Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Getting older

I've been ill for a week or so and not slept very much. I'm medicated for it now and will try to sleep soon, but since I am alone and lonely these days (yes, I'm feeling sorry for myself, but that's a temporary condition. Lest someone stumble on this by accident, I will fill in the backstory that I am a military wife with a deployed husband, children who are with the exes for the summer, and as much social life as life allows, so I'm not holed up in my room not doing anything about it--just alone in too much house and missing my family, and I'll be better when I get past this bug)... Anyway, even when I am not feeling sorry for myself, when I am alone I tend to sleep with the TV on for company. So I put on the X-Files, having seen everything on Nick at Nite a lot of times. i caught it from the pre-theme song intro, and I realized two things:

1. They're playing the "Beyond the Sea" episode. This was one of my friend and sometime boyfriend K.E.'s favorite episodes when he got me hooked on the show in high school. It's been long enough that I checked the title on the guide, but I still remembered.

2. Gillian Anderson was younger then than I am now. Since I am relatively certain this was a rerun when I watched it about 13 years ago, and I just verified on IMDB that she is, in fact, only a few months more than ten years older than I am (and almost exactly five years, one month older than my current husband, and either or both of us would, in fact, "hit that" if the lady were present and willing), she was significantly younger than I am now. (Verified: the episode aired in January of 1994; she'd have been 25 when it aired and most likely when it filmed as well).

I have no idea why this suddenly occurred to me or bothered me; she just always seemed so adult to me as a teenager, closer to the parents of the teens on sitcoms than to the teens, and just a glance just now showed me that at the beginning of the series, she was very young indeed.

I must be getting old.

No comments: