A self-centered list for a self-centered decade!

A self-centered list for a self-centered decade!

Posted on December 31st, 2009 by Les Kay

(N.B.: Tongue is firmly planted in cheek throughout. Expect offense in response to one of the more offensive decades in recent memory.)

It’s that time of the decade again. The toll of tonight’s midnight church bells or the image of that big-ass crystal ball slowly descending into the madness of Times Square will signal that we’ve let another decade slip away. The…um…“naughts” have been a decade like no other, so I’d like to take an opportunity to honor this decade in what seems the only way possible: with an egocentric list.

You see, historians, I have no doubt, will look to the ‘00s and see the gross exuberance of our collective individualism. In this decade, we’ve seen the proliferation of the blog, the democratization of the Internet, the rise of TMZ, “welfare reform,” a war started by a doofus who thought his Daddy was in danger, and ultimately, a financial crisis driven by egocentric greed, a lack of insight into the lives of those who don’t drive a Mercedes SUV to work on Wall Street, and the increasing privatization of every government responsibility — including the regulatory functions of the federal government. Now, large, multinational banks have found new revenue streams by selling imaginary commodities and by tapping revenue streams that were — once upon a time — used only by people who took a hankering to breaking kneecaps. Huzzah!

More, it has been a decade of YouTube, of texting, of sexting, of conspicuous consumption, of video games designed to simulate the playing of sports — because having actual friends to play tennis or basketball with has become too much work for our children.

So rather than offering a column that feigns objectivity and looks seriously at the past 10 years through the imagined lens of History, I’m here to offer you my own top 10 list. So, below, you’ll find the top 10 pivotal moments in my life. Don’t like it? Fuck you. It’s my world. That’s the new American Way.

2000: I moved from Dallas, TX to Berkeley, CA chasing the “dot-com” boom and found a job paying $30/h. The imagination is a powerful economic force. I got laid off from that job.

2001: I found another job, paying a similarly absurd amount. I got laid off in two months and spent the rest of the year freelancing.

2002: I found a full-time job in the e-learning industry with health and dental insurance. I marched in several protests against the Iraq war.

2003: My wife-to-be moved to California and found an excellent job with health and dental insurance. That was a pretty good year — except for June, when I worked the entire month without a day off.

2004: I got married. Enough said.

2005: I finally published a poem. My wife got a promotion and was sent to Cincinnati to open an Eastern Office. We moved to Cincinnati on our first anniversary and bought our first house: A three-bedroom Tudor-style in the Western Hills of Cincinnati. We thought it was a great buy, but it’s still not worth what we paid for it.

2006: I started a blog about poetry and tiny dogs. It’s pretty good, if disturbingly bourgeois.

2007: It occurred to me to go back to grad school. I also wrote a lot that year and freelanced as a copyeditor while my wife continued plugging away at her job. Their numbers had already started to go down, and my wife was tasked with laying some of her employees off.

2008: In February, I found a full-time contract job in Cincinnati. It paid less than I made in 2000. By the end of the year, I’d been laid off.

2009: In February, my wife got laid off from her job. In March, I was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati. In December, federal government assistance for COBRA payments elapsed.

As I look over my list, I have to wonder just how much this really is my list. Key moments throughout the last decade have had nothing to do with my own personal agency or with that of my wife; rather (like everyone else) we’ve frequently been exposed over the course of this decade to the machinations of the moneyed and powerful. We’ve frequently been treated as resources — sometimes, as unnecessary resources. Such treatment, of course, is not new. What is new, however, is the frequency with which such decisions seem to intersect the lives we think we’ve made. Furthermore, such disruptions have, historically speaking, not been the lot of the college-educated petite-bourgeois. So, to me, the “naughts” might well be the decade when we recognized, at last, the “have nots.”

Then again, if you have the cash, prices have been really good lately, and there are more and more ways to keep one’s self from actually looking at the world around us.

X-Box anyone?

A 20-dollar trip to see James Cameron’s Avatar?

Don’t worry about us. We can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, right? That’s the Horatio Alger way!

So, Happy New Year! Get wasted!

But do me one tiny favor: as the kazoos honk in the New Year, don’t think only about how you can make your life better. Think about what you — yes you — can do to make all of our lives better. Why not make that resolution?