Aging, not gracefully

I didn't take enough time off over the summer, and now that the fall schedule is cranking up, I feel like it's all going by too fast, I'm grumpy all the time, and I'm not getting anything done.

And I somehow keep having the feeling that things are worse than ever before - more war, more global warming, people are meaner - maybe it's because I've never been this old before - I feel like my point of view matters less and less all the time. Last night I went to my monthly meeting for the grocery co-op and we got the results of the recent elections. With the addition of three new people, I am going to be the old lady on the board - I don't think I will be the oldest person, there will be two men that are older, but I will be the oldest female.

For most of meeting I was very uncomfortable - these board meetings are the ones where we get dinner, and last night we got steak burritos, which were very tasty, but what we used to call a gut bomb - they lay very heavy in my stomach. The day before, the co-op served steak burritos and grilled portobello mushroom sandwiches at the annual Willy St Fair, and that's also a sign of my advanced age - yes, the Fair is still the best place to go see hippies on parade, but the co-op is serving yuppie chow, and there was a tent where you could watch the Packer game on plasma TV, and one of the vendors was a bookseller that I have only seen before at our state librarian conferences.

At the meeting there were also two kinds of chocolate cake - a chocolate peanut butter cake, made by the co-op's kitchen, which was a good devils food cake with a rich icing, and chopped up peanut butter cups on top; and this thing called a chocolate eruption, made by a local caterer and served at some restaurants in town, which was a dense chocolate mousse, with chunks of I think white chocolate cheesecake in it, and a sort of cake crust - not really a cake at all. And talk about gut bomb ...

But the 40-somethings in the group preferred the eruption pretty unanimously to the chocolate peanut butter cake - that must be the real reason why I feel so old and stupid.