You never really think it will happen to you. You sail through your 20s, 30s, maybe even early 40s, and don’t really know what all the fuss is about. Middle age? It’s just a number.
Then it’s YOUR number and it’s up.
I get that you can’t see up close anymore. I get that you can’t burn a calorie even if you light yourself on fire. I get that you can’t be offended anymore when people call you ma’am. I get it. I accept it.
But I don’t accept what’s happened to my brain.
Oh, I accepted long ago that my “smart years” were behind me. The years where I had the capacity to memorize finance formulas and write papers about the French presidency or the role of misperception in the Berlin and Cuban crises and fill blue books answering things like “Is the Soviet Union an evil empire or a paranoid giant.”
Huh? I forgot all that years ago. (Turns out, none of it mattered a whit in the real world anyway.)
But now it seems my “sharp years” are behind me too. Used to be, if I needed an answer, it was there. Ask me the name of a street, actor, 4th grade classmate, flower, spice, brand, tool, The ’70s for $300, Alex — never had to hesitate a second. Now you can all but see the googly icon spinning in my eyes while the search engine tries to connect, only to stop short: “Neuralnet Explorer cannot find the requested page.” So many broken links.
I’ve tried everything I know to increase speed. I archive old files or delete them altogether, keep viruses at bay, backup regularly (onto paper — more reliable than disk), purge temp files, reboot every morning. Short of replacing the whole operating system, a risky proposition at best for older models like mine, I seem to be stuck with a plodding dinosaur that was once my nimble CPU. Last year’s model that hasn’t the capacity for this year’s upgrades.
I knew I should have sprung for the extended warranty…but of course, you never really think it will happen to you.
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.
~ Jennifer Yane
Writing by Ear 
Mel L said,
Saturday, November 3, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Dude. I am feeling you. So very much.