A Week Before My Thirty-Fifth, I Want to Make a Few Things Clear:

I can deal with the loss of energy, the loss of opportunities, the memory thing.

I learn to live with an uncooperative body. Like an old, dying car, where ice on the wheels means unresponsive breaks and a scratch on the windshield means a defective ignition switch, my body has become random; a decaying mystery. But I can deal with that.

I see myself through the eyes of my society and learn my social identity is shifting. I learn I no longer belong to one group of consumers but to another; a less demanding one, presumably less inclined to fall for the hidden persuaders of advertising. Passively and apathetically I welcome my new identity.

I can deal with all that. The balding hair, the headaches, the goddamn teeth, the strange spots on the back, the snoring, the heartburn, the allergies, the weight gain...

And I welcome it all, because life is a journey and my body adapts as well as it can, and every day is a new adventure, if not an external one, then at least I can find the beauty of it all through my own private transformation. Because after all, thirty-five is the new something-or-other, and maybe I won't be the President and maybe I won't even be Employee of the Month but I'll never forget my dreams and I'll never stop pursuing them, and I will not let a playful body and a confused mind stand in the path of my dreams. Thirty-five means nothing.

But so help me God, the single curly coming out of my ear is unacceptable!!!

Chicken Nuggets

Thank you all for your comments on the previous post. Now, it's not every day I can come up with something like that, so instead of trying to top the previous post I will just give you a meaningless story:

In London, my roommate had a friend stay over for a while. He was from a small Kibbutz and I was from Tel-Aviv, the big city, which meant we had nothing in common. Long story short, he finished my chicken nuggets. Not a big deal, unless you go down to the kitchen craving chicken nuggets only to find an empty box in the trash. So obviously, I did what anyone else would have done in my situation: I wrote a note saying, “You’re not in the Kibbutz anymore. Over here we don’t share our food.” Then, of course, I took out the empty box from the trash and with a large kitchen knife stuck the empty box with the note to his door. Obviously.

A minute later he comes home and sees a piece of trash and a note stuck to his door by a big horror-movie knife. And he looks at me and I’m ready for a fight, but he shrugs and hands me a family-size box of chicken nuggets he just bought at the supermarket.

It’s been a while but God help me, I still have a long way to go. At least I’m vegetarian now.