The Boredom of Ramfree17

Not to be taken at face value

Nov 26

ErinGarbage 4 Comments

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. ~Mark Twain

Never ask a woman her age as that is considered as impolite. I can’t remember the first time I have heard that phrase but it provides a very convenient way for women to evade answering the dreaded question.

My manager celebrates her thirty-ish birthday today, and she says that she is proud of her age. Yeah right, which makes me wonder why she sometimes rounds off her birthday to the nearest tenth position. 🙂 In her defense, she does admit to her age after some time. She says only people afraid of looking their age are those who evade answering their true age, and she is “blessed” with a baby-face that does not show her real age.

At this point I am stumped as I hear the same thing from my wife. She asks me from time to time if she looks her age. My wife and I are already approaching the big three-oh, although age is a somewhat touchy subject for us since my wife is older than me by one or two years depending on the month that the subject is brought up. I don’t really care about the age difference (when you love somebody, you love them for who they are and not for anything else) but the impish side of me cannot let it pass to use it as a platform for launching a tirade of personal jokes. It usually gets me some bruises on my forceps but the smiles and laughters we share afterwards is all worth it. 🙂

Back to the topic of looking their age, how does one really gauge the standard of how each age bracket should look like? I am pretty bad with remembering faces more so with describing them so I am not very credible with this topic. However I am curious on what certain ages should really look like. I think I can distinguish the “bata” (kid) and “dalaga/binata” (adolescent) look fairly well. It would be easy to assume that once a person looks like they have lost that adolescent look then they are in their twenties. Wrinkles are usually associated with the forties although our polluted environment can pretty much speed up the arrival of wrinkles. White hair are usually attributed to people in their fifties, and the amount of white hair, or receding hairlines, are used to gauge people in their sixties and onward.

But what about the people in their between the age of 25 and 35? What distinguishing facial attributes can be used to say that they are in their thirties? I have been thinking about it and I cannot pin down a single quality that would be definitive in classifying a stranger into this mysterious age group. Most of the people who know me have been pegging me in the thirties group. Even our close friends usually mistake me as older than my wife. Does that mean that I am mature looking than my wife? The closest thing I can surmise with the thirties assumption is that I have already lost whatever, if any, boyish feature my face once possessed. Any attempts to rekindle that boyish aura ends up with me looking like a retardate. 😀 Only a handful people are close enough to see that side of me so I am pretty fine with looking like a retard from time to time.

To make the age-classification game harder, there is that abomination called makeup. I know some women who looks very different when they have nothing on their face that you would do a double-take when the difference hits you. It is a seldom occurrence wherein makeup would turn an ugly duckling into a swan but when it does I feel sad. I am sad because it means that the elation brought by the alteration is something that is not real and will fade away very soon. Makeup is something that I can’t really appreciate (not because I don’t use it and I am a man). Or maybe I have this idealistic standard for the people I know. I usually associate makeup with “fake”-ness especially if it is very noticeable (aka thick application). I always admire women who wear very minute or no makeup at all. Those women are confident and comfortable with how they look. If you have to resort to using artificial things to “enhance” your looks and “boost” your confidence level then there is something intrinsically wrong with your outlook in life. I feel an extra pity for those who wage a losing, and very expensive, battle with Father Time just to keep on holding on to their presumed youth. Give me an unpainted face anytime and I will spend the time to discern how the imperfections enhance their beauty, rather than giving me a mardi gras visage that I will think ways on unraveling what horrors lies beneath.

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. ~Confucius

ciao!