Feeling Our Age?

Suddenly, I feel like a grown up – and in this case it's not in a good way. I had dinner with a friend tonight who is turning 40 in a few months. Though he said that he's not really worrying about it, it's clear that he's losing his mind with dread. Another friend, who used to be a wildly dressed, semi-irresponsible, spaced out single New Yorker, told me that she recently went shopping for "sensible shoes." This is a woman who once wore vintage skin tight shiny green silk pants a see-through floral top and gold impossibly high stilettos to a random loft party in Brooklyn – just because. Yet another friend emailed me today apologizing over typos in her previous from yesterday. Clearly frazzled, she wrote, "Sometimes it's just so hard to get it right." How right she is. As for me, I am suffering from carpel tunnel syndrome or hypertension – whatever that is, I just know I am hyper and tense – over BlackBerry emails that start at 5 a.m. and go until midnight, and daily barrage of a million, zillion little problems and hurdles and negotiations that seem to make up the life of a working adult these days.

All the craziness just makes me wish I was an ageless, freewheeling European neighbor draped in a beach towel and sipping Pellegrino.