Thise

Somewhere, I recall coming across an email address -- I think it was -- of MajikThise. Kind of a memorable one. I'm not sure what the inverse would be, but mine qualify, at the moment -- certainly the left one, which goes from amenable to movement with caution to very stiff in a matter of moments. I've learned to get up slowly, and stretch my left left as much as I can. This getting-up-slowly, doing its own bit for my sense of aging, makes me feel old. Oh, man, I have to be careful how I move? This morning, I glanced at the beginning of an article in, I believe, the Times about how the downside of successful life-maintenance strategies for AIDS victims is becoming apparent; their bodies are battered and worn out, much like people who are much older and frailer 'including hip problems'. I was reminded again that the two injuries I've had are commonly seen in people who are much older, and while it was my relative youth that helped me get through the first quickly, and which I hope will help me this time, too, it does raise a tiny flicker of apprehension: if this is whats happening to me now, whats going to be happening to me in twenty years?

I don't think of myself as a young person. I guess, if I had to, I'd agree to middle aged, even something like 'late middle age'. I like to say that 'old' is and continues to be ten years older than I am right now. All of the glib comments aside about 'sixty is the new forty' and the like, I just don't feel particularly young, and I don't feel particularly old. I just am what I am. I found myself thinking briefly about that when reading an article about electronic voting machines, and the problems inherent in them which stalled, and sometimes stopped, votes, the last time that they were used. One person commented with some aspersion about all these sixty-year-olds trying to understand this technology. I don't usually have occasion to use the word whippersnapper, but this was one. The tone of the comment was obvious: stick to your rocking chair, gramps -- let the A Team handle it. Oh, really?