This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

At least in school they show you a little movie about periods. Nobody tells you anything about menopause! It’s only from reading a bunch of stuff in a Facebook group I’m in that I started realizing how little I knew about it and started reading more.

my hippie aunt apparently said "the trick is eating root vegetables rich in vitamin E" ... but ... hippie aunt is not always otm

Horseshoe!!! Hi! :) So happy to see you and thank you. That’s sort of another thing nobody talks about and I’ve found it particularly tough but I do know it will get easier with time. Eventually. ❤️

I won't be in my forties for another few years, but I'm already dreading menopause because birth control pretty much made me lose my mind and so I have this lurking fear that menopause will mean being whomped by mental illness.

Turned 46 last week. Forties in general have been pretty great, though as my wife says, in a lot of ways I've been in my forties since my twenties. I feel very, very fortunate for a lot of different reasons, but this past year has really underscored how important my wife and kids are to me, frustrating though they may sometimes be (probably because I am in fact the frustrating one, at least most of the time). Our living parents (we each only have our mom) are nowhere near us, our siblings and their families are both in other countries, we don't have particularly large extended families to begin with, but we have a core group of local friends and acquaintances that we've known for a while now, and they often feel like surrogate families.

As far as pop culture consumption goes, I've never been more aware of all the great stuff around me that I just don't seem to have (literal and figurative) time for. From music to TV to movies, there is just so much it's downright inspiring/dumbfounding, but I don't necessarily feel the need to keep up with it all. Leave that to the kids, or anyone else that rates anything down to the decimal place. (I give being 46 ... an 8.1! Best New Age!)

whole board is getting old! i thought the contract i signed guaranteed we were all immune.

Speak for yourself forks - I don’t feel old. Not quite yet.

That said - this April it will be 10 years since we FAPed in NY (I still have my little dish you gave me) and that IS kind of nuts.

Wasnt there supposed to be a global FAP last year, haha! What a year to have picked.

Trayce do they call it “the menopause” in Australia? That’s what they call it here in England and it makes me cringe every time because it makes me think of “the curse” or “the change” lol.

IKR? Yeah older ladies do seem call it that, it sounds anachronistic to me.

Ha oh shit was that last year??

Last year was the 20th anniversary of ILX so...

March 1st! It seemed like jokingly long way off when the idea was pitched.

dang was that a decade ago? times move.
we should def do an east coast NYC thing in the summer/fall once widespread vaccination is a real thing.

pop culture is stupid and talking about it is for absolute idiots

Well yeah, but so is arguing about old Miles Davis records, so.

Idiots r us

I will 100% be in a old person goth band with you, Sarah, but we will have to work pretty hard to be older than the Alter De Fey dudes.

hahahahaha we could enlist Eth@n.

lol ... totally unnecessary googleproofing ... as there are lots of dudes named Ethan and our Ethan doesn't read ilx, and is on my list of "friends i love dearly who would be horrible ilxors"

I'm turning 50 next year! Forties have been pretty good, other than this last year, which actually ended up not that bad either. We got a new bigger house, and we're about to get a dog, which is exciting. Working for a big tech company means I don't worry much about money these days, which is, I have to say, a HUGE weight lifted. On the physical side, my knees hurt all the time, and it's been a huge bummer not being able to swim for exercise. I got shingles a few weeks ago, which seems ahead-of-schedule, but ended up being very mild. I'm still making lots music (music with the band, making dance music, DJing, jamming on Endlesss), and the new house means I have a space to do so. I watch a ton of TV these days too, and have been getting into DJs on Twitch on the weekends. I try not to think about the looming deaths ahead too much. I assume I'll slowly adjust to the reality of my 50s and 60s as I did to my 40s.

I keep looking at all of the celebrity deaths where the celebrities in question were younger than my parents and cringing

You don’t have to be in your 40s for that head trip tbh

(My parents are around 70 and in excellent health but sheesh.)

(Sheesh at life not DJP)

I keep looking at all of the celebrity deaths where the celebrities in question were younger than my parents and cringing

Significant aging benchmarks for a sports fan are when you are older than the oldest players retiring and now older than many coaches being hired.

Tom Brady is younger than me.

Super Bowl Sunday, we were all "Well, damn. Brett Favre must've been like 47 when he retired."

Nope. That old goat was 41 when he played his last game.

I am forty. My sadness at this age is regret for the time I wasted on a stupid career (screenwriting) that fed my ego but not soul, and how my ambition in that career meant that I didn’t properly celebrate my successes.The joy of this age is finding little domestic pleasures everywhere, which sum up to something like contentment.

I know the next decade will be tough, as my older relatives die off. However, as I am watching work them through chronic illnesses now, I recognize that death is not the incomprehensible, total loss that I once thought it would be.

I keep looking at all of the celebrity deaths where the celebrities in question were younger than my parents and cringing

is it weird that one of the biggest reasons I've aspired to a successful long-term romantic relationship is so I wouldn't be alone when my parents die?

if it's weird, I am weird with you.

right? I'm going to need someone to cope with the wreck that I'll be.

I'm an only child so it's like .... worse? I do have a cousin that I'm close to though.

Both of my wife's parents are dead, and so is my dad. It was rougher when it was her folks (I didn't like my dad and he didn't like me). Especially her mom, who died of stomach cancer when my wife was in her early thirties, way too young to be losing a parent. Her dad lived another decade or so, then died of a whole bunch of things — emphysema, stomach problems, pancreatitis/diabetes, just kind of total bodily collapse over the course of several months. It was ugly and prolonged. My dad was a diabetic, and one day he suffered bleeding on his brain and went into a coma he never came out of. My stepmother pulled the plug on him on Valentine's Day, and I've never been sure whether that was a gesture of kindness or a fuck-you. (I haven't spoken to her since his death.)

My father died in 2008 after a month in hospital, my mother in 2019 after more than a decade with on-and-off lymphoma.
I worried a lot beforehand about their deaths, as a kid, as a teen, as an adult. Actually going through the experience is different than the fear of it, though. I found that dealing with the particulars of the situation is easier than fearing the unknown.
Also, as I mentioned above, it will give different perspectives to your own life.

the one takeaway from caring for my mother after a near fatal stroke: have your finances in order. i'm not going to say dealing with the financial mess she had going on was as upsetting as the stroke itself. but it was close.

if it's weird, I am weird with you

co-sign, whatever old age is I really would not like to face it alone, especially after this past year

I am ineligible for this thread but have perspective on sick/dying parents, i like remys takeaway and some of what halfway there but for you's experience chimes with my own in re the particulars carrying you along

Morbid to suggest a thread hey :/

Tehre is an "ageing parents" thread somewhere.

xp That's horrible, and I'm so sorry to hear it! This is a huge topic I'm always up to discuss. I'm having minimal symptoms/side effects but I'm also only mid-way through. If there's enough interest, should we start a thread?

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Monday, 22 February 2021 21:06 (three days ago)

would totally join this thread if it exists

fyi colette: There Will Not Be Blood: What Menopause Means to You

thanks ledge, I missed that!

This, then, can remain the male menopause thread.

Porter geezer men o pause

cholesterol was 252. got put on crestor temporarily.

weirdly, the LDL number was only 125, but I guess stuff like VLDL bumped the non-HDL number significantly higher.

I'm also heavier than I've ever been (217 pounds). I weighed 135 when I graduated high school, and I'm 6'0.

guess it's time to lay off the chips and cookies.

I have similar body (and wallet woes) of late.

Two visits. First, thanks to a heavily blocked right ear that refused to clear despite roughly four gallons of olive oil, to an audiologist who cleared it and charged me £95 for the bother. Second, to the optician, after some fatigue and headaches in the last month, to find out my prescription has changed markedly, I need varifocals and that'll be £365 for the two pairs thanks very much please bend over.

i'm not 40 yet but one of the weird ways i'm older than i should be is that i've already mourned the loss of my parents. i don't think watching them die will be sad for ne, other than bringing up old trauma and being logistically tiring. in many other ways i am still a child though.

I've worn glasses since I was 17, but having to get progressive lenses (I assume that is what varifocals are) was such a drag (not as much as not being able to read).

yyyyyeah, i'm sticking to taking my glasses off for the moment but this is a bummer

Oddly enough -- but in a way I can live with -- my doctor said it would be simpler for me just to have more than one pair! So I have my 'regular' reading glasses for every day, computer work and so forth, but when it comes to reading books I use a separate pair.

(And I've had glasses since I was like four or so, so this was no skin off my nose either way.)