Last night I was supposed to go to a concert. An Australian knock-off of Pink Floyd that I was actually looking forward to. But at two o'clock in the afternoon I found myself on the phone begging out. I was too tired. I should have known better than to schedule anything on a "school" night. Instead I went home, did the dishes and went to bed early, which I now consider the perfect weekday evening.
When I was a teenager I stayed out all night. In fact my best memories do not involve the sun at all, for weeks at a time. I would sleep till noon, work till 9pm, and then go out all night with my friends. We had the greatest time. At three in the morning, the city of Phoenix was ours. We drove on the wrong side of the road, hiked up mountains in the dark, and partied at after-hours clubs till dawn. I didn't have a curfew; my mother was fairly lenient but I was also a pretty good kid who had learned to rule herself by buying into other people's scare tactics. I was out all night but I wasn't doing drugs, because Nancy Reagan had succeeded in scaring the crap out of me with her ad campaign. And I wasn't having sex, because the pregnancy and STD commercials also scared me into submission.
In retrospect, television had a pretty severe hold on my psyche. But also I was just one of those kids who enforced rules on herself that were so strict that my parents rarely had to step in. I got my homework done hours before it would occur to them to ask if I had any. I put myself to bed at 9pm on weekdays. I got myself up and ready for school and religiously practiced the piano every morning even though I hated it. And I still found time and energy to have fun.
Once I stumbled in around six a.m. after spending the entire night with my boyfriend. That sounds bad, but I was such a goodie-goodie that all it amounted to was six straight hours of pushing his hands off my boobs. You have to admire a teenage boy's persistence. Anyway, I slipped in the front door as the sun was coming up and happened to cross paths in the kitchen with my mother, who had gotten up for a drink of water. She blinked sleepily at me as I sucked in my breath in fear, waiting for perhaps the first severe punishment of my pubescence, but instead she just said, "It's kind of late, isn't it?" and shuffled back to her bedroom.
A similar situation occurred with my brother, when he came home one day to find our mother sitting in the living room calmly paging through one of his Playboys which he discreetly hid, along with porno tapes and bongs of every shape and size, scattered all over the floor of his bedroom. I think he relied on the family's overall disgust of his mess to keep us from discovering his debaucherous tendancies, but apparently my mother had some random reason for going into his room that day. Her reaction? "This is a VERY interesting article."**
But I digress. My point is that I've always been a Good Girl, and I still am, except now I am old, which means after being a Good Girl I have little time for anything else before I get sleepy.
And that is why I bailed out of Pink Floyd last night, and have vowed never again to make plans on a weekday. I am no longer capable of staying up past ten unless I have insomnia brought on by anxiety which isn't a rare occurrence, but a far more objectionable reason to lying awake than attending a concert or dancing all night or watching horror movies till dawn. Instead of claiming the night for my enjoyment, I lie there thinking, "FUCK tomorrow is going to suck. If I fall asleep RIGHT NOW I can still get six hours..."
Old age is suddenly creeping over me with a vengeance. I can no longer eat a pint of ice cream in one sitting. In fact, I can't eat any dairy at all without my entire digestive system aggressively rebelling. And even if I could get past the dairy issue I still couldn't eat a pint of ice cream - not without putting in an extra two hours at the gym. But not on the treadmill, because my knees can't take it anymore. Just walking up these Seattle hills causes them to emit alarming crunching and crackling noises while I grimace in pain.
My hair is falling out. My husband insists I'm imagining it, but I suspect he just has no sympathy since nearly ALL of his has fallen out. I have about half what I used to, and it's brittle and wiry and daily turning more gray, but thank God I still have more than he does. Meanwhile he's also losing his hearing, something else he insists I am making up, but as I am the one who is required to repeat everything twice I am more than aware of the truth. Give us another five years and we will be one of those couples in restaurants where the wife reads the entire menu to her husband loud enough for the whole room to benefit, and punctuates each item with helpful direction ("YOU DON'T WANT THE FISH. THE GARLIC WILL GIVE YOU GAS."), while the husband nods in agreement and smiles blandly at the wall.
But hey, at least we'll be out.
**Results not typical. Parent must be a psychologist with a very open approach to sexuality such that, when her daughter complains that her 14-year-old son has been in the shower for over an hour, she responds with, "Now, Karen, he's just enjoying his new body."
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