The Horror of Advancing Age

No time for a proper post, but I will leave you with a thought I had this weekend.

In general, I don’t feel old.  My beard is almost completely white, my oldest child is taller than I am (and has a moustache now), and, every time I stand up after sitting for any length of time, I have to crack my ankles before I can take a step.  Yeah, it’s true that I’m generally the oldest person on my tech team (although at my current job I suspect I have at least a fighting chance at “second oldest”).  And, yeah, I’m in many ways crotchety, creaky, grumpy, and falling apart.  But I’ve refused to grow up my whole life and I’m not really about to start now.

Still, every once in a while something sneaks up on me and catches me by surprise.  This weekend we watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which (if you haven’t seen it), is one of those very serious lives-of-high-school students movies, somewhat like The Breakfast Club, which is certainly one of my all-time favorite movies.  (Interesting side note: John Hughes wrote the original screenplay for Perks and was going to direct the film as his comeback, before his death kinda put a damper on that plan.)  This movie stars Hermione Granger and Percy Jackson, which is a pretty awesome combination, at least in the magical powers department.

Possibly because I re-watch Breakfast Club on a pretty regular basis, high school movies still seem relevant to me, no matter how old I get.  This is a pretty good one; I definitely recommend it.  The problems the kids have to deal with don’t seem trivial, but neither are they overblown.  And the acting is quite maginificent—I was especially impressed with Ezra Miller, who I only knew previously from his brief but appropriately disturbing turn in We Need to Talk About Kevin.

So it was by turns funny and touching, and I thorougly enjoyed it, and there were no problems at all ... except.  Except there’s this part where first Hermione, and then later Percy, stand up while riding in the back of a pickup which is going full speed through a tunnel.  You know, when Teen Wolf went “van surfing,” that didn’t bug me at all, but, man, I must be getting old, because the whole time I was watching this pickup thing I was so nervous that one of those damn kids was going to go tumbling out of the back of the truck and get smushed by a semi cruising along behind them or something.  At the very least it was a serious case of road rash waiting to happen.  I kept wanting to shout at the screen “sit down, you stupid kid! you’re going to break your fool neck!”

So ... yeah.  Getting a bit old, I guess.  As Twain says, “It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”