Flashes of Panic

I was amused, a few days ago, to read Sherry’s “bad reasons that I will decide a guy is un-datable.” Amused, largely, because of many of the comments; she stated up-front that they were bad reasons, but one of them is, “too young” and several commenters are either piqued or acting it. The first list—“A few regrets”—is much more interesting, and yet the “too young” line in the second is the one people picked up on. I will resist getting Freudian, I will, I will… oops, too late.

Age is measured too many ways and “young” is an impressively vague way of describing it. Stating a number in calendar years is among the least useful, though easily measured, metrics. I’ve known people older than I who act much younger, and many of the athletes I’m talking to here have a maturity I certainly lacked at their age. I’ve heard people talk about calendar age, intellectual age and emotional age as differing numbers, and recently there’s been a lot of talk from the medical people about physical age vs. calendar age (“But you’ve got the heart of a man half your age!”)

Those are all old concepts, but not ones we keep in mind easily. I guess it’s conditioned in to us in elementary school, where one-year differences (and smaller!) in calendar age make such a big difference in our social circles. When I’m in danger of forgetting, I try to remember used cars. There’s model years, and there’s mileage. They’re each important in their own way, but mileage is what really drives the price, not model year. (This metaphor actually breaks down right in this spot, since high mileage on a recent model year is a bad thing for a car, but could be a good thing in a person… or not.)

I could say that what I find interesting about these athletes is exactly the sort of thing which makes them different from me. I want to know what they’ve done over the last four or eight years which has brought them to such a different place, and how much they’ve thought about how it’s changed them. The differences between them are just as interesting, and even how they react to me and my colleagues with our cluster of notebooks and recorders. Some are natural interviews, casual and articulate under the leading (or hopelessly vague) questions. Others are tongue-tied and reticent, yet ferocious on the track, performing before a crowd.

They’ve all got very high mileage in a literal way. Many have international experience and have competed at the highest levels in their sport, even if only to see how far they still have to go. And they’re all so different when they come off the track. Eventually the only number we can compare them by is a finishing time, and even those are so slippery and condition-dependent that we end up with just the individuals, the personalities.

That’s where we end up in inter-personal relationships, too, isn’t it? She did say, bad reasons.

There. Heavy thinking over for the day. Track tonight. Writing afterward. Flying early in the morning. I should do some packing now.