Today is my birthday. Every year I come up with a kind of slogan for my age. For example, “35: Doin’ fine!”. They’re stupid and they only emerge after a few months, when it finally hits me that I am that age. My slogan for 37 has been “37: Big number!”. To get it right, you have to imagine the “big number” being yelled in a Dr. Frink/Jerry Lewis voice.

It’s not that 37 itself was that big of a number, but it was a big number relative to other pivotal ages. Both age 17 and 22 were big years for me and 37 is 20 years from 17 and 15 years from 22. Hence, big number.

What I’ve noticed lately is that I’m starting to feel my age. My friends want to argue against this observation because I’m perfectly healthy and get plenty of exercise. One snarked, “So that means you only bike for 60 miles instead of 100?” (FWIW I’ve only ridden 100 miles once, ever.)

It’s hard to describe what feeling my age really is. Sometimes it’s a vague feeling that I shouldn’t be expected to do something, especially physically demanding. Sometimes it’s the feeling that I’d like to not make any decisions or answer any questions for like one fucking day without it creating a problem. Sometimes it’s feeling like my authority should have automatically cleared some bullshit away.

This could all be described as an entitled attitude. Maybe it is. At least this particular sense of entitlement is new. I don’t think I’ve arrived here because of some intellectual or logical line of thinking.

I think something in my body has slowed down and my attitude adjusted to compensate. This is not the wisdom of age, but rather the rationalizing of a barely-perceptible decline.

The decline could be temporary. After all, it was a very difficult year. Multiple medical emergencies in the family. A toddler whose surprising strength and will is imposed on us all. To say little of the uncertainty created by an erratic federal government (talk about declining with age!).

Anyway, this concludes year 37 for me. It wasn’t all bad, but it was kind of a beating. Now I’m going to eat some ice cream and go to sleep. Being 38 is tomorrow’s problem.

I went in to GameStop today because I needed a sanity check. I recently saw the game Dragon Quest 5 for the Nintendo DS for sale at Half Price Books and it had a price tag of $170. That’s… a lot of money. That’s 4-5 times what I’d expect to pay for a used Nintendo DS game from a popular series. But I thought, maybe my expectations are wrong about this.

So I asked the guy working at GameStop for a consultation, to look up how much they would sell the game for if they had it. He looked it up and, if they had it, it would be $109. That’s less than the $170 from Half Price Books, but it’s still the same order of magnitude. I asked why this game was so costly. Was it a special edition? Game cartridge made out of titanium?

Basically, it’s just a popular series of games and there’s no remakes of the game so the only way to play it is on the Nintendo DS. And this is what the market value is for that.

That’s uncomfortable. And it doesn’t jibe with my experience of buying second-hand games. Since I bought my Nintendo 3DS last year, I’ve done really well on the price of games, especially compared to the $60-70 of new Switch/2 games. Honestly I’ve had a great run of getting cheaper games by playing 3-5 years behind the latest-and-greatest (I must have saved $1k buying used Wii U games).

A $100+ game feels antithetical to what I’m doing here. I might eventually break down, accept my fate, and spend big bucks on used games, but I’m not there yet.

I’m reading Jingo, my fourth Discworld book, and loving it. All the Discworld books I’ve read feature main characters that are lazy, barely competent, set in their ways, reluctant participants, who only have brief flashes of self-awareness. I find all that highly relatable.

Okay let’s try this whole having-a-personal-website thing one more time. I’m thinking a microblog that looks like old Twitter. This time I’ll really put the Jeff Meyerhoff back in jeffmeyerhoff.com.