This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

That REACT vid link gave me a few laughs, being right in the same age range as their parents, playing The Cure and trying to influence my nephew with my tastes. I liked how open they seemed to the music, not derisive, but genuinely appreciative and/or bemused.

Whatever age the protagonist of Hey Nineteen is, that’s the age I aspire to and am in my mind

Sometimes it bums me out to realize when Hey Nineteen was released Fagen/Becker were 32 and 30, respectively. I’m the same amount older than them as they were to the 19 yr old.

32 in the '70s is like 65 today so don't worry

"Hey 38" would be the new version

hey 38
that's Lily Allen

(too recent actually....)

"hey 40, that's ella mai..."

I will say that one unalloyed good of gender transition is that I dont look like a 49 year old man, I look like a maybe early 40s woman.

I'm 44 and for years looked younger than I was but my beard is now 50% grey and gives it away. I've lived in college towns for years and when the places that got busted multiple times for selling to underage kids and are now super paranoid about checking IDs stop carding you, you look old.

I teach university students though which is a fascinating window into young people who get younger every year to the point that now my students have little to no recollection of September 11th happening because they were all 2-4 years old at the time and grew up with Marvel movies the way I did with Star Wars.

What's retro and cool to them is also a trip; my neighbor's kid and her friends are 14 or so and obsessed with the TV show Friends, and dressed as Friends characters for Halloween and carved the Friends logo onto a pumpkin. And in my design class I had a student talk about the design of Stranger Things which led to class discussion about 80s type and design and one of them asking "in the 80s, did everyone KNOW how 80s they looked?"

I told her that someday they would make a movie about now and the actors would be wearing yoga pants and North Face jackets and riding scooters and they all looked totally horrified.

In less than two years Hey Nineteen could be about someone born on 9/11

"in the 80s, did everyone KNOW how 80s they looked?"

I feel like they kinda did!

I teach university students though which is a fascinating window into young people who get younger every year to the point that now my students have little to no recollection of September 11th happening because they were all 2-4 years old at the time and grew up with Marvel movies the way I did with Star Wars.

This was definitely the case for me at UCI in re shifting perceptions of cultural baselines. I get less of it now at my current UCSF job but the volunteers I oversee provide a small lifeline there.

I remember in the 80s thinking "we are the new thing, we're making the 80s its own style" and then I wore a pink denim jacket, grey stone wash baggy jeans and a thin black leather tie to my year 10 formal dinner ... oh and grey leather shoes dear god.

heh i had someone recently compliment a sweater i was wearing as being "on trend" or something similar, and I said, "thanks, I've had this since the 80s"

I feel like they kinda did!

agreed

in the 80s somebody was ribbing my dad about his suspenders (NB "braces" if you're British!) - saying how "yuppie" they were. he was like "I've had these suspenders since the 1950s"

xxp a few years ago I was told I was voted "best looking guy in IT" (not a high bar obviously) by the early/mid 20s women in the admin team, but they also said they were pretty sure I was only trendy because I'd been wearing the same clothes since the 90s and they happened to be in fashion again, which was obviously true

I wear shirts on the weekends older than some of my co-workers.

Fitting post for this thread being bumped - last week I somehow hurt my lower back really badly, and I have no idea how, and 10 days later it's still completely fucked. I've hurt my back before doing strenuous things like moving house and lifting furniture, and that lasted 3-4 days tops, this just doesn't seem to be going away.

I did something to my knee last year where I could barely get up the stairs - for like a month.

And then ... it just went away!

I wear shirts on the weekends older than some of my co-workers.

I was riding a packed bus to campus at my last job and realized that my circa 1991 sorel boots were older than everyone on the bus including the driver.

And how old was the bus?

It was probably younger than everything else

I was riding a packed bus to campus at my last job and realized that my circa 1991 sorel boots were older than everyone on the bus including the driver.

― joygoat, Thursday, November 29, 2018 9:55 AM (fifty minutes ago)

Haha, my wife makes fun of my grey Caribous which I believe are from 1988-1989? They're a tiny bit rusty on the metal D-rings but otherwise in perfect shape.

The plastic sandwich box I take to work is the same age as one of my colleagues.

on the behalf of thrift shoppers and vintage clothing wearers, old clothes do not equal old person :)

that said i have one dress i bought my freshman year in college that i still wear to work sometimes. it gives me the weirdest feeling because i have been wearing it for SO LONG

My designated funeral dress was my grandmother's. I wore it to *her* funeral, actually, about twenty years ago.

The lol is that my grandmother was a wee thing, maybe 5'3'', and I am 5'10''. Below the knee on her is well above it on me. I wear opaque tights underneath to keep from looking scandalous at funerals.

I am on the cusp of 45 and recently had the thought that were I widowed or something, I'd say fuck it to ever being in an LTR again and would exclusively date 20-something dudes. Then I'm like hmmmm what 20-something dudes would be into a much older woman, would that even be a good idea. The I'm like maybe lol maybe I could find a 20-something dude from ilx. Then I'm like "it could be Treeship!" and then I loled some more.

omg

wonder how tall treesh is

an annoying thing about younger people/age difference is when they wield it in irrelevant ways-- like I was talking to a 30ish person who was very knowledgeable about modern Presidential nomination races. But when I mentioned something about Mondale vs. Hart in 1984 they just said, "That was before I was born."

yeah man, so was most of the rest of history

In my book, one of the best things about having a few decades under my belt is never having to date another 20-something.

i'm over 50 and only guys under 30 are interested in me

c'est la gays

#humblebrag

(Let me know if you need me to explain that one to you, Pops.)

no i follow the younguns' word salads

kids today probably don't remember Harris Wittels

:,(

On that front, I'd say the most noticeable difference in my forties (and really for the last several years of my thirties) is that I used to have some degree of demonstrable niche appeal but of late I don't pick up on any signs of putative interest frivolously-prurient interest from anyone at all ever, period.

(Thought I'd cap off that sentence with a sampling of the word salad so favored by the yoot of today.)

btw i wasn't HBing; they like what i hate about me

i was not into 'daddies' in my relative youth

on the behalf of thrift shoppers and vintage clothing wearers, old clothes do not equal old person :)

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, November 29, 2018 11:13 AM (forty-two minutes ago)

quite true! so now, as a 44 yr old thrift shopper and vintage clothing wearer, when I shop for new clothes, not only am I looking at things that resemble new clothes I bought in the 80s (frou-frou fussy & puffy sleeves are a thing again) but also clothes I thrifted in the 80s/early 90s from prior decades ... there is a lot of cognitive dissonance involved (see also record shopping ... this should be a $3 record because that is how much it was priced at in the dollar bin in 1991) ... though I did recently buy a new dress that is more or less a reproduction of a vintage 50s dress I had thrifted around 1991 but I got rid of a few years back because it was a size 10, and I am very much not a size 10 anymore.

I am happy that this thread turned flirty. I feel like old ilx had a lot of weird crushes/hookups. thx quincie.

new ilx might have the same, just people are more secretive about it because other ilxors can get creepy about stuff

xp yup i totally empathize

ilu quincie

iirc the window on treeship as 20-something boy toy is closing fast

rufus can't be too far away though . . .

My boss -- some years younger than me -- was amazed to learn that the band T-shirt I'm wearing today is from 1992, marvelling about the quality. (It is interesting to see which shirts have held up over the years -- and said shirt was a Ned's Atomic Dustbin one, so hey, it keeps up my good name.)

there will always be earnest 20 something straight cis-dudes on ilx ... there will be more treeships

P sure LJ is unaccountably still in his late teens or something.