New Year!

2010! It never bothered me that 2000 was popularly seized on as the start of the new millennium, but somehow I'm a little bugged that everyone is taking this new year as the start of a fresh decade. Maybe because the aughties, geopolitically speaking, have been a crummy set of years -- there's still one more left to turn things around, people! Nonetheless, with the year 2000 acting so long as a universal signpost for things yet to come, 2000-plus-a-decade feels pretty far out there to me. It's the future! It's beyond the future. We're in the later, less visionary sequel to the future, starring Roy Scheider and John Lithgow.

Like Jack, I'll turn 30 this year and also like him I'll save any decade-in-review reckoning for the milestone birthday. But Kyle and I ran out 2009 comfortably -- Indian food at East India Company followed by Pink Martini's later of two sets at the Schnitz -- and personally I'd say the years since 2000, encompassing almost my entire adult life, have been good ones. I wish everybody a happy 2010, whether you choose to take it as the intro to the next ten-year grouping or not...