I grow old...I grow old...

So it seems like folks my age (folks!) like to make extravagant claims about how old they are, bemoaning the loss of their idyllic childhood experiences of, like, a decade ago, or wildly exaggerating their aches and pains, grimacing about their old this that or the other. 

This is all with a metaphorical single arched eyebrow, ladling on the irony with dramatic anecdotes of 14.4 dial up speeds and dusty DOS programs etc. I think it is another symptom of the witheringly intense self-observation of our generation, which has led to facebook and myspace, and personal blogging. We are definitely giving the boomers a stiff challenge for the title of most self-obsessed generation, and we just started. They no doubt would serenely object, over their increasingly bifocaled noses, that we have merely done much more with much less: charting weather patterns and precipitation totals for every teacup tempest without the saving grace of a single bracing gale (not that there haven't been any, its just that they're harder to quantify in status updates). But who cares about old people?

Anyway, this has all been just to say: I got to tell a "back in my day" story, without a single shred of irony, to a wide-eyed seventh grader today. I feel old.