2000-2010

I spent New Year’s Eve December 31, 1999, in the house of the pastor of the Lutheran Church in Waiwanda waiting for what many believed was the end of the world. On New Year’s Eve December 31, 2009, I spent the evening on the lanai with my wife watching fireworks and smoke — mostly smoke, actually — filling Manoa valley. A decade is a long time, especially if you’re only (only?) old enough to remember three of them. So one thing I spent the past couple of days trying to figure out what exactly I’ve done in the past ten years. My natural inclination has ganged up with the feelings that I share with a lot of guys entering middle age to do their best to make me feel that my time has been wasted, that I have not lived enough. But even the anxieties I have a strong elective affinity for have a pretty hard time making me feel like I’ve wasted the past ten years. I’ve gotten a Ph.D., gotten married, gotten a job, gotten an apartment, have kids on the way, lived in Paris, visited China and India, and, most importantly, written superb Jedi knight fan fiction featuring Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer as characters. Not to mention the fact that on January 1 my blog turned nine. NINE. Good lord.

The deeper I go in to life, however, the bigger the challenges get and the longer and more complex the work becomes. I think if I feel anxious about anything it is about the decade to come, not the decade that has passed. I’ve always joked that my goal in life, starting as a very young child, was to be a middle-aged professor and NOW AT LONG LAST THAT GOAL IS IN REACH. I even got ahead of the game by going bald a decade early. Hells yes. Middle age here I come! Stay tuned.