New Years

I'll admit that I don't usually take much time to ponder the end of a year. I make my resolutions, and keep some of them. Now, everyone seems to call this the beginning of the next decade, but please don't forget that we celebrated a new millenium on January 1, 2000 —— 11 years ago —— but let's just go with the flow.

I can't forget the end of the 90s. For one, the Y2K bug fiasco was hilarious——people even freaked out on the 9th of September, 1999 when they though computers couldn't handle the number after 9/9/99. But I was still too young to understand most of that. Actually, I was more obsessed with the fact that I wouldn't be writing '90-something' in the date anymore. I actually wrote a very heartfelt diary entry to the 90s talking about how much I would miss them. I did this also on the night of June 1st, 1999, the last night that my age would be a single digit. It's scary to think: I giddily awaited my last semester of elementary school in January, 2000, and now I anxiously await responses from master's programs.

I find it cool how perfectly this past decade sandwiched the most important years of development for our generation——in technology, in world culture, in historical events, and in personal growth. We are the generation who first saw the common cell phone as late-middle- and early-high-schoolers (I purposefully use "common cell phone" like a species); we are the last generation that still remembers actually using dial-up internet and VHS tapes.

We were just old enough to remember exactly where we were on September 11th, 2001, and to know what the events meant to the world. We were old enough to organize protests a year and a half later, when our country declared another war. We remember Bill Nye the Science Guy and Nickelodeon, and the birth of the brain-melting reality TV wave...maybe that's a bit subjective. This past decade was really when we put life in perspective, since most of us clearly remember what life was like in 1999.

I went from having to wait for my parents to get off the phone to use the the web to writing emails into my phone using only my voice: I cannot imagine what is going to happen in the next 10 years.