25 Things They Don't Tell You About Pushing 50

Hot flashes, OK, but cold feet, too?

Pushing 50? Ha! You'll need to take a dozen ibuprofen before you push anything. Including an elevator button.

You will still feel somewhere on the age spectrum between 18 and 25. Always. Until you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror.

Amazingly, your legs will require less shaving.

Have you ever seen a turtle's neck? That.

Everyone is younger than you now. Not just famous actors: your brain surgeon, your pilot, old people.

Single sex is better: You know what you want, and you ask for it. Married sex will always be married sex, but your dreams will be just as lurid.

Hello, automatic AARP subscription!

You're still mad about that thing that happened back in 1982, but you no longer dwell on it. Or at least not that often.

In fact, you no longer care about anything. In a good way.

If a friend cancels lunch on you three times, that's it. Sayonara. You don't have time for this.

True wisdom, you'll realize, is knowing how much you'll never know.

Menopause is actually a blessing in disguise. No more tampons! No more birth control! Good lord, you'll think, did I really put up with that insanity for decades?

Congratulations. You have officially become your mother.

Veins: Who knew the body contained so many veins?

When they take a biopsy and ask if you'd rather have the scar here or there, you'll look at the doc, laugh out loud and say, "Seriously? Just add it to the pile."

A glass of wine at dinner will no longer put you to sleep. It will wake you up at 3 a.m.

That bulging savings account you were planning on at this age?

You'll be hanging out with this amazing woman you meet at a party or work, and you'll suddenly realize she’s closer in age to your children than to you.

Your tolerance for 24-hour cable news will plummet below zero.

In fact, one day you'll be watching the news, and you'll suddenly realize that anything else you could be doing, including tweezing or rubbing your corneas with shards of glass, would be a far better and/or more enjoyable use of your time.

Human folly becomes interesting to you instead of an irritant. More often than not, you're able to stand back from it all like an anthropologist studying a hapless, primitive, indigenous tribe.

Rereading Shakespeare, you'll suddenly stop and think, "That dude was smart." By the same token, if you're reading a book that doesn't thrill you by page 10, that’s it. Straight into the donation pile.

All those hours you put into child-raising are now paying off in dividends you could have never imagined. You'll be having dinner one night with these once helpless, endlessly needy humans and think, “Oh my God, I'd be friends with these people even if I hadn't pushed them out of my vagina.”

Speaking of vaginas … No. Never mind. Let's not even go there.