traumatic. It is, perhaps, the final clinching evidence that they are now fully and permanently into adulthood. It's also around thirty that they realize they're starting to behave as their parents did when they were young (when the current thirty-year-olds were young, that is, not their parents; their parents were never young). By thirty you're beyond even the newly extended time frame for adolescence, although I like to think I'm ahead of the curve by still being immature.

I myself turned thirty last May, and I'm still getting used to it. It's led to a slew of unpleasant realizations and revelations. Here are some of them. Five, to be exact.

1. I hate young people.

I'm pretty sure this change uncannily occurred on the day of my thirtieth birthday. Suddenly I started to hate all those little whippersnappers with their rap music, their rich parents, their jumping on the leftmost political bandwagon they can find on account of they've never had a job and don't know how the real world works, and most of all their atrocious online spelling and grammar.

This phenomenon reached a scary peak when I realized I was literally telling kids to get off my lawn. I don't yet own a home, but I manage a small townhouse apartment building owned by my work that they use to house co-ops from far-away colleges; the co-ops are also young, so you can imagine some of the fun I have. But my duties include doing yardwork, and the point I'm getting at (sorry, I ramble a bit in my old age) is that I've had to yell at the little urchins down the street to stop riding their dang tricycles in front of the lawnmower and into our garage. Dumb munchkins are just trying to make me feel old.

Don't they realize that back in my day we had to take the bus to school, while a lot of the spoiled kids today get dropped off by their parents because their school districts can't afford buses? Don't they realize that when I grew up the only way to get an mp3 was to download it illegally and they didn't even have a portable way to play them? Instead we had to burn them to CDs and stick them in our CD Walkmans, whose "anti-skip" feature was a freaking joke. Kids today, I swear.

2. I can't stay up late anymore.

Why, I remember how back in my college days I could stay up until four a.m. playing video games, sleep 'til two the following afternoon, and not bat an eye! My mom remembers it even more clearly, and brings it up at inopportune times!

No more. Staying up, strictly speaking, isn't the problem, but what happens the next morning is. My choices are either to get up at eight or nine and feel miserable all day, or sleep in and feel even more miserable, as well as not having time to get anything done.

It's mind-boggling to me that deviating from my normal sleep schedule should cause me so much agony. As a teenager I was vaguely aware that there was such a thing as too much sleep; somewhere around the fourteen-hour mark I could count on waking up groggy and not feeling quite right the rest of the day. Now it seems like if I go beyond nine hours it's off to Grogsville and the following day is ruined. This throws my body clock out of whack, so I don't get good quality rest the next night either, and let's not even talk about the following work week. Why sleep in at all, you ask? Because it's awesome.

Oh yeah, and on top it all I have a toddler. She's usually amiable to whatever sleep schedule my wife and I choose, but not always; sometimes she's up at 8:30 on a morning when we really want to sleep in, and at other times she goes through phases of not sleeping through the night, so I get to spend the wee hours of the morning lying there while a baby kicks me in the back of the head. Thank God for coffee is all I can say.

3. I've been seeing the same dentist for over twenty years.

I had to sit down after I had this revelation. I started seeing my current dentist when I moved to Ohio from Las Vegas, at around 1990, when I was nine years old. I've been seeing him ever since. I followed him when he moved his offices, and I kept seeing him once I became an adult and it was no longer my parent's decision.

Don't get me wrong; he's a good dentist and a great guy. But man, does that make me feel old. Twenty years! Seems like only yesterday I couldn't wait to be twenty. Now the same guy has been looking at my teeth since at least three years before Justin Bieber became a twinkle in his mom's eye!

4. I'm starting to resist change...in software.

This one makes me mad at myself. The PC came of age right along with me. I know more about how computers work than most modern "tech-savvy" kids because I came out of the generation that viewed their PC as a foe that needed to be outsmarted just to get their favorite games to work. I vividly remember squinting at my system's BIOS setup and setting the tiny DMA switches on my first sound card so it wouldn't cause a conflict and make my computer explode. I remember my peers and I pissing ourselves with joy when "Plug'n'Play" technology made that process obsolete. In the DOS days I created my own custom autoexec.bat and config.sys files for games that couldn't use "himem." I even created batch files to change the contents of those files when I needed to use Windows (3.1, holla). I remember eagerly awaiting the next Windows upgrade, in the naive youthful assumption that the next version couldn't possibly be as bad as the current one. I figured that since computers were a part of my life and I took to them naturally I would be able to stay on the cutting edge forever.

Then something happened. It started with Microsoft Office 2007, which flat-out offended me by completely reworking the menu system and then having the gall to require paying more money for a plugin that would allow veteran Office users to find where the hell anything was. It was like someone came into my garage and rearranged all my tools. To be honest, I still haven't upgraded. I switched to OpenOffice. It has comprehensible menus. It understands me. It's "retro."

But the trend continues. Software developers in several fields—such as graphic design, which is my day job—have also rolled out major interface changes, and I've resisted them, turning them off or using "legacy" settings whenever I can.

Am I losing my technological edge? Am I becoming set in my ways? Why did they combine the "Stop" and "Refresh" buttons on my browser and move them way far away from the "Back" and "Forward" buttons? Are menu bars just not good enough anymore? Am I not?

5. My memory is getting worse.

I had another, much funnier thing that I was going to put here, but in the course of writing the rest of this article I've completely forgotten what it is, so this will have to suffice.

My memory never has been particularly great, unless you count Magic card statistics, comedy movie quotes, and the complete solutions to every adventure game I've ever played. It's annoying; I love adventure games, but they have no replay value even if I wait several years between playing them. The best I can do is pretend they're movies and I sometimes have to click on stuff to advance them.

But when it comes to things that Western society haughtily calls "important," such as a three-item grocery list or what I'm supposed to be doing today instead of writing a hub or the spelling of my wife's middle name, I can't retain the information to save my life. I can forget entire conversations instantly. My wife thinks I'm not listening, but the truth is that I'm hanging on every word; I'm just having trouble hanging onto them. Often I'll have to ask her to repeat entire sections of conversation. It's so habitual that I will often say "Huh?" even on the rare occasion I do register what she just said. I don't know what she keeps complaining about, though. It's not like she has to wipe my butt. Yet.

I could go on. My childhood is starting to become "retro," what with all the new films based on 80's franchises. People that I distinctly remember being kids are now reaching the ages of eighteen or even, damn it all, twenty-one. I'm starting to remark on how much such-and-such a child has grown after the briefest of absences. And I haven't even touched on the physical aspects of my advanced age. The back pain. The sudden difficulty reading things up close. The nose hair. The problem with my...

No, wait. Talking too much about your physical ailments is another sign of being old. For that matter, so is saying, "I could go on," and immediately going on, so I'd better stop this. Wait...being overly conscious about showing signs of age is another...you know what, I give up. I'm going to go drink some Metamucil and go to bed.