when you begin to contemplate dating a much younger man
Monday 31 May 2004 | I like a cookie
- you finally cave in and buy tooth whitening strips
- you worry even more than you previously did about the spider veins on the backs of your thighs
- you make a conscious effort not to utter that groaning sound when you sit down on or get up from the floor
- you think about working out every day—yes, you do—you think very very very hard about it
- you become much more careful about ending reminiscences with “but that was ages ago, in like, 1986″—because in 1986, the year you started college, he was, this can’t be right, oh shit yes it is, six years old
- you do that piece of math again—okay, so in September of 1986 I was seventeen, and he was about to turn—six, yep, I was right the first time—and you put your head in your hands and commence to wail, a high-pitched hysterical keening
- there were always VRCs—always microwaves—always computers—and it’s always been the Reagan/Bush era
- you try not to notice that he still talks about high school with animation and involvement
- you try not to notice that you can’t even remember high school
- you start wondering if your use of slang (I’m down with that, e.g.) is embarrassingly antiquated
- you have to stop yourself from saying fondly “oh, that used to be one of my favorite books” when he recommends something
- you try not to feel jealous that his high school movies were things like Go and Swingers and Fight Club, whereas your high school movies were Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles and Dirty Dancing
- you struggle to admit to yourself that you still like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
- you find your mind hosting involuntary mental images of Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman
- you tell yourself defensively that White Palace is really a believable film
- you calculate birthdays desperately, with an agenda, and then triumphantly conclude that since he turns 24 in October and you’ll still be 35 then, you’re really practically only ten years apart, which is nothing!
- you’re not sure if those things he says, the ones that stun you and absolutely stop you in your tracks and leave you gaping, are worth the looks on the faces of your friends if you ever appear in public with him
- you don’t wish you were young enough for him, not at all, because you’re finally old enough to know that you’re allowed to be happy and allowed to choose your intimate partners based on their generosity and intelligence and availability and humor and sanity and capacity for passion and freedom, not their goddamned demographics (for if not gender, and if not race, then why age?); and that if your friends can’t be happy when you are, they’re not your friends anyway. Dammit.
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