What's my age again?

I keep having these moments where I realise that I am now properly grown up.  I often forget (not deliberately) exactly how old I am, having settled in my mind simply on early 30s.

They included things like seeing someone who used to be part of my weekly pub quiz team take a role in national politics. The birth of my children.  My tenth wedding anniversary.  My mother's retirement.  Hearing a friend from grad school on the Today Programme as a pundit.  Finding out the title of the book I wanted to read referred to a guy I ate lunch with every day in high school.

It is apparently not a very flattering portrait...

 



I heard about this book ages ago.  And thought it would be a funny read.  Then today, I read a piece in the NY Times that made the startling connection for me.

 

I was a smart kid and sat with other smart kids.  You might even go so far as to say we were the nerd table.  Except that I think there was at least one other table of equally smart kids who probably worked harder in school than we did.  It is, however, hard to reconcile the teenager who drew a lot of muscle-bound superheroes in his notebooks with the author of Average American Male.

 

With added controversy for your reading pleasure!

 

But hey, we all grow up, don't we?  It wasn't even the most surreal of those moments - the prize for which goes to someone who was talking about their polyamoury on facebook.  I had a moment where I thought "he can't be polyamorous, he's only eight years old!" before I realised that the man in question had been eight years old at the same time I had been eight years old and had presumably aged at an identical rate.

 

The weirdest part of the article for me, though, was when they printed his age.  "35?" I thought.  "He can't be 35 because I'm only... aww crap."