A little after 4pm today, I drove to the local movie theater to buy a ticket for This American Life Live. The show wasn't for another hour and a half, but I wanted to be sure to get a ticket. Rather than drive back home and wait then drive back to the theater, I sat in the parking lot and read a book. I picked up Jim Kelley's Look into the Sun again. It's been months since I read a word of it, but I think I was able to bring back the important details after a few paragraphs.

The show was excellent, but that's not the point of this post.

While I was driving, the though struck me that of the people I generally hang out with, the few I see on a daily basis, I am the oldest. I knew this conceptually, but had to take a moment to think of what my age actually is (27). Even now I had to double check my math to be sure I was right. The same was true in Portland. Outside of work, I was the oldest person I hung out with. Except when I went to Seattle. Then duaiwe was the oldest. And madscience when I was with him in Portland, but I often forgot he wasn't as close to my age as he seemed.

My age has become so irrelevant to my life that I can't be bothered to remember an integer and increment it annually. Instead I fudge it and take the current year minus 1982 (I was born December '81, so more often than not using 1982 as a reference is accurate). If I don't bother with the math, I figure I'm 25 or so.

And I thought, what would be the repercussions if I stopped keeping track of my age; if I answered the question "How old am I?" with "25" until it was either wildly inaccurate or I was answering in a situation where accuracy is paramount?

Does it matter anymore what my age is? When I was young there were milestones to look forward to:

• 15.5 - Learner's permit
• 16 driver's license (though I deferred this until 18 or so)
• 18 - Suffrage (the right to vote), legal ability to buy tobacco
• 21 - legal ability to buy and consume alcohol

What do I have now? When I'm 30, if not sooner, I should start annual prostate exams. Senior Citizen discounts seem to vary by business but look to start around 50 or 55.

As a side note, I've been job hunting and in the shower this morning I wondered if I would get more callbacks if I had a degree, or said I did on my resume. Then I began to question the worth of a technical degree from four or five years ago in today's job market. Would school then have prepared me for the new programming languages and technologies that crop up every day? Would I have learned C# or Microsoft SMS (Systems Management Server) or Storage Area Networking? Or any of the other host of acronyms turning SysAdmin job postings into alphabet soup?