Apparently I got old while I wasn't paying attention. Observe:

• It's been more than ten years since I graduated from high school.
• I am now older than every single college basketball player in the country.
• Yesterday, my wife asked me if my hair was turning gray (it's not, at least I think it's not).
• Also yesterday, my back was sore after dancing around with my daughter on my shoulders. My back has never been sore before.
• The baby on the the cover of Nevermind, which was released when I was in middle school and essentially defined my high school existence, is now in high school.
• It's recently become clear to me that I have fathered two entire people and am partially responsible for maintaining their well-being.
• I was born closer to Jimi Hendrix's death than my daughter was to Kurt Cobain's death.

Another ominous sign is that the long-standing magical equilibrium between my eating habits (lots) and my natural metabolism (adequate) appears to be slipping. Things are rounder than they used to be. My wife and my mother were in the same room together recently and convinced me to start exercising. So instead of rolling out of bed to check Reddit or tag Flickr photos, I am now on day three of taking the dog for a morning walk.

I actually kind of like it. I don't have to get up any earlier because I had already allowed time for geeky stuff before work. The morning is a nice time to be out - nice temperature, no people, no bumping into things. This morning I saw three stray cats, including one cute little tabby kitten.

I don't think I'm getting much exercise, though. Right now I'm focusing on the will power part of things. Maybe once I've established the habit I'll actually try to get the heart rate up a bit.

Lately I've been trying to force myself to do things that I know are good for me but that I don't like or that haven't been important to me, such as blogging (which I like) and listening to my voice mail when I get it (which I fucking hate, by the way. Email me. I have two in my box right now from Monday, so that's not going very well).

It's not that I feel like I should act a certain way now that I'm old. I enjoy a challenge, and lately I've actually been interested in self-improvement, which hasn't always been the case. I'm running out of computer languages to learn (at least, languages I might actually use, ever - apologies to Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, Smalltalk, C/C++, and the rest of them; I'm sure you're very nice, but I've pretty much got it covered, thanks). As a matter of fact, I think I still managed to avoid being dignified nearly all the time.

Life's too short to be dignified.