Saturday, October 8, 2011

Old and sad

Ugh. I was all set to start reading The Lightning Thief today, but when I got to work my coworker had brought me a mystery I'd expressed mild interest in last week. She'd finished reading it and gave it to me. Now I have to read it. The pressure!

Mom wanted to watch a movie this evening, and as it happens I'd brought home "Clerks" a few days ago. I found it in the $5 DVD bin. I hadn't watched it in probably 15 years, although for a while in my 20s it was the number one movie to quote among my friends. Say "THIRTY-SEVEN?!" to any one of my friends and we'll scream with laughter, and we'll probably answer with "That's his fuckin metal face." I'm admitting both my age and what I was like as a 20something when I say that Clerks is the quintessential GenX slacker movie.

So we watched it and laughed a lot, but now I feel really depressed. It only seems a little while ago that I was living in a crappy apartment and hanging out with my friends Wolfgang and Qathy, and planning revolutions that wouldn't require, you know, a lot of effort. We were going to change the world someday. In the meantime, we drank a lot of Slurpees and published zines and didn't have any health insurance because we were all young and healthy and couldn't get real jobs.

I think I'll go read that crappy murder mystery my coworker loaned me. It'll probably make me feel old.

6 comments:

Alan W. Davidson said...

Sorry. You can't call yourself old, Kate, until you hit 40 (I'm sure that's in writing some where).

Besides...you're never too old to start a little revolution...

K.C. Shaw said...

Bless you, Alan, but I'm turning 42 in a couple of weeks.

Aaron Polson said...

I found myself feeling the same thing when I heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the other day. Smells like my mid-life crisis, more like.

K.C. Shaw said...

I can't hear that song without also mentally hearing the Weird Al version, which is a weird experience. My mid-life crisis trigger music is old Alice in Chains, for some reason.

Free Range Anglican said...

To Kate and Alan: You can't consider yourself old until readers of your blog stop assuming you're under 40. ;) Your brother wants to know what you want for your birthday... shall I tell him you want your 20's back? FWIW,I've always liked you, but you're much cooler at 40 than you were at 20.

K.C. Shaw said...

I was a jerk at 20. Seriously. I'm a lot more fun now.

And I want some extra hours in my day for my birthday. I think they sell them at ThinkGeek. :)