Weltschmerz

Triaphilia:

1. The fear of the number three.
2. The belief that bad things happen in sets of three. 

It is nowhere near my birthday, but three things happened in the last three days to make me feel very old.
I've never really felt old on my birthday.  There have only been two birthdays where I did have a sense of decrepitude.
The first was when I turned 28.  At some point in grade school like everyone else I learned simple math.  One test problem was to calculate how old I would be in the year 2000.  I correctly calculated 28.  While many childhood memories are gone forever, I vividly remember thinking about the age of 28 and how impossibly old that was.  That stuck with me on my birthday in 1999.
The second birthday when I felt old was when I turned 36.  Shortly after I started working after college there was one of those horrible forced department social events.  One of my new coworkers was sitting across a picnic table from me and was making derisive comments on my age.  When I asked how old he was, he replied, "36."  Looking at this guy across the table I thought he looked significantly more ancient.  When I turned 36, I recalled the incident and wondered if the past years working for that company had resulted in new hires thinking I was much older.

The Three Incidences in the last Three Days:

I don't understand the compulsion to do this, but occasionally birthdays are celebrated at work with small posters proliferating how old someone has become.  Friday was such a day with one coworker.  Knowing about when he started with the company, I assumed we were close to the same age, but he has maintained the frat-boy look for around 20 years now.  For some unexplained reason, the posters in this case hit a raw nerve coupling that frat-boy look with the reality that we're nearly the same age (he's a few years younger).

I had to ship a small package by FedEx and stopped by a local office down the street from work.  In front of me in line was a woman and presumably her daughter shipping an overnight envelope.  The daughter was a bit animated, almost hyper and the banter between the two females the FedEx clerk suggests they stop by often.  I merely had to drop off my prepared box and the woman and her daughter were blocking the door as I tried to leave while they looked at a postcard (or something).  As I worked my way around them, I saw the girl attempt to suck in her words as she said, "You almost stopped that old man from leaving." to her mother.

I woke up this morning, early as usual.  As I made coffee, I had a few eyebrow hairs just in my peripheral vision that were an immediate and significant annoyance.  I grabbed my rarely-used electric razor to cut the offending bastard hairs away.  In a brief instant, a significant portion of one eyebrow was gone.  This prompted a bit more looking and the horror of bushiness that my eyebrows had become before being scythed by the razor.  Wisely, I only briefly tried to further trim my way to some sort of repair.

I'll be living with this one for a while.  They will grow back slowly to their old-man disheveled appearance and I will embrace them.  I briefly thought about cutting them off completely to see if anyone would notice.  Eyebrows are an anomaly.  I strongly suspect most people would notice a difference in my appearance, but not be able to figure out what it was due to - at least for a few minutes.
I could pretend I was Bob Geldof from the end of Pink Floyd - The Wall.

Which brings up a good point, have you seen recent pictures of Bob Geldof?  Maybe I shouldn't worry too much about how my appearance may have changed over the years.

Weltschmerz:

1. Mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.