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[taxwonk]

Originally posted by LessinSF
To Whom It Applies;

Did 40 bother you? I am already sick of people asking me whether it feels different, or how I feel about it. I answer - truthfully - that I really don't notice or care because I am mentally arrested at 23 or 25 (and emotionally probably younger), and have a mental physical self-image that is also somewhat outdated, often to my surprise when I see pictures of myself.

But that's the fact. I don't feel that much more decrepit, mature, or wizened. And I expect I will feel the same in another ten years. Is it me? I know that I am unusual (read "freak") in many ways, but still I wonder whether I am that unusual.

And here's my newest example - I was watching the Daily Show "Global Edition" on CNN at a B&B in Ireland where I had a sink in my room, but the toilet in the hall, and Stewart randomly says "Sometimes You Just Have To Pee In The Sink." I was in the common room and could barely prevent myself from not losing it. Because it is so fucking true - and its not just me, its most men, but it doesn't get discussed - so each of us thinks we are the creep, the weirdo, the outlier, when it is actually that we are all stuck with our inner 19-year old who occasionally rises out of the hindbrain and says "Dude, that sink is just the right height, pee, and then run the water and no one in this sound-leaky building will know you did anything other than brush your teeth."

And we get an inner, secret, satisfying thrill from that. I just got away with peeing in the sink. I may be 40 in years, god-knows-what in body, but I am, and will always be, an adolescent in many ways.

LessinSF

I didn't give a rat's ass about turning 40. It was another birthday. I had my birthday reuben. I went out for a couple martinis. My wife baked me brownies.

On peeing in the sink. Many years ago, National Lampoon ran this bit in their Letters From the Editors:

Dear Sirs:

People may say he's not a gentleman but it's not true. He always takes the dishes out of the sink before he pisses in it.

Yoko Ono