Maybe it’s not so terrible after all. I just got back from a reunion (not college-sanctioned–the best kind evah!) with about eight of my close associates, or my posse, as the young people would call it these days.

Met up at a bar, then progressed to the host’s hotel room. My husband thought it’d be all “immature” and stupid, but I think he was just pizzed about having to stay home with Big, Medium, Little and Micro Units while I (gasp!) had fun without him.

Turned out he was half right. It was totally immature! But it was also wonderful, and about a day too short. We’re all reaching that age where some lofty aspirations have been traded in for pragmatic concessions. Lots of our 21-year-old selves would call our 35-plus selves “sellouts,” but nobody went on an American Beauty-style bender about how their lives had played out.

This was a happy bunch of people! And I don’t think it was all attributable to the Molson. Or to a steady run of zippity-do-da events. There was plenty of sad intermixed with the good stuff, but I’m proud to still know these folks because of the way they respond the the maelstrom of life swirling around them. I drove down feeling nervous and vaguely frumpy and friendless, but I left reluctantly in the wee hours, just as the beer muscles were popping out and choice bons-mots like, “Man, how’d you get so fat?!” were wafting around the room like so much love-dust.

My only hope is that they derived the same reassurance that they were, in fact, still abundantly “friended” out of my presence. That I listened as much as I talked.

That they will stumble into the unlocked gym again next time. I want to stay for the second annual shirts vs. skins game.

Blogs. Everyone I ever met in sophomore year of college who was “working on a manuscript” that moldered in their sock drawer prolly has one now.

And now, for my 39th birthday, my present is a bigger forum for self-congratulatory navel gazing than the same old four walls. (Jeepers! 2003 is gonna be great: I can just feel it!)

Funny, I’m not sure how this will turn out yet, but navel gazing does sorta tie in to something that’s been weighing rather heavily on my mind:

GRAY PUBES!!!!

WTF? A formerly demure brown beaver has transformed into a geriatric alpaca, lurking beneath gray, worn-out “hipster briefs.” Hawt!

It was a slow, insidious transformation. The postpartum inner tube had deflated just enough to permit a downward glance at the damage. The intervening weeks and months hadn’t been kind. My once-dandy landing strip had become a curly rainforest teeming with silverbacks.

The the ever-widening gunmetal stripe overtaking the top of my head, I dunno, that’s manageable. It’s like a cancellation stamp that makes my latent “invisible to teenage checkout boys” status official once and for all. And there’s always nice ‘n’ easy, or whatever’s on sale in the health and beauty aisle. But this puts the “closed” sign on the shop doors in bold type: never again will a new, bandbox-perfect person emerge from my own personal Dark Wood of Bad Grooming.

It’s not like I’ve taken to bed clutching a bottle of mouthwash, but jeez.

“On a very special Golden Girls, Blanche dyes her mound of Venus for a big date.”

No thanks. Guess I’ll just age with integrity from the waist down. But check out this shite, in case that’s not in the cards for you.

How to cope with this betrayal of youth, sweet youth?