Baaahh.

When you're young you marvel at old people. You know, people who are thirty or older. You wonder how they got to be so weird; doing things like waking up early in the morning without an alarm clock, falling asleep while watching TV, going to bed by 9pm, eating gross things like fish and mushrooms and nuts, reading the obituaries, spending free time after work doing dishes or ironing or vacuuming rather than doing something fun, etc. Then you reach the ripe old age of thirty and you realize that you are that old person! You're up each morning by 7:30 because you just "naturally wake up." Even if you're not in bed by 9pm you wish you were. And you find yourself ordering the bags of mixed nuts from your aunt's church fundraiser instead of the bags of gummy bears because suddenly, without warning, you actually like nuts (and you eat mushrooms even if you don't like them because you know you should).

Who are you? How did you get to be this person? What happens when you hit that magical age of thirty? I've noticed that over the past few years I've been going through these changes myself. My tastes have changed. My sleeping habits have changed. My priorities have changed. And my metabolism has changed.

A couple of examples of these changes:

1. I am now interested in things like natural, homeopathic remedies for healthy living and am more inclined to believe in astrological signs and symbols than I was even five years ago. I'm very keen to find the right homeopathic remedy to my over-anxious temperament, my stomach and digestive woes, and my other "ailments." I have been going to my homeopathic doctor for almost two years now (whoa) and am still soldiering on with finding the right essence to give me the improved quality of life that I want. (Now we're trying out the essence of the naja snake family, and putting any bit - even if it's not even a real bit - of a snake in me would have been unthinkable years ago.) And I am open-minded to certain astrological belief systems like the Chinese zodiac. I learned on Friday that I am a goat in the Chinese zodiac calendar - specifically an earth goat - and the description of the goat (in some circles the sheep) is just about spot-on. I'm eager to learn more about goats and Chinese astrology (and Eastern philosophies), and really could have cared less about this kind of stuff before.

(Thank you to Taking Back Tiffany for the goat photo.)

2. My diet and nutrition has become an almost-obsession, and this is probably linked to the fact that my metabolism has clearly changed. I have never been thin, or what I would consider skinny, and I have at various times of my life been what I consider "pleasingly plump." But my weight would fluctuate, and I could control it. If I ate a lot of sweets and breads, which I love, then I would get heavier. If I wanted to lose weight I could, just by cutting down the amount of food I ate, or by kicking my exercise regimen into high gear. Now, not so much. I trained so hard for the 5K in November and December, burning so many calories and not eating much more to compensate, and yet am still weighing in at a number I haven't seen in many years. Hence the Weight Watchers thing. And hence the obsession with vegetarianism, veganism, and cookbooks and recipes. As I write this, Doug is reading to me from Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet, because I am eager to learn more about how this healthy way of living might work for me. When in Florida with Jipty and Chris it seemed so natural to follow a vegan/vegetarian lifestyle when we were in the timeshare cooking meals for ourselves, but when we went out to dinner it seemed... mostly inconvenient. You can't just go to any restaurant and expect that there will be food there that you can eat. I didn't think I would be able to put up with that. I like convenience. But now that I am on Weight Watchers (sort of) and I know that I want to be healthy, and now that I'm learning that maybe a plant-based diet would render my snake and spider and whatever-other-kind-of-creepy-creature remedies unnecessary, maybe I can put up with that inconvenience.

So what is it about this aging thing? Do our habits really change as much as it seems they do as we get older? And don't people become more conservative and less open-minded as they age? I seem to be doing the opposite, but I'm not necessarily complaining, at least about these particular changes. The falling asleep while watching TV (or, worse, falling asleep while in the warm, dark movie theater...), well, that I wholeheartedly complain about and curse the aging process for hitting me with this one so early.