Whoever said 'time is on your side' must have been in their twenties.

The lovely Sprite's Keeper has this groovy little thing over at her place called the Spin Cycle. The assignment last week was to write a post about time. I started my post about time, but then I got all busy and lazy and well....I ran out of time. But since I sort of appreciate the irony I finished it late and am posting it now. This week's assignment is a free for all, so it still kind of counts, right?

It’s no secret I have had a weight problem for years and it’s been a major pain in my enormous ass. I have had such tunnel vision about the fact that I’m fat I haven’t really paid much attention to anything else. Now that I’m starting to lose some weight and my body is looking good (well, better), I have only recently noticed another problem. Cyberland, I am OLD. When did that happen exactly? I embraced the fact that I’m somebody’s mother years ago, but it honestly hasn't occured to me that I might actually look like somebody’s mother too. I’m old, and it snuck up on me. I’m super worried that any minute now I’m going to have an uncontrollable desire to cover my furniture in plastic.

Alright, so I’m not really old old. Not old by conventional standards anyway. I don’t have pieces of hard candy covered in lint at the bottom of my purse or anything. There is no denying that I’m definitely aging though. I need to go to bed at a reasonable hour or else I’m cranky and tired the next day. I don’t let my gas tank get below a quarter of a tank for fear of running out and being stranded somewhere. I can’t function on any level when I'm hungover anymore. These are all things that have become my life standard since I got old. Ahem, mature. None of those things would have ever crossed my mind to consider in my twenties. That’s all fine and good – maturity, responsibility, reasonable behaviour…it turns out all that stupid crap is actually pretty useful. I was an idiot fifteen years ago, now I’m not. For that, I’m grateful.

For what I am certainly not grateful is the inherited treachery that is slowly taking over my body. What the fuck am I doing looking like my mom all of a sudden? What IS that and when did it get there? Do I need to start using some kind of cream product in order to deal with it? When did my skin stop agreeing to report back to its original position? Is there some kind of government sponsored subsidy offered to help with the additional time and money I am losing in order to keep myself running? I was under the mistaken impression that I was under warranty.

My friend Politika did her master's thesis (no, she’s not this chick) on the health impacts to women who get breast implants. I didn’t read it (she’s a lot smarter than me and I wouldn’t have understood what she was talking about anyway), but not surprisingly the bottom line was they are bad. Bad, bad, bad and it doesn’t matter if they are silicone or saline implants, they are still bad bad bad. She completed her thesis about ten or so years ago, and her firm position back then was that no one should ever get implants for any reason ever. Not for cosmetic vanity, not because you are a woman trapped in a man’s body, and not even if you ended up with cancer and needed a radical double mastectomy. I remember somewhat trying to argue the point that for some women the risk to their physical health might be smaller than the risk to their mental health should they not be able to correct whatever problem they have (or perceive to have).

She was having none of it – they are bad bad bad regardless of circumstance. Now, that was ten years ago. Politika is gorgeous and always has been – she never wears a stitch of make-up, has a great body and looks fit and radiant all the time. However…..I would be willing to bet the boobs of the 25-year old thesis student who wrote that paper are probably different than the boobs of the 35-year old mom who has now nursed two children. I often wonder if her position on that subject has changed slightly. Not that I believe for a moment she would ever consider getting a boob job, but I bet time has softened her stance on the bad bad bad implants somewhat, at least for a few special circumstances. It’s pretty easy to say NEVER when you are twenty five with an absolute perfect body and have no idea what it’s like to live in an imperfect body.

Either way, I have no firm plans to get a boob job. I’m just going to watch them shrivel up and sag to my waist like a regular old person. They’re heading south pretty fast right now too. Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to smack people around with them. Wouldn’t that be awesome? People talking in a movie theatre, people crowding me in the elevator, whoever happends to be in striking distance and pissing me off would get a whap! upside the head. I could just whip out one of the girls and tune in whoever needs it. They wouldn’t know what hit ‘em. Alright, getting old might not be all bad.