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this aged gen-x slacker has taken umbridge

The obnoxious Salon headline read: "Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis?"

Fuck you, Salon. Just fuck you.

First: I am not getting REALLY OLD, thanks very much. And heads up, youngster, the next 20 years are going to fucking fly by. You're going to be 40-something and be as shocked as I am now every time you see your 40-something year old face in the mirror, because on the inside, you still feel like the funky little hipster you used to be. My kids are going to be the hip happening cool youthful adults when you're middle-aged. They will mock you for being getting REALLY OLD. When this happens, I will get all Schadenfreude on your middle-aged midlife-crisising ass, and I will laugh and laugh, if I'm not already dead and sleeping the dirt nap of the ancients.

Second: You wanna know how a slacker has a midlife crisis you smug little millennial?  Come over here while I lace up the Grunge era combat boots of my youth, and I will midlife crisis you in your narcissistic ass.

I'm 1/2 through my corporeal tour of duty, that is true. I have traded in my youthful lithe size 4 body for stretchmarks and saggy boobs. But, and here is the big but my young friends, I'm wise. I'm so fucking wise. I'm so gloriously fucking wise. And I'm happy.

Really really happy.

My kids are growing up to be very cool people. I'm proud of them and they, believe it or not, are not ashamed to be seen with me in public. They think I'm cool. They want to hang out with me. They like me. So, basically, I win at life based on that achievement alone.

But wait, there's more!

I'm married to a guy who really really loves me and I really really love him back. Words can not convey how profound this is. We've been together for 20 years, married for 17 years, monogamous and true for the duration. We've been through some very shitty shit and endured. This is not love at first sight love, though it may have started there. This is a love that we worked at and nurtured, this is a love that almost choked on a ham sandwich, this was a love that was Heimlich maneuvered, this love stopped breathing but was brought back to life, this love knows that life is short and this love is so happy just to be here. This isn't a love to be trifled with, this is the kind of love that will linger in the ether even after our old dottering bodies have cacked out and crumbled to dust. Most people do not ever have this kind of love. Many people go to their graves without ever experiencing this kind of love.

So, fuck you, snotty young people.

I might be getting older, but so are you, you just haven't noticed yet. I'm not young and pretty anymore but I got love, baby.   

I'm lucky. I know I'm lucky.

You'll be lucky if twenty years from now you're half as lucky as I am.





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