I am too old for this...the 40 plus thread.

HB Aimless and Rock, you are both standup people I admire massively for all the reasons both of you have posted about over the years and then some. xx

I'm struggling a bit at 43 with my level of fitness - I smoke and drink way more than I did in my 20s, bit of a reverse childhood I guess? I have a partner with kids now, so these things weigh on me more than they might have, as well as said partner having a heart condition. Health and get up and go mean a lot now. Its like being a shark - move or die. I despair looking at my sagging face in the mirror but tbh for a 43 year old i know i look good (im way too fat though). I drink and smoke too much, but life is short and shit, so I'm grabbing it by the hojos.

so I'm grabbing it by the hojos

The Howard Johnsons?

Meant to post this yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPhLtIJIiyI

ffs today I pulled a muscle in my shoulder putting on a jacket

I woke up Monday morning and my left tricep felt like someone had snuck in overnight and kicked it with a boot. Still hurts even now. I have no idea why and my left arm is basically useless for anything other than hanging off of my torso.

what else would you do with it?

Star Wars 7 shit talk

Happy belated, Aimless

I am still free of fortysomethinghood, though not for that long

ty

1.) Walked all the way up to the water company and all the way back without paying because I couldn't remember my PIN.

2.) Was thinking last night how sitcom characters never have names like Matt, Mark or Susan - always names like "Chandler". Led to me trying to remember the characters from Friends. Here they are in order of my memory:

12 AM Chandler, Joey
6 AM Rachel
8:30 AM Phoebe, Ross
JUST NOW AS I WAS TYPING THIS ALL OUT Monica

every white american baseball player between the ages of 18-25 is named tyler

who'd have guessed the 10th President of the USA would be so widely honored 170 years later

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/suddenly_susan1_4028.jpg

who'd have guessed the 10th President of the USA would be so widely honored 170 years later

Maybe they're all his grandkids.

I am afraid my 40's are going to involve more full-time work than the last decade did.

― sleeve, Sunday, August 24, 2008 2:25 PM (6 years ago)

I would like to report that I was OTM six years ago

Less than one year into my 40s and I feel that's going to be a major theme.

No comment

My 40s rule so far

Maybe 42 is the age I was always meant to be, I dunno

I love being in my 40s, but man, do I hate people under 30 these days. They all seem like their understanding of the world is on a level with a duckling's.

That's weird. My experiences with people under 30 lead me to believe they're all way smarter and engaged with the world than I ever was at that age.

Being "engaged with the world" and being a naïve idiot are not mutually exclusive.

Turning 44 next week. Ay yi yi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDwQN4UeF8E

I keep telling myself it is just a number, and you know what? that is the fucking truth and it is just a number!

I am here to testify that although I'm a pretty damned healthy 60 years old, all those ticks of the clock, cell divisions and heartbeats add up to more than just 'a number'.

They're all part of a very limited number, one that rarely crosses over into three digits.

I work with a 25-year-old who's going through a bucket list of sorts on Facebook, doing all of these things she's always wanted to do before her first quarter-century is over.

One of them apparently was a big slumber party where everyone watched the Harry Potter movies in order.

I'm somewhat comforted by the fact that it will be that generation nursing me in hospice care.

some people under 30 are smart and engaged with the world, some are not.

i'm in the 'nothing good about getting older' camp.

all those ticks of the clock, cell divisions and heartbeats add up to more than just 'a number'.

feeling this at 57. then again i saw my friends dad recently, wished him a belated HB and he blurted "90 is terrible. 89 was fine, but 90..." as he rattled his walker in emphasis. but he went on to display a fine-tuned cylinders-still-firing mind, at one point noting (he's a retired physician) "the human body wasn't DESIGNED to last this long"

So I'm clearly old enough to be somebody's grandfather.

http://i.imgur.com/knmcJJp.jpg

Looked her up and one of the first Google results is a photograph of her from 2004 when she was 10.

Granted, if I had had a daughter in 1994, I might've named her Malkmus Moore.

ffs today I pulled a muscle in my shoulder putting on a jacket

― just like Nietzsche but with jokes (snoball), Tuesday, December 2, 2014 8:41 PM (9 months ago)

This morning I pulled one of the muscles in my back between my shoulder blade and spine, apparently by picking up a coffee cup off the table.

Timely. I was just thinking today how this year is the first time I've really felt things start to go. Started with a minor fracture in my left forearm in January, which then either led to or exacerbated rotator cuff issues, which I now have in both shoulders (can be painful to reach behind me at certain angles, can't quite reach my left arm all the way over my head). And in the last few months, suddenly getting pain in my right hip when I sit for too long (or stand for too long). I have a feeling the answer to all of this is to get back to yoga, which I've neglected this year. But no amount of yoga will change that I'll be 46 next week.

On the other hand -- I'm still fit enough to hike and camp with the kids, and most days I feel great. So I shouldn't complain. I'm just aware of the slow accretion of physical difficulties.

And looking back I see my first post in this thread was when I was 39. Ah those were the days.

Along with my PIN and the cast of Friends, I haven't been able to remember the name of the book that Harper Lee wrote.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? NO, of course not.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? That's Maya Angelou, but I feel like I'm getting closer.

I could look it up, but this is ridiculous. Atticus Finch, Scout Finch, Dill, Boo Radley... dammit.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD Jesus Christ.

lol

Similar thing happened to me the other day. Even though I could picture all the characters from the show and sing most of the theme song in my head, I could NOT remember the title being "Beverly Hillbillies."

Ha. To your credit though, the title is never said in the song. Just kind of at the end by the announcer.

rip men

The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.

Can't go out on Wednesday nights, that's Church Night.

I don't hang with my pals as much anymore because, yeah work and family, but also social media. Saw an old poker buddy recently in the parking lot, first time we'd seen each other in years, but it wasn't like one minute had passed because we tweet and Like and all that shit.

I worry about my son being lonely like that. The one standing event we have on the calendar each week is Cub Scouts. The format is so weird, and I likely wouldn't have prodded him in to checking it out had I known that it was just a roomful of boys, each with their mommy or daddy sitting behind them, working on projects independently. We've been in there since September, and I don't know if the boy even knows any of their names.

suggest inserting liquid mercury for the boy's pinewood derby entry

it won't win -- the mercury sloshes backward once you hit the level -- but it'll still be cool as hell

Don't even mention the pinewood derby.

lol

i was going to attempt to address the issues raised in the article but . . . my life is different from the author's in a great many ways

People even moving to a different neighborhood in the same city can make it hard to hang out. We try to hang out with another couple every month, usually we make it work out, but I don't have any non-work-related buddies to hang out with at this point. I'm lucky I get along with people at my job!

I figure if I can maintain a couple of hobbies that aren't exclusively drinking or exclusively solitary into my dotage, I should be okay.

"the human body wasn't DESIGNED to last this long"

Lack of meaning and enjoyment in life is the primary problem I would guess:
e.g. why are I going through all these empty routines, did I waste 20 years of my life on something I haven't particularly enjoyed, can I face another x years of this and what for?

Loneliness is a secondary problem because there's no support to deal with the meaningfulness questions.

I get irritated with probably well intentioned, but fluffy, articles in the media about how everything would be alright if only people would talk to each other more and had deeper friendships.