Well, at least I have my jam ready for 2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeo0_3gN190
Got one for afterwards, when we're all stumbling along a road behind a shopping cart, dragging along an irritatingly innocent kid.
I popped a bottle of Harpoon five minutes before six in the evening, hummed what I could remember of Everclear's "Santa Monica", and -yes- felt a twinge of worry. Then the hour rolled over and life on Earth went on it's mostly harmless way. It's currently twenty minutes past Midnight EST and we're still here. And now I feel a little silly for even feeling the slightest worry.
You may have sensed that I am an Older Person. (I was in the Teen Board looking for something else and this thread caught my eye.) If any of you Younger People are anxious about this or 2012 or whatever the next doomsday prophet says, let me tell you something that I hope assures you (since hearing something like this surely would have helped me):
I survived 1999.
Next time you're rocking out to "1999", really pay attention to those lyrics. When Prince warns that "we could all die any day", he ain't kidding. That was the zeitgeist of the time. It was the peak of the Cold War and the bombs could drop at any minute. Just a few decades ago, there was a serious possibility that all life on Earth would be wiped out because two countries had different economic systems.
On top of this was an unspoken but collective agreement that something was going to happen in 1999, which wasn't too far away. Maybe this was based on a prediction from Nostradamus, maybe some other Middle Age prophet guy, but the world would be very different once the Millennium approached. Human nature being what it is, it was unanimously assumed that "different" meant "bad", and so the prediction was tangled up in nuclear paranoia (a truly amazing example of which
can be found here). Later on, this all got complicated with the supposed "Y2K Bug", a silly sounding thing that was going to kill us all in the middle of our New Years' Eve parties thanks to all the computers in the world at once suddenly operating under the assumption that "00" meant not "2000" but "1900". The point is, us 80's kids got the sense that some way or other, we'd never live to see adulthood. Good times, good times.
And as you probably have figured out (heck, I'm betting some of you were
born after it), 1999 came and went. And today most people look back on it and think of the rise of Boy Bands and Beanie Babies and Elmo and Limp Bizkit and the "Star Wars" Prequels and other, weirder things. It's just so strange that so many people that lived through the 1999 scare are essentially assuming that the universe is going to end just because they've hit the last few pages of the calendar.
(Mad props to anyone who read all my old lady ramblings.)
im just bored haha
