Timothee Chalamet made me realize I was old

This week I was hit with a realisation that perhaps I’m getting old. Now before you jump in and say “Nonsense, you’re still a spring chicken”, hear me out.

What kicked off this potential revelation?

I was half watching TV and playing on my phone when I heard them doing a review of the new Dune sequel. I read the books in high school (ok if this is the first time you’re reading anything I’ve written, yes I grew up as a nerd), so it piqued my interest. Then they were talking about the performance of Timothée Chalamet. I recognized the name and knew he was also in the new Willy Wonka movie (but also full disclosure, I’ve never watched any of the Wonka movies).

At that point, I realized I had no idea what Timothée Chalamet looked like. I know he’s a big star, I know he’s been in blockbuster movies, but I could not tell you what he looked like.

I have always been pretty good with pop culture and modern entertainment, but I could bump into Mr Chalamet on the street and not have a clue who he was. If it was most big-name actors from the last 40 years, I could probably give you their filmography and tell you if they’d ever appeared in the Star Wars franchise. Now I didn’t even know what a star of blockbusters looked like.

This of course set me on a spiral of self-realisation.

Scrolling through a lot of my younger friend’s social media makes it evident that I don’t know a lot of the big-name bands in the charts these days unless they’re country artists. I’ve been further down the last few months following the deaths of Jimmy Buffett and Toby Keith who were major musical influences in my life.

Even watching the recent Netflix Doco ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’ showed just how many of the musical stars from my youth had left this mortal coil. Those who remained and were interviewed about the recording of We are the World had fallen foul of Mother Time, well except for Lionel Richie, his skin is still as tight as ever. Can you believe he’s had no plastic surgery?

Is my age realization limited to music and movies? Sadly no, and it’s not just that I take a lot longer to recover from one night of more than one whisky or that I get back pain if I sit for too long.

On the drive to work the other day, someone was tailgating me. I didn’t speed up or slow down, I kept the cruise control set to 2 km/hr above the speed limit. They kept sitting there, and I just made sure I had plenty of stopping distance. Then when the road turned into two lanes each way they accelerated sharply and went around. As they passed by, as if to act like I was encouraging them to continue to drive like a moron, I started waving my clenched hand at the window. Only later did I reflect and identify that I was shaking my fist at a Hoon.

On a recent work trip, a colleague confided that they had an upset stomach and suffering from diarrhea. I reached into my bag and plucked out a packet of Gastro Stop. They were extremely grateful but had the look of someone who didn’t understand why I would have that so ready to go. I of course explained that I don’t go anywhere without a packet.

I also had one of my staff mention that they were impressed that I knew so many people in different organizations and I had a good network. I was a little chuffed with that, until another colleague chimed in and said, “Well you’d expect him to know more people, he is 150 years old!”

For the record, I am not a day over 149!

I guess all that's left from here is to pick out a nice nursing home and plan for my retirement, maybe even my funeral.