Signs I'm Getting Old

• Dave Grohl has been the lead singer of The Foo Fighters for fifteen years, eleven years longer than he was the drummer for Nirvana.

• Nirvana songs have been heard on classic rock stations with increasing regularity within the last five years.

• I was in high school when the first episode of The Simpsons first aired, nearly twenty years ago. Married...with Children was still on the air at the time.

• I've got a...thin spot on the top of my head, that's been getting gradually worse. It's not a bald spot yet, and I hate to use the word “balding” as a single 34-year-old, but at certain angles I see more skin than hair. As a Christmas present, my mom got me a box of Rogaine which I've been afraid to use. It's about a one month supply, but I've read that in most cases it takes 3 to 5 months to see results. In many instances, it causes more hair to fall out before new stuff grows back in. With my luck, I'd probably make the problem worse. On the other hand, I don't want to go bald by the time I'm 40. I feel like I'm too young to have this sort of problem, but I'm probably not.

• After working late for 2 or 3 weeks and skipping the gym, my torso started to melt into something resembling Juno. And when I finally went back and got in a strenuous 30 minute climb on a step machine, blood vessels below each knee apparently burst from the effort as I noticed bruising afterwards. I should just give up and get one of those motorized carts now.

• I think I’m starting to get arthritis. When I wake up in the morning, the individual joints of my fingers are swollen and I can’t bend them or grasp anything until I’ve loosened them up a bit.

• 5 out of 7 of my closest college friends have children, some more than one.

• I watched ER quite regularly when it premiered back in 1994. The characters were great, and the medical procedures were often graphic. There was always a battle to save lives, and I remember the spinning camera across two adjacent operating rooms in times of extreme crisis. They won some and they lost some, but always managed to strike emotional chords either way. I tired of the show after 5 or 6 years as more and more of the original cast left, and at some point I stopped watching completely. I caught the last half of the finale, and it was amazing to see how much had changed and how much had stayed the same. The cast was almost entirely new, and I got the feeling that the characters I was familiar with were only returning for a final appearance. Children of original cast members were now teenagers or adults. The show ended as it began, with the awesome symmetry of a more experienced John Carter acting as a mentor for Mark Greene's daughter, just as Dr. Greene took him under his wing 15 years ago. I can remember when Carter was the show's comic relief, a bumbling intern akin to Scrubs' J.D.. He came a long way.

Also, for some reason Uncle Jesse was one of the newer doctors, among his patients the dying wife of a man played to heartbreaking perfection by Ernest Borgnine, who awesomely is still alive.

• I still stay up past midnight, but I start to feel sleepy around 9:30 PM. Truth be told, I start to feel tired around 4:30, but a good workout wakes me up for a few hours.

• I remember a commercial on FOX for a sitcom called Second Chance. I never actually watched it, and I don't think it lasted more than a season, but I do remember that one spot. A man appears in heaven and is told by an angel that he must guide his teenage self to make the right decisions, so he can be allowed into heaven. His younger version, played by Matthew Perry, appears in a puff of smoke, looks around, and quips, “This can't be a dream; there aren't any girls!” Perry, who would go on to bigger fame in Friends, is now starring in a film called 17 Again. Based on the trailer, he's an old guy who gets to relive his teen years, with that Zac Efron kid playing his teenage self. It's very sobering to realize I've been alive long enough to see Perry play the teenage version of one character who revisits his youth and now portray the adult while someone else plays the role of the teenager.

• I’m writing a post about getting old.