Dylan Stafford

You know you’re getting old when you wake up and you’ve injured yourself.

Last week, Thursday morning, I woke up having slept funny on my left shoulder. A painful pinch wouldn’t release the whole day.

My typical response to injury is to wait and hope it gets better. I applied this wishful thinking but when I woke up Friday it was worse. I’d done nothing but go to sleep, and yet I’d been able to hurt myself.

The whole three-day MLK weekend, I limped around feeling pain from every simple move I made. It was only by sleeping very carefully, on my back and never on my side, for about four nights in a row that the pain finally released.

This morning, on Sunset Boulevard on the north side of UCLA, as I was waiting to make a right hand turn into campus, there was one of those amazing gaggles of college women jogging together in a trio. They were all perfectly young, with swinging pony tails and the next-to-nothing bra/shorts outfits as their only clothing. They weren’t even old enough for gravity, and they bounded uphill with powerful, strong strides.

Their jogging trail crosses my right hand turn and cars have to yield to pedestrians. I realized if I slowed a little extra and yielded I would be rewarded with three beautiful, almost-naked joggers crossing in front of me.

But instead of yielding, I accelerated and exited Sunset in front of them, skipping the extra look.

Which is the bigger sign I’m 41? Falling asleep and waking up hurt, or developing an immunity to college coeds running in the California sunshine?

How about the changes in my fantasies, maybe that’s the biggest sign.

Lately, I’ve been spending too much money at Office Max and The Container Store, trying to find the perfect plastic boxes to organize the drawers of my home office. I spent two evenings sorting all the paperwork associated with my retirement funds, sorting and three-hole punching and putting into a binder. As exciting as that was, my next fantasy involves taking the eight inch stack of papers that is our mortgage and somehow organizing it too.

Whereas my brain—from my teenage years until about thirty five—was always able to come up with a romantic interpretation of almost any daily encounter, now… organizing, placing paper into nice folders or binders, that is what I like to spend my time lusting over, seeking the perfect systems to deal with all the administrivia of my life.

I could ponder these deep thoughts longer, but it’s 10:10pm, Private Practice is a re-run and I drove to and from San Diego today.

I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I’m 41.