“Holy crap! I have lines under my eyes,” greets me my computer screen at the crack of dawn. It’s Yulya, im-ing me on Google talk.
“I just looked in the mirror in the bathroom at work and was like wtf?” she goes on. “One day you wake up and you’re like I just aged overnight! It's like good lord and the birthday is coming up. What am I supposed to do?”
I try not to think about the image that was staring back at me in my own bathroom mirror about two minutes ago.
“Didn’t you get the memo that says that bathroom mirrors lie?” I write back. “And if it’s any consolation, my skin tone is not what it used to be. And I have about a dozen of gray hairs…And I am older than you are…”
“But you're cute and all and you’ll always look like you’re seventeen. And that’s a compliment, by the way…”
Regardless whether I look like seventeen or not, I have never been as aware of my age as I am this year. And that is without even having to see an occasional gray strand. First there was the trip back home that made me realize that had I been living in Armenia, I would be pushing it close to the dooms of spinsterhood by now. Seeing my much younger cousins married and with kids didn’t help either Yet, there I was, no kids and all, stuck in a lifestyle of a perpetual student that doesn’t seem to have an end in any foreseeable future. Later this year, throughout this entire past semester I was constantly reminded of my age thanks to the couple of undergraduate courses that I had to take. And yet, feeling ancient aside, I am coming to really appreciate the fact that thank god, I’m over twenty one and a quarter life existential crisis closer to whatever it is that I am moving towards to. Looking back at my myself at various points of my past makes me extremely grateful for no longer being that young, that misguided, that naïve and that arrogant. Looking at myself now I realize how much I really value the experience, the knowledge and the wisdom that comes to me with every passing year, even if I still react to the physical signs of aging with a “holy crap!”
***
I remember around this time last year I first caught myself thinking and then telling Mother Sugar that I am actually looking forward to being old. Somehow there is this image in my mind of an old woman – wise, serene, composed, in a big house full of books and maps … I see myself sitting in a chair for hours at a time, leisurely musing on things far removed from the everyday life, things that go beyond one’s own life experiences and things that I’ll never have the time to think about while I am young… I remember talking about this with Yulya as we split a mediocre brownie in a bakery in Tbilisi this past summer… and how we decided that when we get old, we’ll open our own pastry shop, and she’ll have a garden and I’ll study butterflies…
This morning I remind her of that conversation. And tell her that I have heard that vitamin E does miracles to the skin. I am also one year closer. And it’s making me smile.
3 comments:
Close to being a spinster??? c'mon in The H-Stan you would already be considered "on the shelf".
Now, coincidentally your last visit home might just be key to the problem. I have conducted an extensive (if informal) study that has revealed, with a few notable exceptions, living in Armenia puts you into a state of "dog years". Yes, living in Armenia ages you at a rate of 4:1 (yes, that is the scientifically calculated #). Now, this does not apply to people that have lived there their whole lives; in fact, the initial study was done exclusively on expats. However it seems to apply to folks that have moved away and moved back as well as refugees that moved there after 30 +/-. In general I believe "TFB's theory of unnatural (also referred to in the medical texts as "Tegranian")aging" applies to anyone who would know the difference... so it seems not the affect children or people who are developmentally children (and we all know them). Other exceptions to the TTUA see to be gender based; men are unaffected if they mate with a woman 2 inches taller and 20 years younger... women if they mate with a man 2 inches taller and 20 million richer. Otherwise I believe the theory holds up to fairly rigorous scrutiny.
As far as the "dog years" theory - it sounds about right, except that you seem to forget the folk living in the countryside... I think that's when the effect is the most prominent - I remember talking to a 40 year old woman and thinking to myself "God, she looks like she could be my grandma..."
So lets do the math... I am what - thirty four by now? I guess you're right - I would be on the shelf, wouldn't I? Hopefully the few and the proud would still be around, otherwise what else are they good for in Hayastan?
The Armenia Hypothesis sounds plausible. That does not apply to me, however, and I've just recently begun feeling--suddenly--old. I think part of it for me has to do with always feeling exceptionally young for most of my life--I graduated high school early, married while still a teenager, had a mortgage when I was 19, tried (unsuccessfully) to have children when I was in my early twenties, got a divorce (successfully) before a lot of my peers had even wed the first time, etc., etc. Then, somewhere along the line, the years caught up with me. Now, not that I truly mind it, I find myself behind the conventional timeline, after a lifetime of being ahead. Yet, I would not go back to being younger for all the world's fortune. But, um, yes, eye cream appears on my shopping lists these days.
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