1. Look up serious old boyfriends. Discover that two of them have married beautiful women at least 20 years their — and your — junior.

Realize this means that they have married girls who could have been your daughter had the two of you stayed together and gotten married right after college, which you might have done if things had gone just a tiny bit differently that spring weekend. Wonder if there shouldn’t be state laws against such things as incest-by-proxy. Become unnerved when doing the math and discovering 20 years younger than you is not so young anymore.

Learn that the one other serious old boyfriend is now a fitness guru describing himself as “deeply into recovery” after a series of relationships with “objectionable, demanding, unhealthy women.” Decide that for a fitness guru he doesn’t look so hot. Stare at photo and see emerge a truly stunning resemblance to Soupy Sales. Puzzle about how you could have missed it.

2. Look up less important old boyfriends. Note that two have changed sexual preference. See that another is “in development” on a new cable station devoted to the “needs of females”; he is proud to announce he will be sole executive producer once “Fallopian Tube: Television for Babes with a Grudge” is on the air.

Three remaining old boyfriends have disappeared, apparently without providing any forwarding information to the class secretary. Or, if your memory of them is any indication of their current status in life, their parole officers.

3. Look up your erstwhile rivals. Establish immediately that all of them are thinner, happier, and more successful than you. Your worst enemy either still looks like a lap dancer or looks like he married one.

See them surrounded by beautiful children (ones they’ve had, not ones they’ve married), clones of themselves at 18, during their latest alpine skiing trip — the one organized as a surprise by their devoted spouse in celebration of their 22nd wedding anniversary. See them winning the National Book Award. See them opening a wild animal refuge on their family estate thereby “giving back to the land” what their predecessors robbed from it. See them owning most of Maui.

Feel same old lurid sense of combined envy and resentment rise in throat. Some things, unlike glaciers or the positions of stars, do not change over time.

4. Look up people you feel guilty about: the girls who wanted to be better friends with you than you wanted to be with them because you feared their nerdiness, sadness, or slowness would cramp your style, which was sort of a moot point because “style” was not really anything you contained in huge quantities; the sweet, funny, but unattractive guys who hung around but never made it to the dating rung even though at that point in your life you would have been far wiser to have been involved with them than the morons who somehow managed to capture your attention (see items 1 and 2 above); the roommate who got moved out of the triple when you and the other, sharper roommate decided to relocate; the kid who let you copy all the notes in Geology I (“Rocks for Jocks”) that you promised to take out to dinner but never did; the kid who smelled funny.

Observe that each and every one of these is also happier and more successful than you. Also thinner (n.b.: all the guys you didn’t date are not only handsome but in excellent physical condition. They look lots better than Soupy The Guru, for example).

Come to terms with the fact that the kid who smelled funny is now the CEO of a software company with a larger annual budget than that of the Dominican Republic. Realize your lack of intimacy in no way seemed to unduly bother any of these folks.

Surprise yourself by feeling relieved rather than resentful.

5. Look up the dead. Be humbled as well as daunted by the number. Get out your freshman year book and look them up. Have your breath taken away as you see their smiling teenaged faces. Realize you knew many of them, if not by name then by sight. At least five were in classes with you. Another three were in your dorm complex. You probably said “hi” and maybe laughed together when the professor made a lame joke.

They are ahead of you now, having skipped the last few years.

Find yourself hoping they’ll remember you when you arrive on their campus.