Older or Wiser or Sad?

A good friend just told me he's dating someone who's a decade his senior...
The Monkey announced that on his next birthday, when he got done being 3.5, he would be 6.
The majority of my friends are younger than me by anywhere from 2 to 10 years.

This theme of age has been everywhere lately. Normally I'm not particularly bothered by it, really. I have no idea how old 35 is "supposed" to look (and, was, I confess, a little shocked when someone remarked to me that he was amazed that I didn't have wrinkles...I'm like, "should 35 have wrinkles?" I just don't know...).

And truthfully? Most of the time I have no idea how 35 is "supposed" to behave either...I waffle between feeling like UberMom, a giddy teenager, a carefree 20something, and a wide-eyed 6 year old. It's like some kind of decade-whiplash tossing me around...

But today I read a story that made me feel older...or maybe wiser...or maybe just sad. I'll spare the graphic depiction, but the high points were a lot of alcohol, forcible extrication from two restaurants, lobbing razor-sharp insults until the victims wept, calculated (nearly predatorial, by the author's description) hook-ups, drunk driving, and some pretty serious destruction of property.

The weird part was that I could see how, in some other era, I might have read this as just a really good party story: the dramatic near miss...taking the better-than-thou's down a few notches...scoring the hookup...drunken runnings with the gang. A wacky story. The sort of story it takes everyone to reconstruct over that big plate of Denny's through the hangover the next morning...and everybody laughs at the misadventures.

And yet I felt mostly horrified as I was reading it today....sad for the people on the other end of the verbal onslaught...sad for the one who'll be accountable for the destruction of property...sad for the carcassed aftermath of this Bacchanalian night.

It is sadness, too, by the way....I'm actually not sitting in judgment of any of it. I'm no one to declare 'right' or 'wrong' in the situation. I've certainly had my share of less-than-proud adventures in the past and those "we did what?" moments when my own 'gang' was younger.

...which brings me back to the topic at hand: Age.

Is it because I'm older? Is that why I read this thing and sat there in gaping astonishment? Or is it that experiencing more of life has deepened that empathetic groove in me? Or is it that these days, I can identify more with the victims than the perpetrators? Where I once ran with the hyenas....I'm now the gazelle?

When people ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I generally quip something about never wanting to grow up. I might have to rethink that answer. Maybe I've grown up more than I thought...