Very early into my Jewish conversion journey, while we were discussing my problematic family history and the problems that led to in my adult life, my rabbi posed a question that floored me. He said, “What if there isn’t a problem? What if the only problem is that you keep thinking there’s a problem? None of us are as perfect as we’d like to be.”

My substance-abusing siblings in childhood led to me in a codependence 12-step group as an adult–not to mention years of anger, knee-jerk emotional reactions, and control freakiness. After a few years, I had finally reached a plateau in my step work where, for the first time, I found myself able to reach out to others in a healthy way and begin to make peace with my past. At the time, my rabbi’s idea that maybe there wasn’t a problem wasn’t an idea I found legitimate.

It took me a while to see his point. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a problem. The point was, there’s always a problem. Everyone has a problem. Life is a problem. From time to time love is a problem, family is a problem. Nothing’s ever perfect or meant to be. And that’s okay. That’s normal, the baseline of life. In other words, I spent most of my adult life making a problem out of the fact that I had a normally problematic life.

I’m not the only person ever to have had a screwed up childhood, to have taken a long time to figure out how to manage the aftermath of it, or to have ended up in a recovery program. Nor am I the first person to be fatter than I want to be, or, at times, lonelier. I don’t have the license on making less money than would be convenient for my creditors, or on being less responsive to my friends than would be helpful to their needs or my heart. It all comes and it goes. Some days, and some moments, are better than others.

An important Jewish lesson in the past few months for me has been the instruction on how to perform tikkun olam, or repair of the world–a central Jewish concern, found in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) tractate of the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism:

It is not your duty to complete the work. Neither are you free to desist from it.

The instruction concerns how we should live with others on a shared planet. But to my mind, it equally applies to how we should live with ourselves. In both cases: don’t fret because problems exist and you can’t fix them completely; just make sure you’re doing your best to solve them. Being part of the solution is a commandment. Knowing the whole solution and every solution, that’s God’s job.

The more my rabbi’s question sank in, the more I realized how much of a project I had made out of not having a perfect life. That doesn’t mean I desist from working through the emotional damage of my childhood. It does, however, mean I don’t need to feel broken about it for the rest of my life. It was with this realization that I found the permission to finally let go emotionally on my Jewish journey. Worship and prayer, getting more involved in synagogue life, and making friends at temple all started to click the moment I stopped criticizing myself for not being able to wave a magic wand and fix all my life problems.

Over the years, there are many avenues I’ve followed down to try to gain a sense of wholeness, peace, and for want of a better term, un-brokenness. Many places I’ve looked for a solution to all my problems. Relationships. Buddhism. Moving back to New York. None of it has been very successful or has lasted for very long. It was the surprise of my life to find my long-sought sense of normalcy in Judaism.

Funny thing, Judaism doesn’t actually solve any of my problems, which had been my former litmus test for a normal life. It does, however, offer me guidance on how to live an ethical yet normally imperfect life in a normally imperfect world. It helped me to stop obsessing about the destination and instead–as long as I do my best–to be okay with the journey. And with myself.

How perfect is that?

(Photo credit: Devyn Caldwell.)

It wasn’t news. Over the past several months of economic H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, as I’ve struggled to gig enough to keep a roof over me and my cat’s collective head, I’ve found a fulfilling–if ultimately humiliating–way to deal with the stress of an unknown financial future.

I’ve rediscovered my childhood comfort food (again), and taken advantage of it at every affordable opportunity. Butterfingers? Mallowmars? Hormel corned beef hash? Pop Tarts straight out of the box? How I’ve missed you so. I can’t tell you how much relinquishing myself into carb and sugar whore-dom over you have brought me peace of mind these past few months.

Sure, with each passing plate I was becoming progressively winded walking up the ‘L’ stairs at State/Lake and tugging a little tighter on my $19 Old Navy allegedly leather belt. But I’ve been here before. I figured as soon as warm weather hit I’d be walking everywhere anyway and it would all even out, so why worry?

It’s not like it was going to impact my love life. Dumped or not, for the past 24 years, I’ve happily dated one type of guy and they’ve gravitated towards me: husky ones. I’ve never been a card-carrying member of the so-called gay bear community, but I’ve certainly dated my way through its ranks.

So imagine my surprise surfing through Bear411 last Sunday when one of them said to me, “Dude, change your picture. You’re fatter than that!”

Truth be told, I am about five pounds fatter than my headshot, but it’s not the rotund picture this guy was painting.

“When we met you had three chins! I thought you were more honest than that on here.”

I didn’t bother to fight the urge not to tell him that when we had met in person a few weeks before I found it hard to believe he was sober or had recently bathed, and he didn’t respond back after that. But considering the source or not, the exchange was instructive.

I don’t think of myself as any larger or smaller than the average Chicagoan. Chicago locals reading this may think that was my first mistake. Still, hearing those words was enough to make me get on my scale again–and that was enough to make me realize that it’s time to get on Marina City’s treadmills again.

Not because I think crackhead-boy is correct in his appraisal of my waistline. But I’d like to get things in check before the sober among my dating pool start snickering. After all, I’m still groping towards economic solvency. Right now, I’d prefer my dates buy me dinner.

Not offer me a free day at their health club.

Yesterday I began exploring ADHD “paralysis”, a sense of overwhelm unique to people with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder that freezes us in place and robs us of economic productivity by causing us to hyperfocus on fear of failure. As promised for Valentine’s Day, today I want to talk about how that fear of failure, never far from the surface for ADHDers on the best of days, works to sabotage our love relationships, too.

Of course, we ADHDers like everyone else do our best to present ourselves as well-adjusted, minimally baggaged individuals. After all, who in their right mind wants to share with employers, colleagues, friends, and lovers that deep down, you really feel they’re wrongly involved with a perennial screw-up? ADHDers can spend their whole lives fighting this single inner demon and still never fully feel they’ve gotten ahead of it.

When applied to the dating arena, it’s almost as if ADHDers set an inner egg timer the moment they step out their front doors on a first date. Before you know you have ADHD, you blame your dating partners who never seem to want to stick around in usually tumultuous relationships with you for very long. Post-diagnosis and armed–or so you think–with meds and coping strategies, often ADHDers continue to wonder why their love relationships continue to end.

Of course, years of barely self-aware, distractable behavior don’t end overnight. We ADHDers know that. But it’s a lot easier for our brains to hyperfocus on the consistent message the world keeps sending us through our interpersonal relationships: go away, buster. It’s not me, it really is you.

ADHD message boards are full of stories from men and women who mourn how hard the disorder can make it to find your way finally into a committed relationship (for examples, see here and here.) It’s not that we’re inherently un-datable. (At least not post-diagnosis, anyway.) It’s that ADHDers rarely offer themselves the same generosity, kindness, and understanding regarding their symptoms that they expect from the other people in their lives.

If we’re really doing our best to manage our symptoms, who’s to say who’s at fault when a relationship ends? Sometimes it really is us. Sometimes it’s them. Sometimes it’s circumstance.

When we don’t remind ourselves on a daily basis that success in love–and in life in general–really is possible for ADHDers to achieve, we have a tendency to act as if it’s not. Post-diagnosis, those times when we truly do have a hand in helping cut short a love relationship, the failure probably has more to do with an inner decision to surrender to that damnable expectation of failure than from our actual symptoms, as annoying as others may find them.

I speak from experience. Every relationship I’ve ever been in since I started dating at the age of 16 was ended by my partners, not by me. Before I knew I had ADHD, I blamed them for the tumult and drama of my short-lived relationships…and wondered what was wrong with me for attracting such unavailable men. That explains a good deal of the drama surrounding my breakup with now-NYC-based photoblogger (and friend), Devyn.

After learning about my ADHD, the tumult and drama in my love relationships continued, sometimes with unabated ferocity, sometimes with a good measure of newly found self-awareness. But so far, with the same unenduring nature as before. I know it’s not just me anymore. But like any good ADHDer, I still find it hard to shut down the persistent inner voice telling me I’m a total hot mess. What on earth would I do without it’s familiar refrain?

Dating Pastry Chef Chris, that inner voice was more of a whisper, though I still wondered when I was going to make the relationship self-destruct. Dating Doctor Dementia, who by all objective measures was a total screw-up himself, I wondered even more strongly what I was going to do to ruin the relationship.

When Overly Frank dumped me last month in an IHOP in Boystown at 1:30 in the morning (pathetic on the face of it, I know), I could barely hear his words over the veritable and never-ending scream of my inner failure-voice. The next day, I sat with him on my couch and told him about that voice. Until then, I’d never really shared my hidden monologue of low expectations with anyone.

The talk was enlightening. Our breakup wasn’t just my fault, of course. Frank and I are simply a better match as friends. But talking to him helped me see how much I’d given into to my classically low expectations, and how that added unnecessary, ADHD-infused friction into our relationship.

The moral of this story is we ADHDers need to allow ourselves–force ourselves, if necessary–to treat ourselves with kindness and a big, fat open heart when it comes to our normal, human foibles, of which ADHD symptoms are certainly a part. Staying as aware and in the moment as possible and reminding ourselves that happiness in love–and every other domain of life–is inherently possible is of critical importance to avoid giving into our deeply seated low expectations about the future.

After all, if my ADHD life is going to be played out as a foregone conclusion, I’d rather that conclusion be a happy one. Wouldn’t you? Or as I put it to Frank last night over dinner, “So it wasn’t my ADHD…Hey! I forgot my pickle!”

(Photo: It’s always quitting time somewhere on the planet. My workaholic boyfriend’s windowsill of satellite-office time clocks.)

It wouldn’t be so bad if I was the only one totally pwned in this relationship, but did my cat have to be brought into it, too?

When I first met Overly Frank online in the wake of my relationship with the dreaded Doctor Dementia, it was only to have something to do that I agreed to meet one day in July. The recently relocated Texan and I were headed to the Lincoln Park Zoo when I met him outside his Lincoln Park apartment. His first words to me were something on the order of, “Let me tell you why I think the Chicago Public Library has the worst customer service on the planet.”

He proceeded to recount the tale of his day’s annoyances and tribulations starting with the CPL and moving on from there, while I followed him to the giraffe exhibit wondering how to politely excuse myself. He told his backstory too: a conservative-raised, small-city southerner who one day woke up in the midst of an Oklahoman oil-industry IT job and decided he wanted to live in a blue state.

I had to respect the contradiction in that. Take me, for instance. I’m a overly frank person myself, at least on the blogosphere. People always tell me I’m a lot nicer than they expect when they meet me in person. I hate to be pinned down, I know I’m both of those things: obnoxious and sweet.

When you get right down to it, my frank nature is as much defense mechanism as stick-to-my-guns blogger prowess. I want to tell you exactly what I think. And I want to keep you at arms length, to insulate myself in case you reject me by dismissing my point of view. By the end of our visit to the zoo, I realized just how much Frank and I really had in common.

In the past few months of dating, it’s been like a tightly danced tango. Backwards then forwards, holding each other close out of affection as much as from the strategic tactic of keeping potential enemies close to you. Liking each other a lot–especially at arm’s length.

What do you know, it’s working. It’s actually the first time I’ve been slow and measured in a budding relationship in my life, and that’s probably why. Finding myself moving forward with a boyfriend out of a restrained approach rather than a headlong rush was totally unexpected for me.

So was becoming the de facto cat sitter for Frank’s lately frequent back-to-Texas work trips. We scheduled a play date to try and pair up my nine-year-old death-defying male cat, Camões, with his 11-year-old, declawed grand dame, Ryza. One hiss from the toothless wonder and Cam ran to cower behind the couch. Yet they both kept sniffing around each other from a minimum safe distance and, more importantly, both were still alive when we returned from an hour’s walk around the Loop, so there may be something there with those two after all.

Frank and I bitch-slap each other in a similarly passive-aggressive way. We have a rule: no finger-thumping above the neck. But points are awarded for suitably speechlessness-inducing putdowns and surprise-inducing tickle attacks. Occasionally, we even look at each other fondly, even in the presence of my Lido’s Caffé coffee klatsch confidantes. Privately, hugs and sex have been known to happen.

Then it’s back to our respective corners. But each time we retreat to them, those corners seem to get a little bit closer. If that keeps up, at some point there’s not going to be anywhere left to run from the unexpected romance that keeps on growing despite all our best efforts.

And if that happens, God help all four of us. Two bitchy gay men together is discourteous enough. But two bitchy gay men and their equally passive-aggressive cats? Why, that’s the stuff Logo shows are made of…

(Photo: “I’m tellin’ ya’, dude, there’s still time for her to call.”)

“Don’t worry, I’ve done this before and they almost always call,” said Nick, announcing his decision to leave his number for our waitress. Overly Frank and I were less than eager to witness the passive-aggressive, likely-to-go-down-in-flames example of heterosexual courtship. We were more immediately curious as to why we were staring into yet another complimentary cookie sundae that had just been plopped on our table.

The same thing happened the last time Frank and I ate at R.J. Grunt’s, the mother restaurant of Chicago themed-eatery juggernaut Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, a week before. We assumed the previous free dessert was the work of the waiter who came up to us to say hi after recognizing us both from Bear411. This time, the host answered out quizzical gazes. “We bring cookie sundaes for every person who eats here for the first time,” he told us. “That’s why we ask if you’ve been here before when we seat you.”

That made sense. I’ve loved Grunt’s burgers and malts for years, but on our prior visit I remembered Frank telling the waitress it was his first time. This time, it was Nick’s turn to be a newbie.

“I knew you’d come in handy,” I told him.

“People say that to me all the time,” Nick replied.

I met the 25-year-old Cincinnati expat on the ‘L’ one evening in late June. He noticed I was using a 3G iPhone and came over to show me his 3GS. From zero to 60 words per minute in no time flat, he launched into an instant conversation about tech specs, how much he’d liked his first two months in the Windy City, and whether the Taste of Chicago was still open that day. I did my best to ignore his lack of a left hand while I tried to figure out whether he was coming on to me. Given his rapid-fire choice of subject matter, I had a feeling he was a fellow ADDer.

The quarter hour Nick spent trying to decide between two hamburgers at Grunt’s left little room for ADD doubt. “If you don’t make up your mind soon,” I growled at the 15-minute mark, “you’re gonna lose your other hand.”

“How did you lose the first one?” Frank asked.

“Bar fight,” Nick lied.

“Birth defect,” I said as I closed Nick’s menu. “But Nick likes to make up alternative stories to see what he can get people to believe. He had Chris thinking he lost his hand in a sword fight.”

“Sorry, guys,” Nick apologized. “I’m not usually so indecisive.” I’d eaten with Nick in restaurants before. How he managed to get that sentence out with a straight face I’ll never know. “It’s just that our waitress is so hot. Did you see her?”

The new boyfriend and I just stared at the Cincinnatian without saying a word.

“Oh, right,” Nick finally clued in. “Well trust me, she’s pretty.”

She was. Pretty busy. Pretty older. And if I bet money on these sort of things, pretty much out of Nick’s league.

Nick went on. “I’m gonna leave her my number.” You have to love the persistence of single straight guys.

“I thought you hated women,” I asked.

“Not all women,” Nick replied. “Just the ones who’ve burned me in the past and the ones who never call me back and the ones who lie to me. Like a lot of the women in Lincoln Park.” Nick hasn’t been a Chicagoan long enough to know the word, Trixies. “You know, social climbers. Back stabbers.” He went in for the kill. “Bitches.”

Frank opened his mouth as if to start speaking then closed it just as quickly. Like a carp coming to the surface to gasp for air, I’ve come to know it as Frank’s trademark expression for signifying speechlessness.

Nick went on. “Now our waitress, she’s not like that. I’m sure of it. So I’m gonna leave her my number. Not directly, since she’s busy here at work. But I’ll write it on my check when we leave.”

Uh-huh. Nick’s edgy, lovelorn diatribe seemed the verbal version of a crooked wig, so Frank and I just left it alone and continued with our dinner. I had a feeling Frank was hoping Nick’s ADD would kick in and he’d forget to pass his love note. I, on the other hand, sharpened my inner pencil and leaned in a little closer to Nick to make sure I took accurate notes.

When the unexpected dessert came, Nick didn’t let me down. He looked right at the target of his affections and asked, “Honey, can we have separate checks?”

“It’s not that I want a girlfriend,” Nick told us as he wrote down his name and number. “I really just want a relationship for the evening. It’s easier that way.”

“Do you think that’s all she’s going to want, too?” I asked.

“We’ll see,” Nick replied. “Fingers crossed.”

Frank and I wished him luck. “Now,” I said, “let’s get the hell out of here before she reads that thing.”

As the three of us headed up Clark Street back to Frank’s house, I had to ask. “So Nick,” I said, “what makes you so sure she’s going to call? You know, for my blog audience?”

“Hey, it’s almost always worked before,” Nick replied as if he were stating the obvious. “Sexy babes like that always want a piece of the good stuff.”

I didn’t have to turn my gaze in his direction to know that Frank was rolling his eyes. I continued to press. “But are you sure you’ve covered all the bases?” I had a reason for asking. I knew there was one small thing Nick was overlooking.

“Yes, all the bases, man,” he replied in the coolest tones he could muster. “All the bases.”

If it hadn’t been for Nick’s ongoing air of douchebaggery glee, I would have taken far less pleasure in my following words.

“OK,” I said. “But since the waitress didn’t actually see you write your number down…” I paused to watch Frank’s eyes light up. Nick still couldn’t see where I was headed. “…out of the three of us,” I continued, “how will she know you’re the one who left it?”

Nick’s face made an almost audible thud as it hit the pavement. “Well, um, wait a second…,” he stammered, before quickly realizing there was only one possible course for his reaction to take. “Oh…dammit!” he yelled into the Lincoln Park evening. “Dammit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

“What are you gonna do?” I said to Nick. My question was meant as consolation, but he took me at my word.

“Well, do I think I should go back there and tell her it was me?” he asked. “I think I should go back. You think? Yeah, I think I should go back.”

“Don’t you dare,” Frank warned as Nick started to turn around. “Michael and I have to eat there, you know. Don’t embarrass us any further than absolutely necessary.”

“I guess all I need to do is come with a title for my blog post now,” I said while Nick smirked in my general direction.

“Give it some time,” Frank suggested. “I mean, I know you have your punch line now, but judging by the baseline of his actions thus far, aren’t you just a little curious to see what else Nick might be capable of before the evening’s over?”

“Well,” I said to them both. “If nothing else, I probably should hold off on the blog post until we see whether the waitress calls or not. It’s only fair to give Nick the benefit of the doubt.”

“No, man,” Nick moaned. “I totally screwed this up. She’s not gonna call. She’s just not. Fuck.”

“Now you don’t know that,” said Frank. “Actually, she might call. Didn’t your check have the free sundae on it? If the waitress remembers you were the new guy tonight, then when she sees the sundae comped on your check-”

Nick didn’t wait for Frank to finish. “Yes. Yes! It was on my check!” Nick exclaimed. “The sundae was on my check! Oh, thank God. That’s how she’ll know it’s my number on there. That’s how she’ll know it’s me! Hurray! See, man, all the bases! I knew it! I’m in!”

Nick hurried on ahead while Frank and I slowed down to shake our heads. And then the cherry hit the top of the sundae. “Oh my God, Frank,” I exclaimed. “He’s skipping.”

Frank and I let Nick have his moment. As time eventually did tell, we knew the waitress wouldn’t call, but no matter. We were too engrossed in the manic display unfolding before our eyes. As Nick continued to happily hoot and holler over an event that any rational person would never expect to come to pass, Frank and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe. After all, we knew we were listening to something never before heard by human ears.

The sound of one hand clapping.

(Photo: “This better not be going on your blog.”)

When Overly Frank adopted olderly Ryza from PAWS Chicago earlier this month, the cuddly interaction between Oklahoma expat and 11-year-old feline made me realize how much I’d been taking my own lifelong companion for granted. His life, that is.

Camões never saw the now-ongoing love-fest coming. For nine years, my Portuguese-monickered danger cat and I have been through a lot together. So many apartments. So many times around the futon chasing a ball of string. So many broken Christmas tree ornaments.

Our relationship is like my ADD attention span, the times I really focus on him come and go like the weather. He deserves more. I do too. Trouble is, my family history doesn’t have a lot to teach about long-term relationships.

It’s no surprise I recently shared with friends the realization that I have no idea how to enter and sustain adult relationships. I call it “The Lonely,” the place I end up inside myself when I’m trumped by my ADD and my codependence. I sit there waiting for my Higher Power to lead me to more stable ground and remind me that the true definition of love is not something I learned in childhood.

Growing up in New York, I never knew my father–either one of them. Not the Irishman with my last name in the black-and-white portrait who allegedly died six months before I was born. Sure as hell not the Puerto Rican border hidden away in the family album with Brillo hair and crooked fingers not at all unlike my own.

A native Manhattanite, my Spanish mom married the Irishman and moved to Queens to get out of her own family’s house and find independence. That’s probably why she raised her kids white-bread American, never teaching us the language of her birth. Imagine her surprise when the Irishman dropped dead of alcoholism in 1964 and a short while later her mother came to retire in the attic apartment.

You’d think she’d have already learned to roll with the punches when she went to the doctor suspecting cancer in 1969 and learned of her unexpected pregnancy. She’d later tell me she cried knowing that it wasn’t a terminal illness responsible for her bodily changes.

By the time I was born–six years after the Irishman died–my brother and sister, both a generation older, were already in the advanced stages of drug abuse and alcoholism. My mother should have known better than to entrust them with the secret of my origins, but given the Irishman’s own addiction, she already had a long head start on codependence, herself.

But my Spanish mother was Catholic enough to feel ashamed at having a child out of wedlock, so a family and a neighborhood were sworn to silence. She sent the upstairs border with whom she had shared what would turn out to be the last sexual experience of her life away and put a dead man’s name on my birth certificate.

I wouldn’t learn the familiar man in the family album was my real father until the age of 24. When the truth finally came out, my mother told me she never loved my father and, after all, my brother and sister weren’t ready for a new one, anyway. She also told me they’d been blackmailing her with the knowledge of my origins for my entire life, seeking money, approval of their eventually uninterrupted drunkenness, and silence for illegal actions. (I remain to this day the only person I know who can claim to have played as a pre-teen on bales of pot hidden in the family house by my sister’s drug-dealer boyfriend.)

When my mother died in 1996, shortly after I fled the family household for the sober urbanity of Brownstone Brooklyn, I thought that was that. Before the funeral, out of resentment at how they had manipulated our mother, I hadn’t had a discussion with my siblings in years. And even then, the closest my sister got to talking to me was the heckling she did from the first pew while I was delivering my mother’s eulogy.

Still, in my mother’s death, I thought I had finally escaped the clutches of my emotionally devastating family environment. As regular readers of this blog know, however, it would take many years of soul-searching, a move across country, and a lifetime of failed relationships for me to realize how damaging my upbringing had actually been.

Damaging enough to keep me from looking for my real father until my thirtieth birthday. Social Security death records told me I’d started my search eleven months too late. Digging through my mother’s effects shortly after, I came across private notes he sent to the woman who didn’t love him. I don’t remember how long I sat there reading and re-reading them.

In my father’s handwriting, they all made one thing clear: he loved her. But he was shut out. He eventually moved to Orange County, California, where he died in Santa Ana on September 29th, 1999. His name was Angelo Oropesa.

Before she died, my mother told me every time she looked at me, her breath was taken away by how much I resembled him. The few photos I have of Oropesa show him with children–my unknown half-brothers. From time to time, I poke around the Internet, seeking them. I probably always will. I doubt I’ll ever find them.

Last week, I went looking again. That search proved surprisingly fruitful, if in an unexpected manner. I ran my own siblings’ names through the Social Security death index.

I learned my sister has been dead for three years.

I doubt she ever let herself be happy. I doubt up until the end at the age of 56 she was ever sober for long. And I doubt my brother was sober enough to try and find me to let me know. I’ve spent many years building an information isolation from the two of them to protect me from their madness. Still, I’m eminently Google-able.

What really strikes me about my sister’s death, though, isn’t the late notice, but the lack of emotional impact the news has had on me. I feel sad that I don’t feel sad at her passing. The most I’ve been able to muster is a sense of sorry when I picture how she must have lived the rest of her life. At one time, I loved her dearly. But I made peace with the destruction my family inflicted on itself a long time ago. And I let go of them a long time ago.

Eventually, no doubt, I’ll find my brother in those death records. In the passing of my family members, what’s truly remarkable is how resilient their ghosts have been. I wish I had the same ability to let them go, too.

Much as I wonder how well “Michael Oropesa” would have fit the face at the top of this blog.

(Photo: I’ll have fries with that…)

So today begins the last year of my youth, and I’m trying to handle it. My body has long told me that year came some time ago. Chronic pain in my right hip and the old man “Uggh!” I groan upon standing suggest a chronological age a bit beyond my newly current 39.

The last age I took so hard was 25. Back then, launching into the latter half of my twenties without having achieved richness or thinness had me feeling like a big loser. Luckily, my self-confidence has improved since then. Now launching into my final 365 days before middle age without yet having achieved richness or thinness just has me feeling old.

“You have to remember, you’re only as old as you feel,” Sole Man Donn told me this afternoon. He meant well.

“I know,” I said. “And I feel old.”

“Well,” Donn continued to the well-worn punch line, “then go feel a 20-year-old.”

Last month, when my newly arrived mid-life crisis first began its sneak-attack, I noted the fallacy of the phalluses of twenty-somethings to adequately assuage the angst of advancing age. Not that I’d throw a fresh, nubile grad-schooler with a high libido and two working hips out of bed. But he’d have to be okay with leaving by eleven–a body this old can no longer survive on six hours a night.

Besides, those youngsters have little respect for their elders these days. Eight days ago, a new friend, the recent Oklahoma-expat, Overly Frank, showed little pity for the quickening pace of my deterioration. Guys who are too young to remember the first run of Star Wars–because they weren’t born yet–rarely do. The blood was spilled in I.M. land…

10:33:38 PM Mike: I’m facing the last 8 days of my life before I begin the last year of my youth.

10:33:56 PM Frank: That is one way of looking at it. Or it could be that your youth ended 3,279 days ago, give or take.

10:36:19 PM Mike: I will, of course, remind you of that smart remark in a few months when you finally turn 30…I believe my card will read, “My condolences to your youth.”

10:38:28 PM Frank: Well, my card to you will say that “age is just a number… expressed, in your case, in scientific notation.”

10:57:27 PM Mike: Next time I see you, should I pat you on the head and sniff for that new-baby smell around your soft spot?

10:57:48 PM Frank: Are you making fun of my hair loss?

10:58:20 PM Mike: No not at all. Though I was thinking in regards to your turning 30 I could just send the flowers to wherever the hair went.

11:00:18 PM Frank: Okay. There were gloves. Not anymore.

Then again, fellow advanced-adult bloggers haven’t been any more comforting. The response from Chicago Tech News publisher Todd Allen when I told him I suspected my mid-life crisis was upon me: “You’re going to look mighty funny buying a Corvette and not knowing how to drive it.”

Rimshot. Try the veal. Remember to tip your waitress.

I’m actually grateful for the humor. I’m surprised how much of a shock the realization of 40 being just around the corner has been to my system. Age really is just a number, and I feel happier, more fulfilled, more on track, and more spiritually aware at 39 than I ever have in my life.

None of that made it any easier to suppress the urge to strangle the barista in the coffee bar where I’m writing this when an hour ago he popped a suicide-by-depressing-lyrics mix of songs by artists trying to save polar bears on late-night TV into the CD player.

The Sinatra at Lido’s Caffé in Oak Park at the weekly coffee klatsch last Tuesday night was a lot more bearable. The new rule being I’m no longer allowed to verbally refer to Doctor Dementia, instead Hoosierella, Pastry Chef Chris, and new pastry-chef-squeeze Bearoke opened the evening wishing good thoughts towards the temporarily incarcerated Gay O.J. (no FIB should ever attempt a low-speed flight from Cheesehead fuzz on a suspended license–’nuff said.)

They needn’t have worried, though. My thoughts last week were stuck on impending AARP membership. But I’d already tread that ground the previous Tuesday, so I covered up my angst by asking how everyone else was doing.

Hoosierella never saw it coming. “Hey,” I asked her, “did you and your husband ever find out if the chocolate-flavored condoms you got from Chris really tasted like they were supposed to?”

As her eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, I continued.

“Well,” I amended myself. “Really, did you ever find out?”

“Be careful how you answer,” Chris interjected. “You know where this conversation is gonna end up.”

“Um, no…” ‘Rella stammered.

“You know what?” Bearoke intervened as a palpable sense of relief went around the far side of the table. “I’m pretty sure they did. One day at work, we had a whole bag of flavored condoms, and we were pretty bored.”

Boy, was that sense of relief misplaced.

“Go on,” I said, as I sharpened my inner pencil to take notes.

“We decided to have a tasting flight,” Bearoke continued as I thanked the Universe on behalf of my byline for friends like these. “We sorted the condoms by type, blew them up like balloons, passed them around the room, and licked them to check for flavor. And surprisingly, most of them tasted just like what the package said.”

“Most of them?” asked Chris.

“Well, except for the cola-flavored condom. That just left a nasty, sweet aftertaste in your mouth.”

“You’ve gotta tell me,” I asked Bearoke, barely able to get the next words out as I descended into tear-inducing laughter. “Was it like a wine tasting? Every time you licked a condom, did you have to spit afterwards?”

“Oh my God,” said Chris to the table, “look at his eyes! He’s writing a headline for his blog as he’s sitting here!”

He knows me well. I’ll let the gang know of their most recent turn on Carless later tonight when they fête me for my birthday at Poor Phil’s prior to our regular appearance at Lido’s. The crowd won’t be as large as the surprise party my old NYC friends threw when they thought I was moving back a couple of years ago. But these local guys have my back, too.

Unfortunately, at my age, I have enough back for all of us. Besides suffering through Sarah McLachlan tunes in public places, I also often sit at my dining table to blog. Recenty, when the aches and pains of age came calling once again as they so often do now, I came to the realization I either need comfier chairs or a fatter ass.

No one should worry about quality time with the birthday boy tonight. Thanks to age’s waning metabolism (yeah, that’s it), these days there’s more than enough of me to go around.