Musing on the last decade

I hope this is not a cliché title. So 2009 will be dead and buried soon. My wife and I are going to celebrate it with a nice quiet dinner at home, with fizzy wine of course, then tomorrow with some friends.

Ten years ago, I celebrated the pseudo new millennium (in fact I will always defend that the new millennium, century and era started at another time) in Chicoutimi, with the mother of all hangovers, no friend to celebrate with (they were in Greenwich, of all places, while I had flown over to be with my family), a TV turned off to avoid a stupid, marshmallow show of Céline Dion Live, overall it was a boring evening and I discovered we were in 2000 fifteen minutes after midnight. It had barely started that I hated the new millennium already. That was me then: early twenties, hangover, feeling like an outsider at home.

It got better, eventually, at least on a personal level. I got my PhD, I did some acting, I met the woman who was going to be my wife, I eventually got married, I also got about a thousand jobs, some I did like, even loved, I discovered Liverpool. Collectively speaking, it quickly got worse. I often wonder if we are going to free ourselves from the influence of that deadly decade, or if we will sink deeper into the abyss of irrationality. On more trivial matters (but maybe not so trivial), I don't think we were much luckier. Music wise, the Noughties was for me a long agony, where I steadily grew old and out of touch, and couldn't care less, as I disliked the new "artists" and sank deeper into admiring singers from a glorious past that was not even mine. Movie wise, it had its good moments.

So now there are only a few hours to go. I will not miss all that much of it, although I am still dreading the future. After all, I am still in my early thirties right now. In a decade from now, I will be forty.