My Decade (part 1)

It hadn't really dawned on me, until people mentioned it on Facebook, that we just came to the end of another decade. I guess after we entered the "new millennium" and with all of the "Y2K" hysteria of the end of the last decade I just stopped thinking in terms of decades. I just kind of thought of us as in the 2000s now. And with it seeming that no one knew what to call the most recent decade - I like the "aughts" myself, I can say "my daughter was born in aught eight" - we didn't have the same kind of repetitive referencing of the decade by a title in the media and pop culture that we had in the past. There was always someone calling the eighties "the 80s" and the nineties "the 90s" on TV, radio and print when those decades were happening.

So I was really only thinking about this as another new year approaching until Facebook made me see the error of my ways. A lot of my "friends" started posting things about looking back at the last decade, and I thought, "Oh right, the decade's ending."

What I found odd was how many people were posting how shocking it as how much their life changed over the decade (wasn't married at the beginning of it, my little kid is now a teenager at the end, etc.). Really? Surprised that your life would change in significant ways in the decade? Come on, ten years is a pretty long time, if your life didn't change over that time you should be shocked and depressed. It would also make you my grandparents.

It is strange the way we humans choose these arbitrarily assigned numbers to define, categorize and reflect on our lives and the world. Hell, we use them to define the human experience.

I've never really thought about my life in terms of decades to define each era. I don't think anything can be so neatly packaged into a convenient little branding. I look at my life and it divides up by certain "eras" that are not defined at all by the calendar. My five years of college from 1989 to 1994 would be one, immediately followed by my "Seattle Period" until the end of 2000, then my life with my girlfriend/fiance/wife Lisa. And my current era started in October of 2008 when our daughter was born. So this last decade alone contains three separate phases of my life.

I guess I'm just pointing out the obvious, our lives divide up by our individual experiences and ages. For me the decades do work out pretty well in one aspect - I was born in a zero year, 1970 - so I'm in the same age group for pretty much the whole decade, in my 20s during the 90s, my 30s during the aughts, etc. Just dumb luck, but will probably come in handy when my memory starts to go hazy in my later years.

Besides, when someone refers to a decade, they aren't talking about the whole thing. When someone says "The Sixties" they are almost always talking about the late sixties counter-culture movement. It is very rare to hear someone refer to the sixties and they are thinking about something that happened in 1961. Go to any 80s night at a club and they are playing a ton of music from 1982 to 1985 or so and you are very unlikely to hear them play a track from the Stone Roses, REM's Green or even Joshua Tree.

All of that being said, I did decide to take a quick look back at the decade to see what kind of things I'll take away from it. It did require some reflection but I don't think I'm surprised by any of it (well, maybe a couple of my choices for favorite albums) and I promise not to feign any shock.

Well, I suppose the first thing that should be mentioned about important events to my decade would be that I'm now a family man. When the decade started I was a single guy living in Seattle, doing some theatre but with basically no direction and floating through life with no purpose. At the end of the decade I have been married for almost six years and been a father for over a year. I'm still basically directionless, but I now at least have something that focuses my energy.

If you went back in time to when the last decade was ending and told that version of me, that guy from the 90s, the one in his twenties, that he would be married and have a kid by the time the next decade ended, he would have been horrified. But what does that stupid, long-haired, grungy stoner know? I couldn't be happier.

It as also the decade in which I gave up any idea I still harbored about having a career in theatre. At the beginning I was still plugging away, taking directing gigs where I could. By the end I had not done a show in over three years and had switched over to a career in medical education that was so much more rewarding. After years of theatre I came to the realization that I just wasn't that interested in doing it. I also got sick of it getting in the way of my life (having to be at rehearsals when there was a band I wanted to see, etc.). And it seemed that my talent for it peaked in college anyway.

At the beginning of the aughts I had been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for eight-and-a-half years. At the end of the decade it has been almost eight years since my last cigarette, kicking an addiction that lasted more than ten years. So great to have that monkey off my back.

In the 00s I lived in six different houses/apartments in four cities in four states. Seattle-Chicago-Chicago-Boston-New York-Chicago. There is not a single section of I-90 I haven't driven in a rental truck in the last decade. While the number of cities I lived in during the last decade is my most ever, the number of actual homes still doesn't beat my 90s number.

I traveled overseas to five different countries (six if you count a layover in Seoul) on two continents. I'm really hoping that number is a lot higher in this decade, because that's just not good enough.

My favorite books of the last ten years were Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, Freethinkers and The Age of American Unreason, both by Susan Jacoby. I'm sure I'm leaving some out but I'm not remembering them tight now. A lot of the books I ended up reading over the 00s were published in earlier decades.

It took a lot of time to go over my decade in music and make my "best of" list, as you'll see in the next post (and it is a completely separate post due to its length). But when it came to movies the answer became pretty obvious fairly quickly. In fact, instead of a list of my favorite movies of the 00s, I'm just going to name my favorite. I'm not saying there weren't other extremely strong contenders, like Once (which I came really close to picking) and Billy Elliot. But in the end it turns out my favorite movie of the 00s has a lot in common with my favorite one from the 90s.

Like, it has the same director and the same two actors playing the same characters. When I first heard that Richard Linklater was making a sequel to 1995's Before Sunrise I was horrified. The best romantic movie in a generation had ended so perfectly, leaving the question for the audience to ponder - do they ever see each other again? But it turns out that Before Sunset was even better than the first movie, and making it was a great idea. I love that Linklater could make two perfect films about two people walking around talking to each other. I never get sick of watching either of them.

Next - I'll look back on my decade in music.