In the past week, I have been told by two separate people, in two wholly different settings, that I look old.

The first came thanks to a picture GoPats took of me at a Nats game. The second, just a few days later, courtesy of my friend Beth at a happy hour, when she noticed how long my hair has gotten and how it, I suppose, has affected the way I look.

I have processed their comments, mulled their meanings over, and come up with this carefully constructed synopsis about my challenged youth: WHAT THE FUCK?

I have mentioned before how much I’m looking forward to old age and everything it promises, mainly a healthy amount of dementia and telling kids to get off my lawn. But I didn’t mean that I wanted to actually look old when it happened.

Luckily for me, my 12-year-old cousin is in town this week at some young whippersnappers’ leadership conference and he stayed with me for the weekend. I say “luckily” because what I have obviously needed lately is an injection of youth (emotional age not withstanding). My pallid countenance has been starved for an exuberance that can only be found by hanging out with a kid nearly a third of my age.

Before he arrived, I said to myself, Self, what should you do with this rapscallion? I mean, what does a 12-year-old boy actually like to do? What do they think about? Unfortunately, getting him drunk and taking him to his first strip club was probably not feasible. Possible, just not logistically plausible.

So instead, I decided to look back at what I liked to do when I was his age (20 fucking years ago) and what I would have wanted to do with my cool, older cousin. I found an old journal (not a diary, diaries are for chicks who believe in unicorns and dot their “i’s” with flowers) that I kept as a 12-year-old. After reading through it for clues, I realized something important. I was a weenie.

The journal centers mostly around my crush on a girl named Tina. I wrote some really anguishing sentences about her, like:

The only one who knows I like her is [Blue]. I love talking to her. Now when we talk, her voice doesn’t crack like it used to. OK, get this. Predita asked me to go to her birthday party this Saturday night. So I made up my mind. I was going to ask Tina to go. Not knowing she had already been invited, I asked Predita if I could invite her. She asks, ‘We have another Tina?’ I gave her a puzzled look. She continues, ‘I already invited her. Why, you two going together?’ She said it in a sweet voice. I told her no, I just wanted to know if she wanted to go. I was so embarrassed.”

You’re embarrassed, 12-year-old Arjewtino? How do you think reading this makes me feel?

I had picked him up at Dulles on Friday, bypassing the TSA security line with a special pass since his parents wanted me to meet him at the gate. While his flight disembarked, a Virgin America employee announced over the loudspeaker, “Will the parents of [my cousin] please come to the front?”

I started to walk forward when she saw me and continued on the loudspeaker, “…or the daddy?”

I got to the gate and started chatting with her. I mentioned that his parents had wanted me to meet him at the gate.

“Oh, you’re not the father?” she asked me.

“No, I’m the cousin,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“That’s ok,” I told her, “it’s perfectly conceivable that I could have a 12-year-old son.”

Yup, definitely not feeling old at all.

I ended up taking my cousin to the Nats game on Saturday. I was planning on buying some cheap $10 seats in the stratosphere, but when we got in line at the box office, some random dude came up to us and handed me tickets to two seats in the 131 section, three rows from the field.

“Just take them,” he said. I kept waiting for the catch but he walked away. The seats were tremendous. And though my cousin, who is from the San Francisco area, wore his Giants jersey which I threatened to trash, I wore my Dodgers jersey and we both put on Nats caps.

We stayed through the rain delay, eating chili dogs that looked like, according to my cousin, “barf”, and watching video games in the Playstation 3 center behind right-center field. I felt young, vibrant, like a kid again. Let’s see someone call me old now.

On our way out of the stadium, my cousin asked me for a bucket of cotton candy. I thought about how much I used to love cotton candy, how I used to beg my parents for some whenever we went to a carnival or a Dodgers game. Now, though, all I could do was wince.

My cousin looked at me and said, “You look like your dad.”

Yup. Not old at all.