Many people would say that getting older is cruel payment for gaining experience and wisdom in life. They want the wisdom without getting old, as in, “If I’d known then what I know now,” and “I wish I could go back to high school – I’d sure do things differently.” I can tell you it won’t be any better if you went back to high school all wrinkly and decrepit, but if you mean you’d like to go back with the wisdom you have now and be in the same body you had then – which did not have a muffin-top – then that makes sense.

I wish I’d had the wisdom back then to be braver,  like talk to a boy I secretly carried a crush on for months. I thought the pain of rejection would be worse than the joy of being brave and finding out if he had a crush on me too. I found that out a couple of decades later that he DID have a crush on me, at a reunion. He had not aged well. I dodged a bullet on that one.

This pining love continues to be the theme in umpteen movies, so I guess it’s still going on even though it everyone is so much more open now. Kids seem to do and say anything anymore, particularly the “f” word, but they – the kids on TV and in movies – will carry a torch all school year for some guy they pass in the hall every day, even though their friends are always trying to get them to talk to the guy or ask the girl out or whatever.

That’s one gift of age – you can see these movies and know exactly what’s going to happen. We’ve seen this plot a million times. Girl (or guy) is in love with guy (or girl), but is afraid to tell him (or her) due to the fact that the movie would end too soon.

The girl and guy bump into each other all the time but he doesn’t pay any attention to her until he finally “sees” her for the first time about 45 minutes into the movie. The guy says to himself, “hmmm, where have you been all my life?” and the girl says to herself, “WTF” (because kids love using the “f” word in movies).

Oh that reminds me, I saw a trivia question: “What two words are used the most in the English language?” I’ll leave a little space for you to think………Okay, here comes the answer, which, BTW, I got wrong. The answer is NOT “and” and “the.” The answer is “I” and “You.” Crazy, huh? I think I personally use the other ones more, but in this very sentence I used “I” four times, and “the” only once, so I guess they’re right.

However, I think that, for people age eleven to thirty-five, the “f” and “f-ing” words are the two most often used. Just cozy up to some high-schoolers in a group – I don’t mean get IN their group, they’ll clam up like, uh, clams, I mean hang out in a bush somewhere where they don’t know you’re listening and you’ll hear these words every third word, like this: “WTF, did she f-ing think I’d f with that f-ing f-er?”

I hang out with kids a lot – I frequently hide in bushes – just kidding – I tutor in the library at the high school, a very loud place where the f-word is used way more often than the dusty books decorating the shelves. Back in the day, if we needed to say the f-word on occasion, we’d check around to make sure no grownups could hear lest we get our mouth washed out with soap. Today, kids know they can call Children’s Services Division if parents or strangers on the street come at them with a bar of Dial soap, so they sprinkle the f-word in their conversations like confetti at the Super Bowl.

And yet, according to Hollywood, they are afraid to tell a boy they have a crush on him.

I have more to write about age and the benefits, but I’ll have to think of them first, and luckily I can drag that out into another post since we are all out of time today. Have an effing nice day!