If You Don't Know What "I'm The Baby, Gotta Love Me!" Means, Then I Can't Know You.

There's a cute guy in my neighborhood, right up the street from me. We always see each other when we're outside walking our dogs. We sneak quick glances and try to act like we're not providing our pets exercise simply so we can bump into each other. We've never spoken a word to one another and, in fact, have never even walked on the same side of the street. But that's part of the fun.

At least, it was part of the fun. One fateful afternoon not so long ago, I was walking Kirby up the street and saw my oh-so-attractive neighbor walking into his house. With a backpack on.

Because he was

coming

home

from

school.

I tried desperately to think of alternate reasoning for this situation. Maybe he's one of those guys who brings a backpack to work. Maybe his high-level executive job with a corner office allows him to wear hoodies and basketball shorts to work. Maybe I should accept the fact that it is 2:50 pm, the exact time the high school bus has been pulling into our neighborhood for as long as I can remember.

Insert a split second of sympathy for Mary Kay Letourneau here.

Insert two split seconds of astonishment at the insane spelling of "Letourneau".

Insert feelings of nausea and premature cougardom as memories come flooding back of this past summer when I blatantly stopped and checked him out as he was doing yard work for a neighbor.

And THIS is why I always like to go for guys who are blatantly 10 years older than me. Wrinkles, grey hair, indications of male pattern baldness- these are all just beautiful little reminders that I won't go to jail for dating them.

A little while back I was talking to a guy in a bar and for whatever reason mentioned Fraggle Rock. His response?

'What's Fraggle Rock?'

I shook his hand, told him it was very nice meeting him, and moved to the other side of the bar.

It is quickly becoming apparent that my friends and I are at the age where people just a couple of years younger than us may as well have been born in an entirely different century. You know how there's Generation X, Generation Y, etc? Well I feel like one of them was capped off after 1986. Maybe 1987 for a select few advanced individuals. And I'm not trying to be a snotty bitch here. I wouldn't even be making this argument if it weren't for the fact that I keep noticing solid evidence on multiple occasions.

Now here's the kicker:

It seems weird for a 25 year old woman (that's right, I just referred to us as women, not girls. How bout that?) to date a 21 year old guy. But it's no big deal for a 35 year old woman to be dating a 31 year old man. I know these are our 20's and we're all less than a decade out of college and we're just discovering who we really are and yadda yadda yadda, but it is a weird little hypocrisy we've got going on here.

Maybe it all comes down to a theory that my friends and I have been mulling around for awhile:

At this point in our lives, guys aren't worth dating unless they're at least 26.

At 26, they (hopefully) have the whole college mentality out of their system, they (hopefully) have a steady job, they (hopefully) have moved out of their parents' basement. And since it's a scientific fact - and who are we to mess with science - that women mature more quickly than men, at age 26 a man is almost as awesome as we ladies were at 23.

Just to be clear, my intentions in this entry are not to bash guys. I'm just, let's say, giving a field report of some social data that I, as well as many other women I know, have collected over the years.

And besides,

I'm the blogger, gotta love me :)

(Not the mama!)

...god I hope you all got that...