Oldster

According to the laws of nature, I have lived my life subject to the standard measure of time evolution, where an utterance of One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi lasts for the exact same duration now as it did at any point in my past. According to W.A.S.T.E (the Wacky Assembly of Scientist-Type Egg-heads), the second (or the "Mississippi") is officially defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of Cesium 133. Well from my experience, while this definition may have had some validity when I was a much younger person biding my time during games of hide-and-seek, it seems now that I am an oldster, time is flying by at an incredibly accelerated rate.

One recent evening when I was brushing my teeth, I looked in the mirror and my regular me was scowling back at me as it usually does. Then when I woke up in the morning, the above image was as plain as day. What happened? Well, it turns out that I have reached the age when my eyes have decided that they have had enough of doing their job in a convenient open-up-and-work operational mode. Now I have worn standard eyeglasses for the past 25 years or so, however, in the past year I have come to understand that standard eyeglasses no longer will work with my eyes. I now require bifocals and in order to actually be able to see, I had to actually buy a set of them. If you didn't realize it, bifocals only come in one frame style, such as you might see on one Albus Dumbledore. When you try them on in the store, the clerks cannot help but to speak to you at an incredibly elevated volume and offer to pre-chew your food. Now that I wear bifocals and, hence, clearly fit the standard definition of an oldster, those pesky Boy Scouts are always trying to help usher me across busy intersections, naturally believing that I am quite helpless. Also, I cannot help but to yell out at the neighborhood children to stay off my lawn.