Wednesday List: Ways I know I’m getting older

this cartoon is by the always lovely Beatrice at Master of Arts

• I’ve started checking the weather forecast obsessively. It’s now one of my favourite pages in the newspaper and I was very pleased at the new Metservice site redesign that has allowed me to see the weather ten days into the future.

• Finding Dilbert cartoons funny. Two years ago I would read them and be distinctly unamused. Nowadays, after I’ve read the weather page I flick straight to the Dilbert cartoon. One of my favourite morning routines.

• Last weekend I was in bed before 11pm on Friday and Saturday night and I was extraordinarily pleased with this turn of events.

• Learning tolerance and acceptance towards some things (family members’ quirks, long waits for buses and trains) and then feeling deep deep intolerance for others (other people’s loud music on school nights, puddles on the bathroom floor, a sink full of dirty water). I’m sure the categories of tolerance/intolerance have swapped over.

• Acknowledging when something makes me feel crap, and making a decision to accept it and move on rather than bitching about it until I make myself feel like a terrible person.

• Witnessing my first full scale fashion style revival. The 80s revival thing was quirky and nostalgic in a childhood kind of a way but this more recent 90s revival is very spooky and way too close to home. I refuse to see a repeat of “The Year of the Slip Dress”. It was unflattering on me in 1995 and I doubt that it’s going to look much better 15 years later. ALSO I saw a band called Dear Times Waste at Camp and I was suddenly back in 1996, lying on my teenage bed in my teenage bedroom, complaining that no one understood me, writing angsty poetry and thinking about the Drew Barrymore movie with all the butterflies.