Someone I know (a close friend who looks just like me, but is definitely not me) is having a 50th birthday in April. Sometime during my forties I started to realize that I had probably crossed into middle age, so I came up with a novel approach to deal with that fact: I decided that I'd live until 100. If I did that, I wouldn't be middle-aged until I turned 50.

Well, since December I've been spending time trying to come up with a new plan. Maybe I could plan to live until 101?  While that would buy me another year, I've rejected it as unwieldy for two reasons: 1. I'd have to continue to issue a new age goal each year and 2. Who the hell was I fooling? As those who know me can tell you, I was never going to live to 100 to begin with.

There is a third reason: In reality, I've been acting like an old man for a very, very long time.

Case in point?  The way I have dealt with the technology changes in the way music is recorded.

Sometime in the early 1980s, I started making cassette mixes, with the aid of my first stereo with a built-in cassette deck. (I believe it was made by Sanyo). This was a big step for me. My first forays into mix making in the late '70s involved a portable, monaural Panasonic cassette player, which I perched next to a speaker on top of a high bookshelf. This method ended when the player unceremoniously fell on my head one day while I was recording tracks from my brother Jeff's "Woodstock" soundtrack album.

I used to spend hours deciding which songs would be absolutely perfect for my tapes, going through a process of creating lists and eliminating songs that wouldn't fit the correct "mood" of the recording. It got to the point where I felt bad for the songs that didn't make the cut. ("Sorry, 'We Can Work It Out'...maybe next time.")

My early tapes had dramatic names like "Life Ain't Easy, Love Ain't Easy." (Sounds like I was between relationships.) Before a trip to the Granite State in 1987 from Queens, N.Y., I made an upbeat tape called "Concord, NH." (I met my future wife, Mary, on this trip and moved there a year later). A post-move tape is entitled "Barry's Big Bad Mix '92", and while the bigness and badness might be argued, the intent was never in question.

However, with the switch to CDs as the preferred media for making music compilations, I didn't budge. I begrudgingly added a CD player to our stereo system (which now boasted a dual-deck Realistic cassette along with a Technics belt-drive phonograph), but only so I could add the songs from the CDs to my cassette mixes.

The fact that I would need to accept the inevitable showed up in the title of "The Last Cassette Mix (2006)?" And so, in a world that had already moved on to iPods and iTunes playlists on laptops, I finally made my first CD mix. 

Maybe it's just me. My son Eli (now at R.I.T., in upstate New York) rolls his eyes whenever we discuss music and technology. I have friends who politely turn down my offers of "If you'd like, I can burn you a CD of it." But I can't help myself. I need to continue that connection I've always had in the past.

I need to handle my vinyl albums. When I play them, each pop and hiss is a memory. When I listen to my old cassette mixes, I can hear the sound of every "edit" between the songs and remember the effort it took to get the timing just right. The CDs I burn are seamless, but at least there is some material to grab from the tray on the side of my laptop when I'm done.

I think as time goes on, I’m no longer embarrassed about being one step behind the changes in trends and being judged as a fossil. In fact, I kind of view the way I tenaciously hold onto what I’m comfortable with as a badge of honor.

I guess what I am trying to say is: "Hello, 50. I've been waiting for you for a while now. I think we're going to be friends."

Barry Wenig lives in N.H. with his wife Mary, his daughter Talia and their pets. Let him know if you'd like a copy of one of his cassette mixes. You'll probably have to find him a blank cassette, though.