The Old Guys

Most of the time I do not act my age. I laugh at my own farts, belch proudly at the dinner table, make up dirty lyrics to songs*, and always spend a few minutes in the action figure aisle when shopping. My job requires me to spend most of my time with nine year olds, and I write books for kids. I'm like a lewd Peter Pan.

However, there are times when I am rudely reminded that I am in fact thirty-three. (I know. You can't believe it either, right?) Some of these times:

• Whenever I exercise. This includes jogging across the road because I misjudged the speed of an oncoming car, or climbing a flight of stairs because the elevator was taking too long or I was going to be stuck inside of it with a stranger and I didn't feel like going through the thirty seconds of uncomfortable silence associated with that.
• While driving I find myself thinking, "Today's music sucks. I guess I'll turn it back to talk radio."
• When it's Friday night and I fall asleep on the couch around nine o'clock.
• When it's Saturday night, Little One is at Grandma's, and the only thing The Wife and I want to do is watch TV or read.
  
• When everything on TV stinks, but instead of turning it off, I watch The Weather Channel, and then complain that the idiot forecasters are never right anyway.
  

But the real reality check is what I did this past weekend. Some college friends were in town and we thought it would be fun to relive the "glory days" of our youth.** So we went to a college bar at our alma mater.

When we were in college there was this guy who would show up at one particular bar and we would make fun of him.*** He wore a suit, carried a briefcase, and looked like Paul Simon. I'm sure he was trying to cultivate a successful businessman image, but he ended up looking like a lonely dude who thought his chances with the ladies would be improved by wearing that ratty-looking suit and carrying the weathered briefcase. We'd watch and laugh as he struck out with girl after girl.

Now we were the old guys at the bar. A few times we caught some girls looking our way and of course the waitress was really friendly. As guys do, we all told ourselves that we still had it, even though none of us had "it" when we were actually in college. More likely, we were being stared at because we were old, out of place, and a little on the creepy, Paul Simon side of things. The waitress was nice because, unlike most of the customers, we had real jobs and could afford to generously tip.

Here are five things that revealed our oldness:

1. Our receding hairlines. (Not mine, though. I'm still doing okay up there.)
2. Our needing to use the restroom at a far too frequent rate.
3. Yawning.
4. Our lack of familiarity with the most popular dance songs played. It seemed to us that there was a strong correlation between suckiness of song and popularity of song, the correlation being that if a song was really bad, like this one, then college-aged kids (God, I just called them kids.) responded enthusiastically.****

Of course, the theory was hard to test. We thought all the music sucked.

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* I have amended Shania Twain's "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?" to "Whose Head Have Your Boobs Been Under?" Genius, I know.

**The "glory days" usually consisted of going out late, drinking too much, spending a lot of time talking to each other while all the girls ignored us, egging each other on to go dance with a girl who had had a few too many, being too nervous to dance with said girl, talking some more, drinking some more, dancing by ourselves, leaving, stopping at Panchero's for a burrito, going home, talking about how hot the girls were, and falling asleep on a couch. Glory days, yeah they'll pass you by.

***Not to his face. We all preferred making fun of people behind their backs. Safer that way.

****The enthusiastic response usually manifested itself in a couple of ways. Girls would go "Whooo!" They would raise their hands in the air while doing this. They would then start dancing, usually with other girls, often in a circle. There was much smiling. Guys would grin and nod a lot, approach the circles of girls from behind, look over at their friends and grin and nod some more, get ignored by the girls, and eventually go back to their table.