Thursday, March 1, 2007

On Growing Old

Over the past three nights, I've gotten 5, 6, and 2 1/2 hours of sleep. In college, I'd have called that little phenomenon "Every Monday through Wednesday." Now, though, I'm pretty sure that if this keeps up I'll be dead by April.

I turn twenty-eight a week from Monday. I don't think I really believed that there was a difference between twenty-eight and twenty-two back when I was twenty-two. But Oh. My. God. I feel like there are gumbands around my wrists and ankles and every move is a little harder, stretches them a bit more, and at any given moment I might be snapped back the 13 miles into my bed. I know there's a class going on in front of me right now, and other people are participating in it, and I even know what it's called (Professional Responsibility). But that's all I know.

The main culprit is The Libel Show, which will have a much prettier website up in a week or two. I'm the music director, and it's fun and fabulous, and ensures that I don't start my reading (or more likely, watch TV or whatever other stupid stuff I feel like I have to do) until midnight or so. And then there's last night, where I was at a party until 2am, and then, despite being completely (well, undoubtedly legally) sober, decided that IMing until almost 4:30 was a good idea. The moral of this story: I'm some kind of superhuman genius freak who clearly deserves to be paid obscene amounts of money starting in six months or so. Clearly.

In other news, the Twins are playing baseball again and McCain is in the race. Both mundane and virtually meaningless formalities that portend much, much better things to come.

4 comments:

Stephanie said...

So basically, you went to bed an hour and a half after I did, despite the fact that your time zone is three hours later than mine. Wow. And you actually got up and went to that boring class. Very impressive. ;-)

I totally feel your pain on the getting older thing. I'm 26 1/2 now, and I can feel my body deteriorating more and more every day. I find it rather disturbing, yet I lack the motivation to do anything about it. Like, say, exercise and eat healthy food and take vitamins. Instead, like you, I work on finding out how little sleep I can get and still make it to work in the morning without falling asleep in rush hour traffic.

Getting old stinks!

The Common Man said...

Dear Bill,
This is you: "Wah! Wah! My name is Bill! I'm getting old! Wah! Wah!"
This is me: "I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. Serves you right for being younger than me. Jerk."
This is you: "I don't understand, Mike, what did I ever do to deserve such abuse and negativity from you?"
This is me: "You like it."
This is you: [sheepishly] "Yeah, I do."

Bill said...

Even more to the point: I went to bed less than an hour before Kristine got up. But then last night I got nine hours. And now it's Spring Break. So it's all good.

And on the other hand, I'm sure I needed to catch up at some point even in college (usually from about 4 am-2pm on Saturday). And this kind of whining would sound ridiculous to the sizable majority of Americans who are older than we (oh, to be 28 again!). But still. I feel old.

Bill said...

Not much to say to that, except you really nailed my signature whine. How do you DO that?

Oh, and think about this: I'm in the last year of school, and I'm three years older than the bulk of the people in that class with me. I think I have the right to feel old.