Women My Age Are Too Old For Me

I have my 20th high school reunion in September. (Yea, I don’t look that old – it’s the facial cream.)

It’s going to be very weird going and seeing people twenty years later: the people I never talked to, the people who got really fat or bald or look really old.

But the weirdest thing of all is that it’ll be the first time I have been around the people I went to high school with wherein the women are now too old for me.

Sure, when I was 16, another 16 year old seemed like a good choice.

But at the age of 37, one of the many double-standards that favor men has become obvious: the women my age are too old for me.

I’m 37 and I still don’t know if I want kids. As far as I’m concerned, I have another five years to figure that out, maybe even more.

How many women have the luxury of being undecided at 37?

Also, if I date a 35 year old who wants kids, she is going to pressure me to move things along very fast.

That’s why I’ve come to the conclusion that for me, the perfect age is somewhere between 26 and 31, give or take a few years. This age bracket will remain my target for the next 25 years, which leads me to my next point…

There is, of course, the observation that it is far more common to see an older man with a much younger (and more attractive) woman than it is to see the opposite.

Exhibit A: Larry King and wife Shawn Southwick:

So, are these young women at all attracted to the older guys? Because I would never want to have sex with the female version of Larry King.

When I think about how many more years I have before I really need to think about kids, men like Larry become role models.

(I’m adding this note based on the criticism I’ve gotten – please note that this was filed under “satire”).

From Lethargy to Dynamic Health

I went out drinking on Friday and woke up with an unusually painful hangover on Saturday.

So I slept all day, read, and watched a movie I rented. I took a hot shower, drank herbal tea, ate a light dinner, and went to bed early greatly anticipating waking up the next morning to head to a yoga class.

I was therefore very surprised to wake up hungover again.

How could this happen? I was tired and aching. I didn’t go to yoga. Instead, I stayed home and took naps. What was wrong? Why was I being such a wussy? Friday night wasn’t THAT bad.

And then I woke up on Monday still hungover. This was really, really strange. Eery even.

As I checked my email Monday morning, I noticed all the people announcing they were staying home with a terrible cold.

And that’s when I realized that I wasn’t hungover – I simply had been fighting a cold and won.

Although I didn’t get sick, I got what I think of as “almost sick.” I was lethargic because my body was using all of its energy fighting the cold.

I hate feeling lethargic. It’s depressing. You want to nap, but doing so just makes you more tired. There is nothing refreshing about sleep in this state.

So I decided to kick the lethargy out of me by doing some hard, sweaty flow yoga. Although it was the last thing I felt like doing, I did, and voila – I immediately felt fantastic.

Just one hour transformed my body from tired into bursting with energy.

I’ve noticed in the past how good I feel after either a cold or hangover – they make feeling healthy so easy and wonderful to appreciate.

Netflix & Yoga

If you’re into yoga and have a tough time getting to classes, you might want to try renting them on Netflix.

Of course, you can buy DVD’s, but they’re expensive, and you don’t know if you’re going to like the teaching until after you’ve handed over your money.

I started renting yoga classes and have found that I do yoga more often, I spend less on it, and I can select exactly the duration I want to do.  For instance, the typical class is 90 minutes.  But there are DVD’s that will let you choose 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 minute classes.

There are a lot of instructional DVD’s on Netflix as well.  If you want to learn an instrument, language, or just about anything else, it’s there.

Damn, this sounds like an ad for Netflix.  It’s not.  You can also get these DVD’s at the library.

Your MySpace Page & The Fame You Await

So, I checked out your music on MySpace.

You probably get really excited to see all the additional plays you get when people stumble on your page because of all the ways you have cleverly marketed yourself.

But you know what?

I moved on.

There are so many of you. Thousands? Millions?

And even the good ones are only worth checking out for a few minutes.

And the best ones? Well, I’ll listen to their music a few times.

If I really like you, well I might stream you on Rhapsody. That’ll get you a few pennies every month. But then I’ll probably blend you into the 600 other musicians I consider genius and when the musical honeymoon period wears off, you’ll fade into the background.

You’ll have to work hard to find another new fan to make up for the ones that are getting distracted and moving on.

After I first discover your MySpace page, I’ll move on to another deliciously short-lived entertainment fling: it might be a YouTube video, I might go to Facebook and see what all the hot women I went to college with are up to, or I might just navigate Wikipedia for 25 minutes.

I’ll probably start on a page about someone like Parker Posey, then 15 minutes and four clicks later find myself on a page about Service-Oriented Architecture.

I won’t really be sure how I got to this page from the one about Parker, but I did.

I’ll explore my Technorati Profile for awhile.

And with so many options in front of me, I keep clicking and moving on to a new experience in a seemingly infinite world of options that reduce the best and most talented to a short-lived moment, like a kiss on the cheek: it was nice but there is no looking back as long as there is a world of more in front of me.

And the sad thing is that you so believe in your talent that you are waiting for fame. But you know what? Fame was something that came to musicians when the world of options was far less infinite, when everything wasn’t free and ready to jump out of thin air and into your computer’s speakers.

Fame was something that happened in a time when things would come and stick to you for years because it’d cost you $15 / album to move on to something else.

We are in the age of the entertainment fling.

LA Women

I had lunch with a famous music producer who will remain anonymous.

He was describing LA women to me and said, “Whenever I’m having sex with a woman here, I’m convinced they are thinking to themselves, ‘I wonder if I could be having sex with someone more important’.”

Is it really like that?