Up here in Oregon, the winters are bleak and stark, with weeks upon consecutive weeks of rain and grey. There’s a phenomenon called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” that can be used to explain the winter doldrums we experience in the Pacific Northwest (although we tend to call it by its less-pedantic moniker, “alcoholism”). While I wait for the return of the sun and the dissipation of the thick cloud cover, I can’t help but focus on how old I’ve become.

I turned 35 a half year ago, and for me it was a watershed milestone. I’m now officially middle-aged. (I base this assumption upon the fact that 67 is the retirement age that the Social Security Administration deems you’ve slaved long enough to collect full benefits. I then add over two years to this number for that realization to actually sink in).

At the time of my birthday, I had no time to reflect or dwell, as my wife was in the hospital undergoing the second of two major surgeries to remove cancerous tumors from her mid-section, and my best friend was in another hospital barely cheating death with a nasty bout of lymphoblastic leukemia. Also, it was Venezuelan Flag Day, which for socialist Hugo-philes like myself is equivalent of Christmas and Bastille Day rolled into one.

Now that things have slowed down a bit, I’m now awash in the morass of listlessness and depression that accompanies the gradual march towards death. Also, my Arizona Wildcats are in danger of missing the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the first time in 24 years, and Mike Huckabee is no longer a viable candidate for the Republican presidential nominee, which means that we will not have a candidate this year that believed Man and Dinosaur both existed at the same time. Calgon, take me away.

You know you’re old if:

• You reach for salt in your kitchen and realize—in addition to kosher and iodized salt—you have 9 types of sea salt
• After your daughter knocks your beer chalice off the table and breaks the glass, spilling witbier all over the carpet and sofa, causing your wife to yell at you for playing ball in the house, you realize at this point in your life there’s pretty much nothing she can say or do to ever make you stop
• Dinner and a movie becomes just dinner or just a movie and then becomes sitting on the couch with a laptop and yelling at the Internet
• If in previous decades you used to look in the mirror and see promise and potential, you now remark to yourself, “Wow, time to tame those nose hairs”
• You remember when rap music didn’t suck
• You’re thinking about rehab because the first one didn’t “take”
• Your anger and resentment transgresses from players and the coach and shoots up the vitriol hierarchy to the actual baseball GMs themselves
• You have a food blog
• You stop and consider the full implications of amortization
• You get replacement earphones for your iPod because you feel self-conscious with white earbuds in public
• You are resentful that another one of your friends is getting married, not because you’re losing a friend to marriage or that it reminds you that everybody’s getting older, but because you’re compelled to go to Las Vegas and suffer through a punishing weekend
• You foment a fondness for a certain brand of toilet paper
• You take the bus downtown on New Year’s Eve and realize everybody on the bus is younger than you and has spent more money on their clothes
• Flipping through the channels, you come across Suze Orman and don’t immediately change the channel
• You call up your mobile phone provider and yell at them for the 3rd time to remove incoming text capabilities from your device
• You need a vacation to recover from your vacation
• You have a difficult time keeping track of which celebrities are dead or alive
• You reflexively spew invectives at anybody who tells you to visit their MySpace page
• While paging through the recorded episodes on your DVR, you realize that it’s 50% PBS shows—including Ruff Ruffman,  Frontline, and Clifford the Big Red Dog
• You develop curmudgeonly insane rationalizations, such as “I’ll reduce my carbon footprint the moment somebody perfects microwave pizza”
• You’ve rearranged your garage for the third time in as many months
• One of your favorite bands is playing, and you say “I’ll just catch them next time they come to town on the back leg of the current tour” and the band either breaks up or dies before you can do so
• Your skepticism is no longer reserved for standard, questionable precepts such as Religion and Government, and instead trades in  theories related to the systemic suppression of Monosodium Glutamate