The End of the Aughts

In stark contrast to last year where the lady and I rang in 2009 in a Waffle House, I spent this New Years eve watching movies with my parents, siblings and girlfriend in suburban Michigan. After listening to Dick Clark valiantly attempting to count down (if you didn’t see, it was simultaneously very sad and very funny) and watching the ball drop, we put in Steve Martin’s The Man with Two Brains. We laughed and then we went to bed.

That kind of low profile evening is probably really pretty similar to my close of 1999 festivities. Sans girlfriend, of course. I was but a lowly, awkward teenager. Now I am an full grown awkward man.

The last ten years have for the most part been good to me. I graduated high school, went to college, met my girlfriend, graduated, spent a little over a year working for the Purple Rose, moved to Chicago, got a job, took improv and writing classes, started a blog, got in on the ground floor of a great sketch group, did a couple of shows and voila. Here I am today.

At the same time, from a broader perspective the last ten years have been filled with incredible amounts of worry and angst. We’ve had a national tragedy, a pair of wars, excessive amounts of airport security precautions, wiretapping, bird flu, swine flu, cell phone radiation, global warming, the collapse of the banking industry, the collapse of the auto industry, the end times “Left Behind” nonsense, the impending 2012 apocalypse, WMD proliferation, phantom WMDs that appear never to have really existed, election turmoil, the Detroit Lions and celebrities, celebrities MY GOD WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE CELEBRITIES?!

Some of these were legitimate concerns over which we mostly have limited control. Still more, however, were people getting insanely worked up about things that turned out to be unimportant, minor annoyances, or inventions of the paranoid. Anyone remember how we ushered in the aughts? Y2K. How did that work out?

I feel like people spent most of the time running from worry to worry, taking just enough time to buy their iPhone before running off to the next worry.

It’s exhausting, people. We’re still here. We made it through the aughts. Everything still appears to be functioning.

So let’s do this, shall we everyone? Let’s try not to get so freaked out about everything. Take a night off every once in a while, spend it with family, watch a movie or something.
We have a new decade in front of us. Let’s try to make the best of it.