Am I jaded or is it just "Low T"

Birthdays, my own in particular, make me introspective. With the specter of a passing year looming, I begin to wonder if the most interesting years have passed me by. Now that's not to say I'm unhappy or that my life, which can be summed up as being married to a great guy, with a good job and two wonderful dogs, is at all a let-down. It really isn't. It's just that it seems a lot like the goal, not the journey towards it. And then, suddenly, the age of 37 seems very old indeed.

I'm not sure how this happened so quickly. Nothing really seems to be that long ago. I remember being an anguished teenager pretty vividly. Now I'm an anguished adult. Childhood, which seemed to take forever, is really just a blink when you take the sum of those years and add them to 17. Thinking about it is depressing.

And as much as I try to wrap myself in the comfort of nostalgia (which my slightly younger husband mocks), listening to the music of my youth (or even someone else's youth), really seems to only punctuate the passage of time. Seriously, if I listen to disco -- which I love, I start to feel bad for people who are old enough to have lived through that era knowing that whatever aging drama I'm suffering through must only be amplified by the fact that they are past the halfway point in life. Next stop: Depends undergarments, maybe some shuffleboard at a raisin ranch and all too soon, death.

And I think "I'm headed there too." And it will come in the same blink it took to get here.

This internal dialogue seems to really put a damper on my ability to enjoy a moment, perhaps because I'm constantly reminding myself to enjoy the moment so much that it has passed.

Also, as I've gotten older, I've started to approach situations with expectations. Having had formulative years that really were pretty damn fun (or at least, I remember them that way), I carry that expectation of beguilement with me into situations. Then I find even the novel has little by way of novelty. In  the rare occasion situations don't come up wanting or I realize that I'm too tired to have that much fun. Really, what the fuck?

Is life over the age of 35 underwhelming by design? Did we evolve to wind down from thrill-seeking to comfort zone for our own good? Seriously, when you're chasing after a buffalo (or whatever) on the plains of Africa the last thing you want to worry about is an old fart who thinks he can keep up.

Maybe we are hardwired to be jaded so we don't get lured away to danger  (or in my more modern case, a dance club) and stay the fuck home, by the fire, telling stories -- passing on what we have and what we know as our last useful act in life.

Or maybe, now that I have a commercial to put my mind to the possibility, it's all wrong. This isn't how it's supposed to be. I might just have low T.*




*Low T is short for Low Testosterone, for those of you who are safe from the American pharmaceutical industry's marketing machine.