You Might Be Getting Old If...

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Take this simple test to see if you may be getting old.
You might be getting old if...

Scoring the Test If one or more of the 20 statements above apply to you, you may be getting old. If you answered yes to 5 or more, you're almost there. You are also someone who has learned enough from life to make a valuable and cherished friend for those of us who have already arrived. Take heart, and keep working till you can score a perfect twenty on the test.

1. Increasingly, the attention that you attract from members of the opposite sex comes from historians and archeologists.
2. Recent efforts to date you have exclusively involved the carbon-fourteen method.
3. You enjoy The Flintstones more for its nostalgic charm than its cartoon humor.
4. Your sex drive has migrated from the chemistry of hormones and pheromones to efforts to atone for the things you did back when you were under the influence of such chemistry.
5. In restaurants, you find yourself more intent on inspecting the menu than on scanning the attractive servers.
6. Your thoughts have progressively shifted from your passion to your pension.
7. You are anywhere near making the last payment on your house.
8. You are struck by the similarity between the merchandise in today's dollar store and the five-and-dime store where you shopped as a kid. (NOTE: If you have noticed that the dollar store's merchandise is cheesier than the five-and-dime's used to be, then you can stop the test right here and score yourself a perfect 20. Jump to the key at the end to read what this means.)
9. On your last birthday, the cost of candles exceeded the cost of the cake.
10. You have gone, in order, through these four stages in personal development:
    • You believed your parents knew everything
    • You believed you knew everything
    • You learned that you really didn't have answers to most of life's questions
    • You finally know most of the answers, but now nobody asks you the questions.
11. You find yourself wishing for a copy of Berlitz Conversational English for Time Travelers to help you chat with the kids at your family reunion.
12. The mindless chatter of youth is less and less disturbing to you because, more and more, you can't hear what they're saying anyway.
13. You begin to notice that everyone else who is your age looks old to you.
14. Your concern about adding a stroke has shifted focus from your golf handicap to your list of physical handicaps.
15. Your dietary and exercise objectives are now less about beating your body into an hourglass figure and more about figuring out how to beat the hourglass.
16. You can finally find the time to read as much as you'd like, but you now have to set aside ample time for finding your reading glasses.
17. Your selection criterion for a new car has shifted from finding one that can pass most cars to locating one that will pass most gas stations.
18. You find yourself doing things now that, in your younger years, you disdained because you felt they would take too long.
19. Folks you consider the younger generation begin to lament to you about the follies of the younger generation.
20. You feel a growing concern as to whether there's time enough left for age to bring you wisdom.

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