According to a friend who is forty-five, I am too young to complain about age at my tender thirty-five. I'm still young enough for my dreams to be realised, to have a bright and chipper view of the world, and to have my genitals working with their complete and proper function. I think he said something along those lines when he was thirty-five too.

Since I can't complain, I'll blame. Someone has maliciously glued love handles to my lower sides while I was sleeping. Another equally malevolent soul has grown me a beer belly and I don't even drink. He's doing this perhaps in tandem with the guy who's been shrinking all the waists on my pants and boxer briefs.

Someone else has been, one by one, scooping cells out of my brain for what purpose I cannot imagine, making me go to the store and spend all my money on fifteen things save the single thing I was there to buy. Another wicked imp must be turning off the fire under my pasta, because there's no way I would forget to do such a thing and then wonder why it's taking so long to cook.

Not that I'm close to the point where flight attendants, sales people, and other assorted strangers call me "dear" as if I were a cartoon or an antique china doll and not a real person. I can still turn heads and I don't yet look completely ridiculous when I wear the same style of jeans as my nineteen-year-old cousin. I just wish I could still wear the same waist.

And when I find out who shrank not only the waists on my pants, but all the waist sizes in the entire world, why I'll tell that young whippersnapper to respect his elders because in my day the world was a much better place.