The corners on my driver's license are rubbing off.

I don't use a billfold anymore--this practice dates way back to my late teens. In one pocket I carry cash. Another has keys, and yet another holds my cards. Credit card, ATM card, Smith's (grocery) card and Driver's License. And the edges of my Driver's License are rubbing off. This really wouldn't be much of a problem if the date of birth wasn't sitting directly on the bottom right corner of the license. So now, when anyone looks at it (only when I buy beer or booze or want to get in a bar), they get a confused look on their face. Because my date of birth is now 02/01/197...something. The "2" has disappeared.

It's only been really bad in the last six months. Before then the "2" was visible enough to be recognizable when I said "it's 72," and they'd nod their heads and hand it back to me. But now, they think I'm lying.

When my birthday comes around in a few weeks, however, the argument will be moot. Even if I was born in 1979, I'll be 21 in a few weeks. The year 2000 is the final step for everyone who was born in the 1970s. We will all, by the end of the year, be legal. And all I will have to do is point out that it doesn't matter what that last number is--I was born on February 1st sometime in the 70s. And that should be enough.

But as I've gotten older, apparently I haven't aged like I'm supposed to. Or maybe the whole thing started a long time ago. When I was 18, I looked like I was 15. When I was 21, I looked like I was 18--or something like that. And now that I'm almost 28, I apparently look less than 21. Somewhere hidden beneath my youthful veneer are all of those years. Maybe they're just waiting for a sign to manifest themselves.

Personally, I remember what I've been doing since graduating from college when I was 21 (way back in 1993). I've got a good chunk of memory stuck in my brain just to make sure I remember everything that happened from around the time Kurt Cobain shot his head off to now. And more than that, I've even got some physical proof that I was around between then and now. But this doesn't really matter to some people. They want further proof. They want proof certified by the State or the Government that doesn't have conspicuously rubbed off numbers.

Maybe I should just start talking about listening to music on vinyl and that'll do the trick. No one who was born in 1979 really has any reason to own a record player. By the time they got interested in popular music, it was all CDs, baby.

I know some people don't want to hear me bitching about looking young. I haven't lost too much of my hairline since being a teenager (although I do have a bigger forehead since those days when my hair threatened to get tucked into my pants along with my shirt). Even though I pound keyboards and click mice for a living, my hands don't look too much worse for wear. And while there are a few lines of age on my face, they could be confused with minor dimples, I guess.

And maybe there is a good reason for all of this. A good health regimen or a subscription to some Eastern philosophy that takes all of those tell-tale signs of age away. But I can't really think of one. Hell, I thought I was doing all that self-preservation crap wrong.

Surely some of this is hereditary--I would certainly agree with that. Some people in my family have lived forever--or close enough. But I can't take much credit for it. I didn't mean to be born into the family I did.

And this reminds me of being a teenager and thinking too hard about this one thought: What if I'd been born in Russia? The entirely futile attempt to imagine life if I'd been born on the other side of the coin--as Russia was in those days--consumed a bit of my time. What if I'd been born a communist bastard? Certainly my life would be different--and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be bitching about people not believing that I'm 21. They don't have those kind of drinking laws in Russia.

Is this the pre-birthday freakout? When will all this age I've accumulated suddenly present itself to the outside world in the form of, well, whatever form age likes to show itself with? Should I shop for clothes at Old Navy or Sears? And how old will I have to be before the sign that says "We card everyone under 30 because we want to be extra special sure" doesn't apply to me anymore?

Certainly the fact that I spent at least 800 words and countless rhetorical questions analyzing this disturbing development should count for a couple of years, shouldn't it?

When Matt Worley is reincarnated, he wants to come back as a vat of Oil of Olay.