You're Prettier When You're Younger

The Great Plotnik has noticed that the older you get the more pronounced your bad habits become. If you used to interrupt people before they were finished speaking, you do it more now. If as a younger person you might have (among friends) allowed the occasional gaseous eruption into the world while looking sideways to blame the next person, as your years advance there may be an increase in frequency (temporal as well as sonic).

Not that Plottie is talking about anybody he knows, just sayin'.

One of those features of aging seems to be an increase in anxiety. It has something to do with your diminishing sense of control over what's going on around you. Maybe you can't do anything about it but you can still worry about it.

Plottie recognizes this readily in his mother but she has an excuse. And he does it too. This morning he awakened very early with a sense of -- well, what was it? Not doom, not imminent danger, just a kind of unfocused ill-at-ease. He and Duck saw a play Friday night about a young man who has to move in with his aging mother as she becomes too frail to care for herself -- that could be part of it.

The upside-downing of this year's holiday planning, where nothing will be as it always has been -- maybe that's part of it too. Realizing he just did a nice long bike trip with PD should make him feel good, but instead he finds himself thinking about the things he can probably no longer do. Could he crank his knees up those stone stairs to the top of the mountain and then down into Macchu Picchu again?...and then continue on with BZWZ to the top of Huayna Picchu?

So why not worry about it?

But most of all, he does, in the middle of the night, what he feels like he spent decades teaching his kids not to do -- worrying about problems for which he knows there is no answer. Is he going to move in with his mom, like the guy in the play did? No. Is anyone going to find a solution to her increasing mental and physical isolation? No, at least not any solution she would ever agree to.

So why worry about it? Why waste hours of sleep upstairs in BZ's room, staring out the window as the sun comes up? Does this mean Plotnik is getting older too?