Mar 6, 2015 3 min read

They say, “With age, comes wisdom,” but I was wondering, “How old do I have to get?”

I burned my lip on soup last night. I thought I would stop burning my mouth on hot food by the age of 7, or, at the very least, 13. I’m a good deal past 13, and I am still putting boiling liquid on my face. I have a bright red blister on my bottom lip.

Note to self: If the pot is still bubbling, don’t try to consume the contents. It was definitely one of those, “When will I ever learn?” moments. Apparently, the answer resides in the far, far future. I’ll have to blow out more candles on my birthday cake than Methuselah before I get it right.

The other day, I jumped off the bus into a puddle of slush on my way to work. I had a big brownish/blackish stain on the bottom of my pants. I fussed about it all day. I would pull my leg out from behind my desk and show it to people. No one would have even seen my leg if I kept it behind the desk where it belonged, but I had to show off my ridiculousness.

You can’t miss the lip. Even if I wanted to hide it, it would be nearly impossible without the help of Hollywood’s best makeup artists. Get me Max Factor on the line, stat!

In defense of my burned lip: I was in a hurry. I am always in a hurry. I thought I could eat the soup at 6 p.m. and be somewhere else by 6:30. For the record, I have not yet conquered the time/space continuum, but I keep trying. Other points in my defense of this case: It was homemade soup, and it was delicious. I just shouldn’t have been willing to die for it. You guys didn’t hear the blood-curdling scream from your house?

OK, when I say homemade I don’t mean “homemade” like from scratch. I use fresh ingredients – celery, carrots, potatoes, onion and garlic – but I throw lots of canned and frozen vegetables into the pot. Is that cheating? It doesn’t matter. If I make it at home, it’s homemade. It’s not like I opened a can of Campbell’s, and try to pass it off as my own recipe. It doesn’t matter. It’s mostly gone now. Yes. I continued eating after the scalding.

But I digress, like I do.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

It seems my very existence mocks Hemingway’s philosophy, because I am neither careful nor wiser.

I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact I am not alone. There are plenty of men who are both older and more stupid.

Turn to any page in this paper, and you’ll find politicians, celebrities, sports figures and plain, old common folk older and none the wiser than I. Those guys will prove my point.