I’m not much for poetry, yet for the past few months T.S. Elliot’s famous refrain from The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, “I grow old … I grow old …/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” has been bouncing in my head like the Baby Shark chorus. True, there have been other times when I was reminded that, like Prufrock, I was getting on in my years, like when I tried to renew my passport and they told me my photo didn’t look recent enough, or that time when I got the overwhelming urge to wear a trilby. But lately this feeling has become constant. Here’s what I suspect is going on:

1. I got a new job

I was surrounded by younger colleagues at my previous job, too, but there were enough Gen X peers around to make it okay. Now my team is much smaller, and I have to accept that most of them were still in diapers–or in utero–when I finished grad school. I was tempted to drop hints that I suffer from a premature aging disease, but there are always tells. Like when I shared a story about meeting Steve Buscemi and they had to google him to find out who he was. Or when I have to google their celebrities. Can you believe Millie Bobby Brown is only one person, and she’s not related to Whitney Houston?

2. New York got a little snow

This February New York had two snowstorms. Measly snowstorms, but the first we’ve had in two years. However, what made me feel old is not global warming, but remembering that in the middle of the blizzard of 1995 I was willing to trek all over Brooklyn in search of cigarettes, and now, with the tiny amounts of snow we got, I was reluctant to even open the door to pick up my mail. If they’re not emailing me then they can damn wait till spring.

3. My shoulders hurt

I started feeling severe pain every time I stretched out my right arm. At first I figured it would improve on its own, but when I started struggling to put on a shirt–and going shirtless at my age is not an option–I finally went to the doctor. It turns out I have frozen shoulder, an auto-immune disorder that usually affects women 50 and older. And when my left arm started hurting, too, I started worrying that I have two frozen shoulders. I’m not just getting old, I’m getting two-middle-aged-women old.

4. I shaved

My wife and I were visiting Portugal, and the middle-aged Americans and British men we saw there all looked like me: bald with salt-and-pepper beards. In a hasty attempt to differentiate myself from my fellow tourists I did something stupid–I shaved. I’ve told myself again and again I shouldn’t, but like a third-rate mythological character I’m doomed to forget and repeat the same mistake through eternity. I took advantage of the hotel’s complimentary “shaving kit” (a cheap razor and some ineffective shaving cream) and after 30 minutes of hacking away I made the grim discovery that the face under my stubble was not the face I remembered from 10 years ago, but something more akin to a sack of walnuts. I would hope recording this here could stop me from doing this again, but a Greek tragedy wouldn’t be a tragedy without a large dose of inevitable pathos.

5. My left eyelid started drooping

I’ve noticed that when I’m tired my left eyelid starts to droop. At first I thought it was good news because maybe it would distract people from the horrible bags under my eyes. Then as it got more pronounced I tried to tell myself it was kind of cool because Thom Yorke also has one. But since my coworkers have probably never heard of Thom Yorke, I finally looked up how to fix the drooping. Turns out I’m supposed to exercise my eyelid, so now I’m wondering if it would be easier to just get my right eyelid to also start drooping. And I’m wondering if Thom Yorke’s shoulders ever hurt.