Good Lifestyle

Ed Note: This article was originally published in the August 2008 issue ofBetter life.

A few days ago, I had a business lunch with a guy I thought I was about 10 years older than me. I'm 46 years old and he was looking for 55 years old and looked like every English teacher you ever had. At the end of the lunch, he said, "You know, I was born the same week as you ..." And I went to discuss the same music we listened to in high school. Meanwhile, all I could do to compose me by looking around a reflective surface - a knife blade, the hologram on my visa card - to convince me, I did not look like 55 like this guys. I felt like I had the Progeria, this disease in which you get an age half a century in five years. That's what grows older made to a guy.

We all struck out friends who look like hell. Our first thought is always divorced, booze or one of these other nasty gear bumps on the road to life. What's really going on, of course, your friend is in the middle of a prodgeon plunge. Time passes, and more time passes, then you see this friend in the payment line of a Safeway one afternoon and you realize that he did not drink or having any problems. He just aggrieves. The kicker: I must be too. That's when you head to the product department and check in the mirrors above lettuce and celery.

I have this theory on men and aging. We have two ages: the age we are really and the age we are in our head. Most men are almost always about 31 or 32 in their head - just ask them. Even Mr. BurnsThe simpsons is 31 in his head. One of the most universal experiences of adult men is to stand in front of a mirror and saying, "I'm sorry, but there was a horrible mistake. You see, it's not really me in the mirror there -bas. The real self is tanned, throws frisbes and kayaks the Estuary of the Columbia River without sweat. "

In myself, I came to notice that aging is in trouble. I asked others and they are about agree. I'm going to look exactly the same for a decade, then-wham! -God strikes the Progeria switch and for two years, the downward dive begins again.

And then he stops again.

My body goes tray for another decade, until the next time he decides to collapse a little more. What is funny because in a strange band twist, I'm probably in better shape than I was at 20 years old. Several reasons: I stop smoking in 1988 (although I could start again now), I stopped eating shit two years ago and last year, I finally found a gym that does not allow No music: No JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP's music at the maximum volume, while circus monsters in a harem pants and the strong equivalent of a t-shirt make these noises of embarrassing orgasms while pressing the bench. mathematical squares of their qi. Instead, I can think and enjoy my time working without a massive invasion of the sonic brain. That makes all the difference. And what do I think in the gym? Break muscle tissue. And then I try to decide to rebuild it or pack. My ligaments are if they have to infiltrate or strengthen. My body tries to decide to age or become more powerful. And like a control freak, it bugs me so much that many of these things are beyond my control. Exercise, of course, but at the end of this one, instead of looking thinner, I can simply look Gaunier. Or haggard. Or ironically, my age.

The former astronaut Neil Armstrong has already been asked if he exercised and he said, "The good God gave us a finite number of heartbeat, and I am damned if I'm going to use mine running in a Street." What I found is that even though I'm doing the fantastic shape and throwing the spare tire and stop eating junk food, the best I can hope is to stay in the same place. This is the main thing I lived to realize aging. The elevator never again becomes. Well, okay, I think it goes up if you go to Beverly Hills-dishes-Surgery, but it's a loved kingdom and shaded. Compare and contrast George Hamilton with Samuel Beckett.

Recently, I started having this heretical thought that people were never supposed to live to be old enough to age in the first place. We forget that until the 1950s or 1960, the elderly were extraordinarily rare and that the elders we saw were started, often - often the people of the head narrowed - the head-head that are breathes and Cacques. A hundred years ago, if you reach 70 years, you deserved every shreddown of respect you had. These days ... Well, do you deserve respect for the desire to look for 55 to 70 years? Does he want to look younger in any form whate to deserve respect for all? In the 1990s, I helped design a plausible future for the movieMinority report.One of the things I proposed was "young seniors". Tom Cruise's character in the film was actually 70 years old, even if he watched it. Now that I think about it, maybe Tom Cruise is really 70. If it turned out to be the truth, would you be surprised? Be honest.

The way things are now going, pretty much everyone you got from high school with it will easily go to 70 years. Nobody thought it a hundred years ago when they invented the high school meeting. The essential look (and intrinsic injustice) high school meetings is that you never know who always turns along a tray and has just passed through a prodgeonive plunge.

My father is 80 this year and always works as a doctor, a GP. His practice is largely older and his specialty keeps them not only alive, but as alive and pinched. It covet that aging can be slowed by thorutous monitoring of the thyroid, keeping the levels of high folic acid and monitoring cholesterol in a certain way. All this is good advice in any event, but I hit his patients all the time, and the man, these people vibrate. Its waiting room is like the cocoon pool. These people always attend their secondary meetings. It's the new strange life circle.

It does not bother you to age. The best part of aging is that everyone you know is aged with you. Last week, I checked online and James Gandolfini, Leif Gandolfini, Michael J. Fox, Henry Rollins, and I were all born the same year, and yes, that's where I feel in my head - this which feels honest and just. I would be really panicked if I discovered that Nick Lakay was born in 1961.

It seems obvious, but ... we get older. This is one of the first things we forget once our teenagers are over and we stopped counting the hair of our armpits. Panking on aging becomes depressing or funny or pathetic only if you make an incorrect hypothesis that everyone lives in an anti-change hyperbarous room.

They do not do it, of course. We are all locked inside the Time machine, and we all go to the same destination. And I just checked: Tom Cruise was born in 1962.

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