Plus, Maybe He’ll Get Superpowers!

By Evan — — Personal

My cousin just turned 30. Happy birthday, Auros!

Some people hit thirty and begin if it’s time for a mid-life crisis. Not my cousin, though, he’s made of sterner stuff:

I dunno. Isn’t the midlife crisis thing, where you go out and get a car and a girlfriend inappropriate for someone your age, supposed to happen around 50?

I’m not particularly planning to have one of those, though. Nobody in my family seems to have done that…

As far as I know, he’s right, nobody in the family has a ridiculous mid-life crisis car at the moment. Frankly, our extended family is mostly not that into cars. Cars are boxes that take us from point A to point B.

That said, Grandpa Bert’s fast-car genes must still be lurking somewhere in Auros’s genome. Waiting to be exposed to the right trigger, waiting to be expressed…

Maybe we should expose him to radiation or something.

12 thoughts on “Plus, Maybe He’ll Get Superpowers!”

  2. Hey, your software screwed up my link! It converted the underscores in the link into italics tags, and prevented the A HREF stuff from working. 🙁

    *EDIT: Link fixed. Happy Birthday! -Evan*

  4. According to evolutionary psychology, men don’t exactly have midlife crises – women do. A man goes nuts as a result of menopause. Which means that a 25-year-old man dating a menopausal woman will go through exactly the same thing as a 50-year-old man. Buying cars is a display of your reproductive fitness. 🙂

  5. According to evolutionary psychology, men don’t exactly have midlife crises – women do. A man goes nuts as a result of menopause. Which means that a 25-year-old man dating a menopausal woman will go through exactly the same thing as a 50-year-old man. Buying cars is a display of your reproductive fitness. 🙂

  7. Auros: Yup, comments use Markdown instead (see documentation at the bottom of the page). Welcome to 30, it’s a cold, cruel, HTML-less world!

    I was totally thinking about suggesting the Tesla Roadster at your LJ. Great minds think alike… or maybe the Grandpa Bert gene is more powerful than I gave

    Mris: I don’t know if you ever watched *Scrubs*, but in Season 5 there was an amusing [Pilgrim funeral scene along these lines](http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zjb5hyByJbs).

    Jemaleddin: That’s fascinating — do you have a link for that? And does that mean that if I’m 50, and I date a string of 25-year-old women, I’m trying to *avoid* a midlife crisis?

  8. As for cars displaying reproductive fitness, I’m in trouble, since I drive a dinged-up ten-year-old Nissan Sentra. On the other hand, I’ve been investing my money in a major remodel of the master bathroom, and it looks pretty awesome if I do say so myself.

    On the *other* other hand, it’s clearly smarter to display reproductive fitness via your car rather than your bathroom. I’ve done this all backwards. “Hey baby, I know my car is crap — but come home with me anyway, I’ll show you the tile work in the bathroom…” Eh.

  9. I always thought that you were required to get a motorcycle (preferably a hog, probably a Harley) with a leather jacket in order for it to count as a real mid-life crisis.

    I think for 30 any crisis you have should be more sedate…take a trip, start a new career, get a haircut…

  10. Well, I _am_ in the process of starting a new career.

    Evan: Wacky non-standard markup systems are teh sUxx0r. Bring back limited HTML, just neutralize angle brackets that don’t belong to some limited set of permitted tags. That was working fine here for ages! Why spoil it?

  11. Here’s the appropriate snippet – let’s hope i get the Markdown correct:

    | **The midlife crisis is a myth???sort of**

    | Many believe that men go through a midlife crisis when they are in middle age. Not quite. Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it’s not because they are middle-aged. It’s because their wives are. From the evolutionary psychological perspective, a man’s midlife crisis is precipitated by his wife’s imminent menopause and end of her reproductive career, and thus his renewed need to attract younger women. Accordingly, a 50-year-old man married to a 25-year-old woman would not go through a midlife crisis, while a 25-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman would, just like a more typical 50-year-old man married to a 50-year-old woman. It’s not his midlife that matters; it’s hers. When he buys a shiny-red sports car, he’s not trying to regain his youth; he’s trying to attract young women to replace his menopausal wife by trumpeting his flash and cash.

    | http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

  12. Jemaleddin, you’re a Markdown ace! 🙂

    Auros: I used MT’s built-in HTML filtering for a few years, and came to the conclusion that it sucks.

    * I’d like to allow people to comment with more complicated structures, such as ordered lists and blockquotes and 

    formatted blocks. Unfortunately, simple element filtering doesn't work here -- if a commenter forgets to close an open tag, they could destroy the rest of the page.
* Even restricted to inline elements only, HTML filtering sucks. Ever been to a blog where someone forgets to add a , and then subsquent commenters desperately try to close the open tag? It's a sad spectacle, isn't it?
* Finally, people at this blog might want to talk about HTML markup: 
    , , . By encoding all  characters automatically, and using Markdown for markup, this blog provides a clean separation between "writing about markup" and "applying markup". 

The best solution, the Cadillac of Comment Systems, is to cobble together together like what [Jacques Distler](http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/) has. I've tried that, but I'm on a shared web host, and I can't get all the necessary CPAN modules installed. Oh well.

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