Getting Older

Warning: This post may contain far more information about my personal bodily functions than would considered decent by most people.  Proceed at your own risk.

About nine and a half months ago, I crossed a fairly substantial milestone in my life. I went from my 20s to my 30s.  It was a somewhat surreal transition.  I purposely didn’t mention my birthday to my co-workers.  (This was before they were keeping that damnable birthday calendar culled from our personnel files—and the ridiculous desk decorations that ensued.  Whoever decided that it was a good idea to sprinkle confetti on a person’s desk to celebrate their birthday needs to be shot.)  I simply went to work, did my job, came home at the end of the day, and went out to dinner.  Throw in a little homework, and that could be three days out of every week for me.  It was pretty low key.  I’m not into birthday parties much (or parties in general).

So, overall, my entrance into a new decade of life went largely unheralded.  It didn’t seem all that weird.  Turning 27 was, thus far, the strangest birthday.  I was no longer in my mid-20s.  I was now officially in my upper 20s.  But 30?  Meh.

However, I’ve begun to notice that, right about the time I turned 30, certain things started changing.  My body began to malfunction.  Things that used to work stopped working.  Things I used to be able to do were no longer possible without severe consequences.  I’m not talking the things you expect like pulling a muscle or hurting my back.  No, this was far more sinister and off-putting.

The biggest change I’ve noticed in the last year is my digestion.  I’ve never had what one might call in iron stomach.  The simple act of eating anything at all often sends me to the bathroom.  If you ever go out to eat with me, chances are that, toward the end of the meal, I will have to excuse myself to go to the restroom.  I know what you’re all thinking, and I want to put this to rest right now.  Would a bulimic person have a gut like mine?  I mean, for reals.  If I’m going to binge and purge, you better believe I’m going to make sure I’m skinny.  Throwing up is bad enough, but if you’re going to do it purpose, it better show results.  

Right around 30, though, I began to notice that my body was reacting in a particularly violent way to certain foods.  Take bacon, for instance.  Bacon is Ambrosia—food of the gods.  I think we can all agree that God probably has bacon served to him at every meal and never gains a pound.  I LOVE bacon.  I used to be able to sit down and eat a pound of bacon (pre-cooked weight) and not think twice about it.  Three or four bacon sandwiches, plus a few extra strips for good measure.  Yeah, not anymore.  I so much as smell that smoky, glorious scent of bacon frying, and I’m running to the nearest commode.  With violent diarrhea. Not that this has stopped me from eating bacon, mind you.  I just have to carry a cork around in my pocket.

I have also started to get heartburn.  A lot.  It seems like everything gives me heartburn.  The worst, though, is pizza.  Pizza is a heavenly food.  Yet eating pizza makes me feel like someone poured acid down my throat which, technically, is half true.  I’ve got someone splashing acid up my throat.  Mexican Food, Indian Food, Chinese Food, American Food.  Pretty much the only things that don’t give me heartburn are Pho (Vietnamese Noodle Soup) and Red Mango Frozen Yogurt.  What’s a foodie to do?  I’ve begun crunching on Tums.  I eat them like popcorn.  I just sit down in front of the TV with a bowl of tropical flavor Tums and a bottle of water for a couple of hours before bed just so I can sleep horizontally without my stomach acids burning off my nose hairs.

Not that I couldn’t stand with having my nose hair burned off.  Seriously.  Nose hair?  What kind of a cruel joke is that?  Just thinking about nose hair pisses me off.  I started going bald at the age 19.  NINETEEN!  I went through three miserable (and largely worthless) hair transplant surgeries in a misguided attempt to ensure that I could continue having a career in the performing arts.  And despite it all, my hair is still falling out—everything except the transplanted follicles around my hairline.  This means that I’m going to look like a monk with a bad case of chemo-head.  But don’t you worry.  What I am missing in hair on my head, I make up for with hair in my nose.  It’s only been in the last couple of years, but my nose hair has started getting out of control.  I’ve gotten into the habit of pulling my nose hair (for when I want to look like I’ve been crying even when I’m not sad).  Some of my nose hairs have been 3/4 of an inch long.  Why does anyone in their right mind need 3/4” nose hair?  What evolutionary purpose does that serve?  Now I have to keep extra AAA batteries in the house for my two different types of nose hair trimmers—the ones with the straight blades, and the ones with the round blades.  And even those don’t always work.  Sometimes I need to go in there with mini scissors, or go back to plucking (and looking like Meredith Baxter Birney as the battered wife in the latest movie of the week on Lifetime: Television for Women.)

Then let’s talk about clothing.  I’m sorry, but what is a 30-year-old man supposed to do for clothing?  Where can I shop?  I used to get clothes at H&M, Abercrombie, Gap, American Eagle, Aeropostale, Old Navy, Express.  If I walk into those stores now, I feel like a dirty old man encroaching on the purview of junior high girls.  And none of the clothing in these stores is something that I could be caught dead wearing in public.  I refuse to look like a giant douche by wearing pink polo shirts with the collar up that look like they’ve been run over by a car.  Nor am I willing to pay exorbitant prices for the privelege of advertising for the store.  Dammit, if I’m going to wear a banner for your store on my chest all day long, you better be paying me to do it.  And I’m sick and tired of dodging these slutty-looking 14-year-olds who are wearing skirts that barely cover their coochie with fuzzy pink boots walking around the mall glistening in body glitter.  (BTW, would someone please tell women everywhere that big bulky boots with short skirts looks STUPID?  If you wear this combination, YOU look stupid.  Knock it off.  It’s even worse than wearing leggings underneath a skirt a la Madonna circa 1983 or every high school girl circa 2006.  Also, body glitter comes from one place and one place only—Satan’s in-house cosmetic line.  It’s not cute.  It’s annoying.  And I don’t want to be picking glitter out of my nose hair for six months just because I happened to walk within five feet of your person).  I’m too young to shop in the cool shops, and I’m not yet so far gone that I want to start shopping for my clothing at Mervyns or Sears (Softer side my @#$).  I’m too poor to shop at places like Banana Republic or Nordstrom, and where would I wear all that expensive clothing around anyway?  I hardly think that wearing an outfit that cost me $700 is appropriate for going grocery shopping to walking to the dog park.

However, I think I can say that the worst part of getting older are my night times.  I’m only 30, and I can’t make it through the night without having to get up and go to the bathroom at least once—usually more.  There’s nothing worse than waking up for no apparent reason at 3:00 am, snuggled up in your blankets with your puppy sleeping next to you, warm and comfortable, only to realize that you need to pee.  Then, you usually spend three minutes trying to convince yourself that you don’t need to go that bad, and if you can just get back to sleep, you’ll be fine until your alarm goes off.  But then you realize that you’ll never be able to go back to sleep having to pee so badly.  Then you remember that one time when you peed the bed at someone else’s house when you were spending the night and, oh yeah, you were 26 at the time, and you just washed your sheets three days ago and you don’t want to have to wash them again because you still have laundry in the washing machine that needs to be put in the dryer and you hope that it hasn’t been in there so long that it’s started to grow mold and then it will have to be washed again.  (What?  You don’t have that thought?)  So you get out of your warm, comfy bed, and stumble into the bathroom, trying not to turn on the lights because it’s always harder to go back to sleep when you turn on the lights.  Being a man, you try to pee standing up, but you’re in the dark, so we can all imagine how well that ends up going.  Plus, the sound of urine hitting the water in toilet bowl is magically magnified between the hours of 1AM at 8AM so that the simple act of urination can deafen your neighbors, set off your car alarm in the parking lot, and cause earthquakes in small third world countries.

The thing that worries me the most about getting older, though, is that I’m only 30, and I sound like I’m a 75 year old man with an enlarged prostate and irritable bowel syndrome.  I can’t wait to see what I’m going to be like by the time I hit 50.  At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably be in a wheelchair, drooling on myself, and talking to my imaginary children who never come to visit me.

But you better believe I’ll still be eating bacon.