Ten years ago, I was basking in the reality that we – my family, my school, the world at large – had not suffered the wrath of a mysteriously cataclysmic event. My dad, in his stern humor, warned me that the new millennium may snatch away my ability to drive a car at sixteen. As scary as that was, I was more terrified of not being able to chat on ICQ all day long with people who liked the same musicals as I did. So, it was with great fear and trepidation that we approached New Years’ Eve, and despite news reports proudly showing a not-dark Lima and an illuminated Charles Bridge in Prague, my family left cosmic bowling an hour early, to sit in front of the television to make sure we made it to 12:01. We did. As a result of our newfound freedom, my family sat around in the kitchen the next morning at our home in Maryland, eating all of the canned food and drinking from our water bottles. We still had the generator that we didn’t know what we were going to do with, but those other things certainly didn’t need to go to waste.

Ten years later, today, I’m getting ready to go to another New Years’ Eve party. I am a little taller, I have been trying to grow a beard, and I will be driving a car to the party. I no longer enjoy musicals, even though in five days I will see one with a friend of mine. I have seen Belfast and Munich with my own two feet, not just on CNN on New Years Eve. I have recently taken up bowling again, not in the cosmic sense, just in a normal sense, if you can call my friend having his own bowling ball and shoes and customized embroidered bag ‘normal’. My dad, in his pensive reflection, told me last week over Christmas dinner at their home in North Carolina, over soy milk and baby food for one of his three grandchildren, that the time flies so quickly. “I’m 53, son. I’m practically 60!” And this is how the time flies, I say, when we get ahead of ourselves. My dad is 53 turning 54, and the six years until he is 60 is far enough ahead, not lurking in the shadows around the corner.

I have no idea what is going to happen in the next ten years. Perhaps some of my friends will stop looking at me with blank stares. Perhaps I’ll actually figure out which graduate program I want to apply for, and maybe I’ll actually move to New York or Baltimore or Ireland or Australia like I’ve always wanted to. Maybe there will be peace on earth, and maybe there will be more goodwill towards others, or maybe we’ll stay entrenched in global chaos. Maybe my family will hold on to the family generator for the impending doom that is 2012. Maybe I'll look for love in all the right places, maybe I'll continue not looking at all. In the meantime, here we are, in bold and blue, proclaiming that 2010 will be our year. The general consensus is that 2009 was so awful that 2010 can only improve. In retrospect, I had a fine 2009, and I saved enough sunshine to last through January, February and March. That's as far ahead as I care to look right now.