I’m two years in. There’s no going back now.

Those who know me well know that time travel makes my brain throw up.

This is why I don’t have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor in my garage. And for all of you embryos saying “Wha???” do me a favor. Go rent Back to the Future and at least try to pretend that we had electricity and running water in the eighties.

My aversion to time travel is also why I don’t currently reside on a mysterious island with hatches and smoke monsters and hot, sweaty men with six packs in their abs and a bespectacled, dethroned leader whose face has OPEN CAN OF WHUP ASS HERE tattooed on it.

Well, that and the fact that I’m not a size 2 and wasn’t home the day Lost producers called me.

Stupid doctor appointment.

But, sometimes I need to turn back the clock, like when I allowed my best friend Traci to perm, color and highlight my hair on the same day, or when I voted for Ross Perot or when I bought a tankini. When stuff like that happens,  I tell my brain to suck it up and then I run super fast around the world in an attempt to reverse the earth’s rotation and get a do-over. Sometimes this works but more often than not, especially since I hit my forties and my knees developed an allergy to movement, I typically last about 2.4 seconds before collapsing in my driveway from exhaustion, forcing my neighbor to drag me inside lest our property values plunge all the way to Antarctica.

My last attempt was par for the course which means that the last twenty-four hours, which I’ll refer to as YESTERDAY, actually happened and thus, I turned fffffffforty …

ffffffooortyyyyyyy -tttttttt ………..

fffffoooortyyyyyy-ttttwwwwwwoooooo.

There.

I said it.

And it only hurt a little.

Actually, it hurt bunches but no one likes a drama queen.

In my fffffffforty-ttttttttwwwoooooo years of roaming this planet, I’ve assembled quite a plethora of useless knowledge and experience and I thought I’d share both with you today. Because why should I suffer alone?

So I present to you:

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Stuff that took me 42 years to learn

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• I could lose 30 pounds with diet and exercise but my hips aren’t going anywhere without divine intervention and a U-Haul.

• I could Fedex his head to Tanzania and Nate’s body would still manage to snore from 1:00 a.m. until 3:30 a.m., out of sheer spite.

• A universal remote.

• I can convince my eight year old daughter that a fat old man in a red suit spends one night out of the year zipping around the entire world, unseen, in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, squeezing his girth down a billion or so chimneys, leaving gifts that were crafted by his height challenged roomies wearing funky shoes, which gifts were specifically made to look exactly like the things she picked out of the Target catalogue a month prior. But if I want to convince her that  48 ÷ 6 = 8, I’m going to have to wait until the second Tuesday of next week.

• Football season last 13 months out of the year. Fourteen if your team makes the playoffs.

• It’s not whether you can live with him. It’s whether you can live without him. This is crucial to remember when he turns up the TV so loud you think the space shuttle is landing on your head.

• It’s not the number of days you spend alive. It’s the number of days you spend living. Therefore, I refuse to give up bread, pasta and potatoes just so I can be miserable and thin. I will eat them until I am plump and happy and adjust the appropriate buttons and zippers accordingly.

• HDTV was invented by a man as an excuse to buy a 54 inch TV.  No woman I know sees the value in being able to count the exact number of pores on someone’s face.

• Men need a place. Women need a reason. And an eighteen inch wide perimeter around the wet spot wouldn’t hurt either.

• The reason why people look at you funny while you shimmy to Dancing Queen by ABBA in the check out line at Wegmans is not because you’re making a spectacle of yourself. It’s because they’re wondering if you’re looking at them funny while they shimmy to Dancing Queen by ABBA in the check out line at Wegmans.

• The expressway exit you’re looking for is the one in your rear view mirror.

• Getting your husband to ask for directions to the Grand Canyon is like asking him to fork over his penis. Getting him to admit he’s actually lost is like asking him to fork over his penis but not before sprinkling it with glitter, wrapping it up in a bright, red, shiny bow, placing it on a silver platter and presenting it to you while singing karaoke to Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.

• My forties would be a hell of a lot more fun if I could live them in the body I had in my twenties.

• Life is but a perpetual series of period underwear, interrupted by the occasional thong every so often just to keep it interesting.

• Motherhood won’t come with combat pay, no matter how much you lobby for it.

• Gravity and my boobs are not unlike my children in that they refuse to listen to me, no matter how loud I yell at them to knock it off already.

• Raising a teenager is like slamming a bowling bowl against your cranium until you pass out. It’s gonna leave a mark but, with any luck, you’ll be brain dead and won’t notice.

• Now that Nate can’t retire until he’s 129, the only way I’m ever going to see the Greek islands in my lifetime is if I go by myself on an all-expenses paid acid trip.

• You’re not doing anyone any favors by eating cheese every single day of your life, except the cardiothoracic unit of your local hospital. And cows.

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So, what have you learned and how long did it take you?

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