The other day when I went to the chemist to fill my rather large prescription for the dreaded chest infection I had acquired, the pharmacist asked me if I was on any other medications. As I started to reel off the multiple medications that are currently improving my health and way of life I started to realise that I sounded old. Like proper old.

“I sound like an old woman” I joked to the barely adolescent pharmacist.
“That’s okay” he responded flatly, although I could clearly tell that he was thinking “that’s because you are an old woman”.

I don’t feel old (apart from when I have a chest infection) but when I think about it there are a fair few things that point to me actually being older than I think:

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This is not the first time this has happened to me: I get sick before I go on holiday. Some would say it’s psychosomatic, to them I would so psychosomatic, shmychosomatic, I feel awful. So awful that I went one step further than Googling my symptoms and actually made an appointment to see my doctor. On my  first visit she  told me I should rest and drink plenty of fluids and on my second visit, when I felt infinitely worse, she made a weird shape with her mouth when she listened to my chest and PATTED ME before prescribing anti-biotics, puffers, nasal sprays and various other goodies. I like to think her patting me was a way of saying “sorry I dismissed your cough on your first visit”.
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Allow me to take you for a journey into the world of the professional Sharpest Pencil, the consummate corporate professional who consults to business about important matters like social media, seo practices and getting more readers to your site.

Let’s take yesterday for example. I had a meeting with the Marketing and Communications Manager of a huge media outlet.  Proper huge – like household name kind of huge.  I got myself out of pajamas and into the city right on time for the meeting so everything was going well.
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I had made up my mind that I was not going to cry at my son’s Bar Mitzvah. I was going to be big and strong and ridiculously mature and together and not a drop of water would fall from my eye all weekend.

I figured that I had made great headway into this dry eye territory by exhausting every single tear I had in the lead up to the occasion. Gathering photos to display on the night had taken me right back to the very first days of Little Pencil’s life and I shed a fair few tears about all those memories (where a few means about a hundred litres), I had read my speech aloud, in front of the mirror, in a myriad of accents with tears and without tears so many times I just “knew” that it wouldn’t make me cry, I had watched countless rehearsals of Little Pencil doing his thing and I had hardened myself to the point that if a tear came to the surface I could ice it with thoughts of algebra. A nifty trick you should try.
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I am a particularly sentimental person and now that my son is on the verge of adulthood, well at least according to Jewish tradition, I am almost sprouting sentimentality from my pores.

I’m feeling like on old woman who talks with an aged accent about when her son was just a baby or when, a million years ago, she was just a girl herself who roamed the wilds of Africa, although the wildest place she ever roamed in Africa was the corridors of her high school.
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About a month or so ago I was feeling very sanctimonious. I had announced to the world that I was giving up Diet Coke. I felt like one of the healthy people as I reveled in my new-found hatred of drinking “black acid”.

As I scrolled through the scores and scores of articles online I felt better and better about my decision to give up. Diet Coke has been linked to a variety of medical problems, everything from weak bones to kidney dysfunction, acid reflux to reproductive disorders. Researchers have compared the effect of the acid in diet drinks to the use of methamphetamine. I have seen Breaking Bad, I don’t want those teeth.
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I am not a beach person. I hate heat, sand and crowds in no particular order.

School holidays in Sydney are a particularly hard time for me because my son loves the beach, in fact he loves the heat, sand and crowds in no particular order.
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I have completely misplaced my memory.

This has come to my attention once again since my friend Kerri Sackville started a little blogging game called #MyFirst. Every Monday she provides a prompt for herself and other bloggers to write about their first experiences in a raft of different subjects. I really want to join in but I can’t because I cant remember anything.
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