Hold the Botox

I always told myself I was going to age gracefully, allowing nature to run its course with dignity and embracing the changes as they come.  I was going to be Helen Mirren--sleek and silver and stately.

Then, a few weeks ago, I got my first gray hair.  It sprang out ex nihilo, three inches long, wiry, and standing straight up like a Who-hair.  In a single, sharp moment of soul-deep clarity, I realized that I wasn't going to look like Helen.

I was going to look like Doc Brown.

So let's just throw it out there.  Growing old sucks.   

You've all thought it, too, so don't get all "Oh, it's not that bad." Of course it's not all bad.  I'm particularly fond of getting to make my own rules and eat my midnight pizza on the couch. Sometimes it just hits me, though, that I'm getting older.

And it sucks.

Everything that tastes good makes me bloat.  Salads are apparently now a viable meal choice. Things that worked perfectly well for twenty or thirty years have suddenly stopped working for absolutely no damn good reason, like my warranty just expired.  I woke up one day and realized that my metabolism broke up with me years ago and didn't bother to leave a note.  We haven't even mentioned the funhouse sag and shift of anatomical drift, thinning hair, sun-damaged skin, stretch marks, weird hormonal mustaches, a resurgence of the acne I thought I had left behind in high school, and an extra half-chin.

I do have some things going for me.  While being flat-chested was a trial when I was younger, it also means less back pain and a lower likelihood of my boobs keeping company with my bellybutton in twenty years.  I also spent puberty, some of the most soul-crushing years of life, looking like this:

It could only go uphill from there.

I mean, sure, I'm not thrilled about whatever shenanigans my body is going to pull in the next fifty years, but facts are facts: I'm too unmotivated and cheap to do more than cursory maintenance.  My attention span just won't allow it.
   

With that in mind, after careful reflection I have come to the following conclusion: I have to choose my priorities. With a minimum of vegetables and exercise, modern medicine can give me roughly at least another 50 years on this rock.  How do I want to spend the next five decades?  I could choose to romanticize the incompletely developed body that I had at 17.  I can obsess over every wrinkle, stretch mark, and skin tag.  I could flagellate myself with every memory where one of my charming, sensitive children grabbed a handful of belly and asked why I was so "squishy." I could keep my hair coiffed with regular visits to the salon, spend copious amounts of money on creams and unguents and unicorn blood to rub into my skin, and eat all my kale like a mature woman...or I can wrestle my old-lady fro into a ponytail, buy adult-quality chocolate to go with my minimum of vegetables, swap bad puns with my tasteless kids, and go read a book that makes me laugh so hard I cry.

I'm going to take the second option. Surgery is expensive, good memories are better than good boobs, and life without Oreos isn't worth living.

I need to get that on a shirt.  I could make a killing.