Getting Carded

You reach a point in life when you accept that you're not young anymore.  That you'll never have the metabolism of a teenager.  That your idea of pulling an all nighter isn't staying up all night, but sleeping for a solid 8 hours.  That you don't know it all, in fact you can't even remember things you used to know.  Like how to spell knowledgeable without relying on spellcheck.

And that you're not getting carded at the liquor store anymore.  

That was all a lie.  You never get used to any of those things.  Or needing glasses to find your glasses.  Or the creaks your body makes when you stretch.  Or just sit down.  The gray hairs, the chin hairs and the unmentionable curious, stray body hairs.  There's no way of getting around it (without creaking or breaking a hip)...

...getting old sucks.  

But, it gets even worse.  Now when you're out in public and someone refers to you as "Miss", you know it's meant to flatter you because the person saying it knows you're ridiculously old and that you need it to stroke your ancient and dilapidated ego.  But you're not flattered in the least because you know you were only being patronized by an ignorant kid that you've just calculated in your head you're old enough to be the parent of.  

Nothing's worse than being reminded you're old by a youngster.  

Unless it's using the word "youngster". 

I thought I'd finally accepted that I'm not 21 anymore, but a middle aged woman.  Or as I like to think of it, 21 with 25 years of experience and a rheumatic knee.  That's when I went to the liquor store to stock up on some bold and complex bottles of red wine.  I passed by the more economical and inferior boxed white wines the youngsters like because their palate is underdeveloped on the way to the cashier.  The cashier, a youngster himself, promptly asked for my I.D.  That's when I realized...

 I'm only getting carded to check if I'm using a stolen credit card.  

In retrospect, maybe I actually like being patronized.