Midlife

I shot him a short text: "I'm glad you're still in the hood fwiw"

"Tyme2ttyl"

Time?  Time to?  Tie me?  I got "ttyl", talk to you later.  Not sure how, but I got that at least.  Or maybe it meant something else.  Shit, did I not get any of that?

I was tired.  Maybe that was it.  It had been a long few weeks.  For some reason, I'd been getting up early to get to the gym before work which meant also going to bed early.  I'd been on some crazy mission to get myself in the best shape possible.  I started taking a supplement called NOS which helped my work outs.  I cranked up the weights.  And the cardio.  I went every day. I have to admit, people noticed.  What I noticed is that I was achy.  Lateral epicondylitis.  My fingers felt crampy.  My shoulder wasn't quite right.  It was from volleyball--from a month before!  And my back had been acting up again.

Work didn't help either.  I'd recently been taking on a lot of geriatric patients, many of whom were angry and frustrated.  It was their senescence.  "Don't get old," many of them tell me.  "It's the pits."

And then the text.  "Tyme2ttyl".  Oh God.  There it was--LCD proof staring at me from my iPhone of having reached that stage.  

I flashed back to the times I made fun of my parents for repeated calls to reset the clock on the VCR, for trying to explain for years and years that an answering machine would be easy and helpful before they finally acquiesced.  Or the time my father had me paged overhead at the hospital so I could talk him through the process of turning off the computer.

I had reached "that" stage.  And I texted my 25 year old friend back: "WTF does that mean?"

"thank you, me too, talk to you later."

"OMG I've become "that" generation that doesn't understand newfangled lingo"

Age has never been an issue for me.  I still look young for my age.  At least that's what my lying friends tell me.  And I really am in the best shape of my life.  And I still go out and have an active social life.  So, no it's never been an issue for me.  But the joint pains, and now this?  The inability to stay current?

OK maybe the real issue was the thing that happened to me two weeks ago.  The big sign that my nurses taped on my door.  The funny, yet slightly annoying cards.  It happened a little over two weeks ago.  I turned 40.  Forty.  That's big.  Huge even.  I'm not ashamed of being 40, and I tell anyone who asks me.  But that's a number that no one can spin doctor as being young.  The best one can say is that you're young at heart.  I hate that fucking phrase.

My friend ended our text exchange: "Haha...I wasn't gonna make a comment :) Anyway, I wouldn't have gotten fwiw out of context."

OK maybe text-speak is a bad measure of a life in decline. But forty?

Comments

[ThatGuy]

Wow. I had no idea you could text with a Jitterbug.

[Chuck]

Forty is just fine, and certainly not a sign of life in decline.

[prayer request]

Yeah.. passing at the age of forty is good. really good!

[Term Paper]

It is a fine idea. Try it next day. you will get the better results. I am very sure about it.