cranky

How do you know you're getting old? I'm guessing that maturity, experience and wisdom are not reliable signs because while these characteristics depend on age, age does not depend on them. You can be a fool until you die, even if you die at 80.

I'm certainly still a fool. Everyone who runs marathons is one, and plenty are old. But with those guys, the really old ones, it is easy to tell. Their faces are emaciated, worn thin from sun and dehydration. Life has left their limbs, sticks of bone held together by nothing more than parched skin and a maze of tendons. I don't see myself in that category even after 42 kilometers.

In fact, this time around, I feel golden; infinitely, unbelievably better than last year when I couldn't walk for weeks and stayed away from running for half a year. The pain was unbearable. Today, in striking contrast, I felt good enough to go for a jog in the park, 10k with friends from work that had to slow me down because I was cruising. The only thing bothering me was a blister in the arch of my right foot, one blister that turned into two in the course of the run, but nothing major.

Right after the marathon, my thighs were all that hurt, much like they did the two times I scaled the Alpspitze without any preparation. The day after, I couldn't walk stairs down. I couldn't do so this time around either, but the pain only incapacitated me for three days.

Today in lab I showed a colleague how to use a particular instrument. The instrument was on another floor, in another lab whose occupants are young students, the spring chickens of science. Their presence irritated me greatly. One of the kids looks like a normal dude from a distance, spiky hair, frayed t-shirts, jeans and an attitude of haphazard carelessness. He looks like he discarded ambitions of climbing the ladder of traditional popularity a long time ago. His entire persona suggests that he doesn't care what other think of him.

This can be pretty cool if it's honest. But watch him for a while and you'll discover that his appearance is just a charade. I applaud his desire to build coolness from uncool, but he's trying so hard, so desperately that he makes a complete travesty of himself. Wearing Heelys everyday, gliding though the hallways with an aloof expression in your face is great for the king of kindergarten, but at a university?

I could rest my case here if this guy were my case, but this post is about age, and so I continue. The second thing that annoyed me in the lab today was the music that the kids were listening to, tunes that had their brief moment of fame but were already old when I was young. "Stop it", I was tempted to scream, "this teeny techno is rubbish." Every song, blasting from tinny computer speakers, irritated me more than the one before. I was glad when we were done, spitting impotent agitation as I left the floor like a cantankerous old man.

My lesson wasn't over. Back on our floor, my student was in the middle of planning extensive experiments. I reminded him that today was the last day of his project and that it was nearing six. The three-day weekend had basically started already. He wasn't even listening. "I could run native gels and we could do light scattering and I'll do another prep and I'll run the gel filtration column and I could work on the full-length construct and so much more, what do you think?" I thought a beer would be nice now or two but tried my best to guide him, guide him away from pathological ambition and towards happy finale. On Tuesday he has to start writing his report, but he's still going as if there were three weeks left.

I talked reason and humor, trying to get him to see the light, but he was blinded by youthful exuberance. During my Ph.D. I would have stayed till ten and helped him prepare a weekend of 14-hour days, but it was 6:15 now and I wanted to leave. And with every idea of his that I had to talk him out of, I felt a little older, suffering the heavy weight of routine where there used to be excitement.

So maybe age is in your head after all. Maybe there's a point when you lose the connection to those that are unambiguously young. Maybe at some point there won't just be a generation ahead of you that you look up to but also one behind that you look down upon with frequent bewilderment and occasional irritation. But maybe there's only two generations and I'm sitting in the middle and can't decide. That would really be something to get cranky about.