In Continuum.

Creams to battle wrinkles, lotions to battle spots, hair dyes to battle the sprouting of your silver hair. Half of the advertisements these days are targeted, not to make you look more beautiful, but to make you look less old. Buy this to slow down your aging process, buy that to make you feel younger, buy one and then get one free, buy five and get two free, admit to yourself that you are feeling old, you owe it to yourself. So we do as the advertisements tell us to do, we make ourselves look fancy and younger than we actually are, we've all looked death in the face with our bottles of hair dye. At least that is what this old lady did, the one I saw on the bus some time last week. She was a typical old lady, with those flowery dresses that they seem to know where to buy and we don't, the kind of old lady with plastic bags in their arms so loaded that you'd have thought that she was preparing for a great flood. Anything but the color of hair was typical of an old lady that morning when I saw her, the way she dyed her hair into a strange shade of orange. As sparse as her hair was, they formed an orange atmosphere around her head that looked like a strange and bare planet of sorts. The odd color, however, looked more like the canopy of a forest full of orange trees, and she was wearing that on top of her head to, well, make her look more youthful.

Nobody probably told her just how big an epic failure the color of the hair dye was, I guess you can literally do anything you want with yourself at that age and nobody is going to tell you that you are doing something wrong. She looked like a walking tangerine, and that wasn't the only strange sight I saw that very morning on my way to school. Anyway, it just seems like people are so afraid to look at their reflections in the mirror and tell themselves," Wow, I am old". George Carlin got it right, we all want to be older now, not so much about getting old. I wonder which aspect of getting older is worse: the idea of losing your youthful self forever or the idea of your impending death looming around the corner. It almost seems like a curse doesn't it, to look upon your painful and slow decomposition with your life no longer going by at a blinding speed. Suddenly, you are sitting on a steam powered car and driving through a bumpy road with no suspension. It'd be great if the view is great, but more often than not it's probably not going to be very pretty. Personally, I can't help but imagine how I'd be like when I get old, and the kind of old person I'd not want to be like. It is not difficult to pick the kind of old person on the bus you'd like to turn into when you get old yourself - all you have to do is to look into their eyes. 

My father came home a little drunk two nights ago, and he stumbled into the house and kicked off his shoes at the front door. Judging from the smell of alcohol on his body, he couldn't have been as drunk as he pretended to be that night, the way that he collapsed in front of my sister's bedroom and supposedly fell asleep. My father has a strange sense of humor, and that extends to asking my friends for cab fares whenever he sends one of them home in his car. His strange antics that night stopped abruptly in the bedroom when he received a call from his brother concerning the situation with a relative of ours being in the hospital. My mother did most of the talking and the comforting on the phone while my father just laid there on the couch and listened to the conversation for the most part. Apparently, a relative of mine has a tumor in his liver, and the situation is not looking good at all for him in the hospital. My father is the youngest in the family, and this relative of mine happens to be his eldest brother's son. They've been childhood playmates, and they've grew up together and started working together in Taiwan back in the days. More than just a family member, he's also a friend of my father's that has went through with him through the thick and the thin. 

The liver problem seems to be hereditary in the family, and his mother died from the same problem a few years ago as well. My father listened to my mother's explanation that night with his arm over his eyes, and interrupted for a question or two from time to time. Things are not looking good, my mother told me later, and he's probably not going to go on for very long now. My father does not take death very well, and it was evident in the hospital that night a few years ago when his father died. My father pounded his fists on my grandfather's cold hard chest that night and attempted to punch him back to life. That act only made my relatives more upset, but then I know my father. He likes happily ever afters, and nobody ever dies in his world. My father cried that night, the first time ever since my grandfather left so suddenly that February night. Things haven't been very easy for him I suppose, but I can't help but wonder if it was the death of a family member that pushed him over the edge or the idea of death being so close to himself. Perhaps a little bit of both, it is hard to say. He is in the age whereby he is saying goodbye to people that he's known his whole life, at an increasing rate at that. It must be a scary thing when that happens, when your friends and family starts to die out one by one. You know that your time is just around the corner too, and you just can't help but feel utterly terrified of death itself. 

But there are some who dares to look death in the face and go,"So?" My mother is one such person, and she has long come to terms with the inevitability of death as a part of life. So when the news came to my father, she was his pillar of support for the most part, she was the one that laid out all the facts for him. And as for me, I suppose I am still trying to get used to the idea that for all the things that we can achieve in life, we are still so vulnerable. Death is still very far away from me, fingers-crossed, and it is indeed to early to decide certain things. I guess we'd know when the time comes, I guess it's something that we all have to face somehow. For those who cannot bear to face the idea of death, or aging, we all wear our little crowns of orange trees and pace the face of earth until it becomes too late. It doesn't matter how old you are on paper, or how old you look to others. It just seems to me that people would do anything to make themselves feel better, or younger. How far away from death can one get anyway, it doesn't take very long for you to realize that yes - you are going to die someday. 

I just wish that right now, life would slow down a little bit just so that I'd be able to appreciate the scenery before I have to face the idea of aging, for real. The day when you start to smell like old people, have less sex, wake up early in the morning without the aid of an alarm clock, feel the strain in your knees when you climb the steps, or your twenty-twenty vision isn't there any longer, you'd be looking at yourself in the mirror and giving yourself a monologue. So, do you think you'd look old, or just older. How far away from death have you deceived yourself, or have you stood up against it and lived life to the fullest and to be free of the bondage of the crown of orange trees? There's nothing wrong with being old, some would tell you, if you know the death is not the end of all things but a vessel that sets you free.