No longer 15

True, I do occasionally long to be several kilograms lighter, and to be able to run as fast as I could when I was 20, but I am reminded how horrible the teenage years were.

Driving home tonight, I was listening to the Violent Femmes' first album. That album resonated with my adolescent self, as it just sums up that frustration and angst and desire and inability of a regular 15-year-old.

For instance:

Ya know that I want your loving
but my logic tells me it ain't never gonna happen
and then my defenses say I didn't want it anyway
but you know, sometimes I'm a liar.
- Promise, Violent Femmes

Now that I'm happily married, and happily middle-aged (whatever that really means), those days of confusion and despair and conflict seem light-years ago. Not that I am perfect, or have become completely emotionally stable, but I am pleased that I no longer have to wrestle with such turbulent emotions.

I can enjoy the music, but I'm no longer the teenager who needs to find "someone who understands" in a song, because there's not a single other human being I'm connecting with out there.