I'm getting old

My metabolism is slowing down. After years of having the metabolism of a rabid wolverine on a forty day fast, my body is finally saying "yo dude, if you eat that it will go straight to your hips." OK, not quite. My hips (as well as the rest of me) remain morbidly skinny, nevertheless I can tell that I am starting to get the normal body functions of a (*gasp*)... twentysomething. But yeah, I guess ye ole bod has decided to settle down with the psychological and lifestyle changes that have ushered me into the scary, responsibility filled, latte soaked, subway covered life of the modern working man.

I have noticed other changes that lead me to believe that soon I will be buying a cane and investing in a nose hair trimmer. One tell-tale sign of my encroaching retirement is that the other day, whilst on public transportation -digression: I sometimes think that I have lived out most of my life on public transportation. I have had most of my major revelations with people pressed up against me as I have fought my way through the maddening system of buses, trains and subways. Digression ended- But anyway, I notice that I am getting older when I go by the "Ciudad Universitaria" subway stop. It is where all the university students get on the metro and the other day I looked up from my book as they were shuffling on the train, loaded down with technical manuals and law books, and I thought to myself, "they look really young." That was kind of a depressing thought, considering that I was a college student last year. Of course, I also thought that about the Freshmen when I was a high and most definitely mighty upperclassman, but that was different; in that case I was the elite amongst the young. Now I am out of the hip crowd, the narrowly post-pubescent masses of carefree procrastinators living on dreams and idealism. Now I don't have time for that cause I have to earn a living. Actually, I am starting to get a feel for the graduate lifestyle. The university students can keep their idealism, their hipness, and the remnants of their hormonally charged teen years, its only the carefree-ness that I miss. It still made me feel old to look up and find them to be young.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hey there,

i love your writing and hmm...

well i miss having you around.

peace, friend,

moi
3/12/06 21:57
Anonymous said…
Yeah, I know what you mean. My metabolism isn't what it used to be. No, wait, that happens to girls in jr. high so now that I'm old and almost 25 (gasp!) I can hardly remember the jr. high days. But I know how it feels to think that college students look so young (and I still have a semester to go!).
3/12/06 23:49
Anonymous said…
i know what you're talking about too, ryan. my back scares me sometimes with its pains and creaks after doing some manual labor such as digging. and my little potbelly is strangely out of place on someone who's as morbidly skinny as you....
4/12/06 05:08
Anonymous said…
yeah dude, I am starting to accumulate weight in the waist region and it is weird. Yes, my quarter life crisis has reached its zenith. I signed up for a gym last week. Shhh... can you hear that? yes. listen. the creaking. Hell has frozen over.
4/12/06 14:08
Anonymous said…
a gym class????????? wow. i hear the creaking.... memories of you and me out on the soccer field during P.E. come flooding in.....
5/12/06 04:15
Anonymous said…
well, not a gym CLASS. Just a gym. "Run on treadmill, pump some iron, repeat as needed" type gym. It does have a sauna though. that is nice.
5/12/06 04:28
Anonymous said…
oh oh oh ok.... a sauna...that sounds more like it.... i don't know where i got the "CLASS" part from...
5/12/06 10:17
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things I think in the city on the verge of winter

Winter is almost here. You can never tell for sure at this time of the year. One day it is warm, the next it is cold. But for the past couple of weeks, the Fall has been wrestling, and losing, to Winter. The mornings start out very cold, and slowly the day starts to warm a bit as the sun comes out. But the Cold stands patiently in the shadows, hidden from the sun's warmth, waiting for you to walk into the shade of a building or tree to show you how cold the air really is and remind you to bring a scarf. Today was especially chilly. Even our apartment made me wrap up a little tighter. It also made me close some of the windows that we had wide open. Our whole building is heated with a giant coal furnace in the basement that tends to turn our humble abode into a living inferno. We balance this out by opening windows. It is a terrible waste of energy, but we have no control over the heating. I read that madrid still has over 2000 buildings running their heating off coal. It is terribly...
Read more

Snowmelt demands movement

The sun is out again today. The snow has all but melted except for in the abandoned lots where they piled it up several stories high; but even those piles are melting, leaving behind all of the grime that was plowed up with the snow and rivulets of water running towards the nearest gutter. The fact that the water reaches the drain is quite a feat. Just weeks ago it would have frozen halfway across the sidewalk... and lain in waiting for an unsuspecting jogger. But, as I said before, the sun is out now, the temperatures are up, and the ice is nowhere to be seen. I am running out of excuses to avoid jogging, if you will permit the pun. I am in some of the worse shape of my life and I don't particularly feel good about it. Those of you who have known me for most of my life know that being "in shape" was never really been a priority of mine until recently. In high school I looked for ways to do the least amount of work possible in P.E class. When we played sports, I chose t...
Read more

Blogs

I remember when I started blogging. I think I was one of the first people I know to start blogging. Dont get me wrong, it was a cultural phenomenon back 4 years ago when I began, but none of my friends really did it. And then all of a sudden a bunch of us did. We all kept it up for a while, some came and went, but I had a pretty vibrant blogging community. Tonight I found myself checking my friends blogs and finding only abandoned websites for the most part. It kind of kills a lot of the fun of blogging for me. So I guess this post is a bit of a salute to all the blogs around me during this time: So I started thinking of all the people that had blogs I liked that stopped: -Jen -Erin Kidd (though she kept it up for a very short time) -Rebecca Wood (though it seems like she may start up again) -Kenny -Evangeline -Chris Cherene Or the ones that never really started up in the first place: -Charles And then there are the ones that I wish would write more often: -Ed Rand -Aitor -Erin Davidso...
Read more