Another Year Over, A New One Just Begun

Against all odds, 2009 has finally ended. I thought about doing a “Best of the Decade” or at least a “Best of the Year” post, but the internet is already full of them, and after the decade I’ve had, I’m just a bit tired. Instead of looking back and thinking about the best and worst of all the good and bad of the last ten years, it’s better to look ahead to 2010 and start thinking about ways to keep the next decade from looking like the last one. I’m now on a different side of the country, with a vastly different group of friends and a slightly different haircut than I had back in 2000, so perhaps things have already begun to change for the better.
2009 has certainly ended on a good note (minus all the financial problems and the 24 hours I spent stranded in the Atlanta airport—I love snow, but not when it leaves me stuck in an airport with nothing but Tiger Woods coverage on CNN for entertainment). I enjoyed Avatar a lot, even if it didn’t change the way I think about cinema for all time. A great 3-D action adventure yarn with jaw-dropping visuals and fun action sequences is good enough. I didn’t walk out yammering about how beautiful it was like I did after Titanic (Yeah, that’s right, I went crazy over Titanic like a 13 year old girl—what are you going to do about it?) but James Cameron has yet to make a bad movie. And though it’s gotten a lot less attention, I also had a ton of fun with Sherlock Holmes. It was more my style than Avatar—I don’t know about you, but I’ll take any story set in Victorian London over any story set in outer space any day of the week. Add in black magic mixed with 19th Century science, the always excellent Robert Downey Jr., and a complicated plot right out of a 1900s pulp magazine, and you’ve sold me. Both movies had a similar tone of wide-eyed adventure that made them feel tailor made for the 12 year old in all of us—they’re the kind of stories you find in yellowed old books in a box in the basement, Robert E. Howard and Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling and the Hardy Boys and H.P. Lovecraft filtered through an explosion of modern special effects and thrilling soundtracks. What’s not to like?
But it’s not just the movies that have made the end of 2009 so much better than much of the previous year. I had a great time at a wedding down in Georgia with friends from California, a good trip to D.C. with friends from college, many hours spent enjoying the ridiculous two-player action of New Super Mario Brothers and The Beatles Rock Band, and a great Christmas complete with snow. When it’s not keeping me at the Atlanta airport, snow is great. Weather is something I miss a lot in California. There’s nothing worse than repeating the same thing day in and day out, whether it’s good or bad; a job or a TV show or a song or a game or even a thought. When you get stuck in a rut in California, you can’t even count on the weather to make one day different from the next. Everything is exactly the same.

That's my main hope for 2010. A philosophy, not a resolution; resolutions so often become an albatross around our neck. I spent so much time in the last decade doing the same things over and over again every day that the time just flew by, and in many ways I’m in the same place on New Year’s Eve 2009 that I was on New Year’s Eve of 1999—in fact, I’m literally in the same place at the moment. So many of the days bleed into the next because I’ve allowed them all to become exactly the same, and before I know it years and years have gone by. So for 2010, and for the next decade, it’s important that I try to do things differently every day, to find the variety in life even if it’s something very small. There’s more than enough out there to make every day unique and memorable, all we have to do is spend a little time looking for it. If not, life might end up like Los Angeles weather—pleasant, but not very interesting.

So goodbye, 2009. Let’s all hope for a better 2010!