Another decade passes and a lot of shit went down.

I'm finally old enough, not that I'm excited about it, to remember all of the monumental moments of an entire decade of time. Whoa. Ten whole years just went by and it seems pretty damn quick looking back. In 1999, I was a sophomore/junior in high school turning 16, living at home, playing basketball most of the time, and smoking weed and drinking vodka the rest of the time. What the hell did I know about anything? Now at the end of 2009, I've lived in 5 states, graduated high school and college, became a CPA, watched my parents divorce, added a new stepmom and 2 new siblings to my family, made friends from all over the country, had the hots for euro-dudes, been a stepmom, been a military "spouse", bought a house, been pierced 4 times and gotten 3 tattoos, and so on and so on. That transition from teenager in high school to working adult has been a wild one. I watched my world grow up around me and shit have things changed.

When I was just a wee little tike, VCR's were new and my parents still played vinyl records. Answering machines with little tapes were your only option if you wanted to know who called. I sat on the console of a corvette or some other muscle car, on the floor of a race car, or on a harley. We've now gone through cassette tapes and CD's. We did the cordless phone thing with the automatic message lady. We started wearing seatbelts. What hasn't changed since then? So much happened between my birth and the new millennium and I was too young to keep track.Now it's the start of another new decade, but this time there's no fear of Y2K. We can rest easy knowing that the internet and everything digital isn't going to blow up. The host of the house party where you'll be celebrating probably won't shut off power at midnight sending the house full of drunken teenagers into a panic. Things have changed.

In my opinion, the most significant happenings of the decade are 9/11 and other terrorist attacks around the globe sending the world into paranoia and war. Coming to mind are things like anthrax and shoe bombers not to mention the deaths and injuries of countless American Troops. Deployments to fight the war on terror have hit home in the most personal way. After 9/11 and tempted attacks, it's hard to remember what it was like walking a loved one to their

departure gate or surprising another when they arrive at their gate. Then li

quids were banned and ziploc bags at security checkpoints became a staple. Terrorism, war and lost lives, and airport security. Those things could easily define the decade. My hope is that they won't define the next.

Natural disasters have been a plenty. There have been massive tsunamis and earthquakes in the East. We experienced a hurricane named Katrina that nearly wiped a US city off the map. After 2005, Katrina's not the prettiest name.

We elected George W. Bush as a president after the closest election in history. Way to kick off a decade. Based on that decision, I was baffled when we had a woman and a black

man battling to win the democratic nomination. In this decade, and thankfully my lifetime, a black man has been elected the President of the United States. Other political breakthroughs include the legalization of same-sex marriage for the first time in 2004. Then we experienced a global financial collapse and government bailouts and all around panic. I guess I should also mention that there's now such thing as The Governator. Don't even get me started on Sarah Palin. Quite the decade for politics.

Technology has an entirely new meaning. We have DVDs and now Blurays and why did we ever have to live without digital cable or DVRs?!?! Remember having to sit and watch the TV guide channel? Torture. Cell phones have come a long way. A cell phone can now be your phone, camera, video camera, computer, stereo, and instant messenger. Don't you remember that Ginuwine song, Two-Way? Yeah...the first texting and it was a pager, not a cell phone. The internet has transformed into something completely indispensable. I'm blogging, one, I can share my blog on Facebook, two, and even attach videos from YouTube, three. I don't have dial-up AOL, but high-speed cable internet that I use on my iMac rather than a Dell. Let us not forget about the technology advances in the music world. I don't know if I had started downloading music for free on Napster to burn CDs by the end of the last decade, but now I buy songs on iTunes or Amazon and load them onto my iPod. Technology these days has done away with VCRs, tape players, phone books, checkbooks, fax machines, and countless other things of the past.

Obviously there are other random milestones of the decade such as the Harry Potter phenomenon, our first American Idol in 2002, Botox, the write-off of Pluto as a planet, the Enron scandal, the Chappelle Show, the Office, and other things like Red Bull and Free Credit Reports. We also lost people special to the world such as Bernie Mac, Aaliyah, Dale Earnhardt, Heath Ledger, and even Michael Jackson. It seems the world is both advancing and tearing itself apart at lighting speed.

I'm sure there are things I've missed, but so much has happened in my life and the world around me that it's hard to keep a tally. If all of that happened in the last decade, I can't imagine what this next one's going to bring. Any predictions? Flying cars, life on another planet, the Jetson's robot maids, the obsoletion of paper? I just hope that I won't have to see the extinction of Penguins thanks to another one of the last decade's terms: Global Warming. Personally, I'm hoping it brings me strength and stability, marriage, children, and maybe a new career. Yikes! Good thing we have seatbelts and airbags now. I have a damn good feeling I'll need them.