It's Sad (So Sad), So Sad, It's a Sad, Sad Situation...

...and it's getting more and more absurd.

Okay, not really, but it's hard to age gracefully when everyone is so damn young. Witness:

This weekend we hoofed it over to the valley for my niece's (on the SU's side) high school graduation party. One might think that the difficult part of this situation was being surrounded by 18-year-old girls in their party frocks. It was decidedly not. And this is because I do not wax nostalgic for the days when I didn't realize I was wearing too much make-up, my hair was hilariously fussy, and I was clearly—oh, so clearly—not yet comfortable in my own skin.

No, friends, the difficult part was engaging in a bit of small-talk conversation with my other niece's twenty-something boyfriend. The two of us, you see, were working the service-side of the buffet table because the two of us, you see, know how to make ourselves valuable at a party in which immediate family should not have to do such things. Good skill.

Anyways, some enterprising soul had created a CD of songs loosely based around the theme of...let's see...friendship and bright futures. And so it came to pass that the opening bars of Journey's seminal "Don't Stop Believing" suddenly blasted from the sound system.

"Great song," offered the twentysomething niece's twentysomething boyfriend.

"Oh, yeah. I love this song," I said. I plopped a Mediterranean chicken kebab on a teenage girl's plate. She snapped her gum. "I saw this concert."

"You did? Really? Man, I wanted to go."

"Are you serious? You must have been like 6 years old or something."

"No, they had a concert in LA last month!" announced the young buck.

"Dude," I said. I plopped another kebab down on some girl's plate. She said oh, no thanks and then I un-plopped it. "I saw the tour when the album actually came out.

"Oh."

What's that sound? It's the sound of me. Sighing.