So mere minutes after I get done writing one of the longest blog posts I’ve ever written about the past decade and including a huge bit on the evolution of being smart and information and such, I swing by Draegs blog and find this:

(click for hi-res)

And it sums up exactly what I was talking about. My long droning post is old-skool. This quick chart is the new smart.

My post sucks. This chart rules.

My two big exceptions come with Google and Auto-Tune. And not because of placement, but because of how long it takes things to go mainstream.

I understand Google as a verb probably hit around 2005, but I distinctly remember using and telling others about this awesome search engine when we lived in Florida. That would have been 2001 at the latest – although if memory serves me correctly it was certainly before that (late ‘99, early ‘00?). I don’t know what my point is, but I’ve been googling for 10 years.

As far as Auto-Tune, I used it way back in Florida too. My big mistake was using it so that it didn’t sound like I was using it. But then again, doing something like that seems to be a cultural change that’s happened in the past decade too – and I can’t quite describe it. But it never occured to me to use auto-tune in a way to make it noticable. It was a tool that was meant to not be noticed the way I (and the countless people who used it) seemed to understand it. A tool.

I always used the hammer to nail the nail flush and look pretty and blend in. These guys are using it to bend the nail halfway out of the wall and hang a sign on it reading, “Hey, check out this fucked up nail!”

That sort of mentality (and I can’t pin it down in words) is something that evolved over the past decade. You couldn’t have done that 15 years ago. People would just be like, “That dude can’t sing and he’s trying to cover it up with processing.” Now people dig it.

Not condemning it in any way, because I do admit a certain admiration for the cleverness of it (and mashup artists and people turning something like DJ’ing into musicianship in some weird sort of way and similar things – in all fields, not just music).

Still no real point, but rest assured, people were using Auto-Tune long before it became the noun of 2009.

Ok, enough of my rambling…

…I should have just made a chart.

With the 00’s coming to an end, you know damn well everybody will have a list or a retrospective or just some thoughts on the past decade. I’m no different. What makes mine any better or worthwhile than any of the millions of others you could find being posted somewhere this week? To be honest, nothing. In fact, I suggest you go find a better one to read.

Hell, that right there is one of the biggest changes of the past 10 years – the internet is here for everyone to talk about anything. 10 years ago the blog was a blossoming idea. Now it seems everyone has a voice online. 10 years ago you wouldn’t have gone blog-to-blog gathering your friends’ and acquaintances’ thoughts on the preceding decade, but on the cusp of the 10’s here we are – me posting and you reading.

In fact, I think life (in many aspects) changed more in the 00’s than any other decade in history. It seems like change comes quicker than ever. And the quicker it comes, the faster we can change again. The rate in which things evolve seems to keep increasing. I can’t even begin to imagine how different the little things in life will be on December 31, 2019 – especially if the rate of change and advancement continues to grow seemingly exponentially.

On December 31, 1999 we personally had 54 TV channels available to us. We had one cell phone my wife used for work – no one texted and it didn’t do much other than play ‘Snake’ and be ugly and gold with a pull-up antenna. I did have a 1.5Mb down internet connection – which was pretty fast at the time. The catch was that it was 56k up via phone line. My wife would call home from work and get annoyed that the line rang busy.

I imagine I’ll look back at what I use and have now in the same way at the end of the 10’s.

Two of the larger, widespread (cultural?) changes that immediately come to mind that happened in the 00’s that I happen to find particularly interesting are on the subjects of celebrity and intelligence. (polar opposites, right?)

I think we became more focused on celebrity as everyone is a celebrity to some degree now. I mean, if you’re reading this and you’ve never met me, then I’m a stranger who’s actions and ideas you care about…and that’s kind of celebrity following in a weird abstract way. How much difference is there between reading TMZ to see what Brad Pitt is up to and reading this blog to see what I’m up to – especially if you don’t know me (or, presumably, Brad Pitt)? Doesn’t the idea that I even post ideas here for people to read (even total strangers) present a certain sense of narcism that in the past was reserved for only public figures? Because, face it, if I were really only doing it for myself, it wouldn’t be online and you wouldn’t be reading it.

Not only that, but this is the decade where ‘celebrity’ became a career of it’s own. It used to be that people were celebrities and famous for doing other things. Actors, musicians, athletes, etc were all celebrities because of what they did. Now kids cite ‘celebrity’ as something they’d like to be when they grow up. There’s probably better examples, but immediately I think Paris Hilton. She may not be the textbook definition of what I’m getting at, but I think she’s the one I blame for bridging the gap between being famous because of what you do and just being famous.

Somewhere along the way between reality TV, our online presence – complete with narcissistic tendencies becoming acceptable and attention whores like Paris Hilton making the big time we’ve crossed the line into that weird chicken/egg area where someone can be famous just because they’re famous. (edit – now that I think of it Tila Tequila would be a good fit too – I think you see what I’m getting at)

I think in hindsight, the 00’s will be seen as the decade when the idea of celebrity changed forever.

The other big change is the way we are smart. Intelligence. I read somewhere (don’t know where) that being smart used to me “knowing information” and now it means “being able to use/process information that is known” – in the sense that technology picks up a lot of the workload in terms of being smart these days.

I see a lot of younger kids talk about how they don’t need to know more than basic math or spelling because we have the tools to do that for ourselves now. Why bother learning to spell if spell check will just fix it on the fly as long as you get even remotely in the ballpark with your guess? Why bother learning any more than simple math facts when calculators, programs and online tools do all the hard stuff (anything you wouldn’t quickly do in your head, at least) for you in less time? Why bother knowing facts when you can access pretty much any piece of info from pretty much anywhere? Hell, I even see people who are clearly just going to the grocery store with their GPS fired up.

I think the 00’s will also be defined as the decade where the flip to a new way of thinking, of knowing, of information, of being intelligent began. Our descendants at the end of this century – my grandchildren as grandparents (yes, that’s just 70 years away – yikes!) will look back and laugh at how they did things as kids like I do now and try to imagine doing it differently a few decades before they were born. My childhood of the 80’s (my 7-17 years at least) will seem even more foreign and distant than my own grandmother’s childhood of the 30’s seems to me…mostly because of that increased rate of evolution I mentioned earlier.

I still laugh sometimes when I think about being a kid. If I didn’t know something, I didn’t know it. Simple as that. If it were something of importance, you could go to a library and research and learn, but if it were something trivial (the name of that song that goes like this…, or what year some TV show went off the air, things like that) you might never know. Now you just google it. The amount of info at our fingertips is staggering and light years beyond what it was at the onset of this decade. Having the information and knowledge isn’t the issue anymore, using it is.

But enough with my usual pseudo-intellectual ranting and onto more personal thoughts.

Actually, before I forget – what exactly have we decided to call the 00’s? How do we verbalize it? I used the “Noughties” as the title of the post and I’ve also seen it referred to as the “Aughts” as well. In type it’s easy to just do the 00’s thing, but how do you say it? And how exactly will this decade be remembered? And how can I use the two together? Like when I write (or say) “90’s Sensitive Guy” or “80’s Hair Metal” or “70’s Swinger” or “60’s Hippie” or “50’s Greaser” – each of those painted a clear visual for you. What stereotypes will hold about the 00’s and how will we verbalize it?

I dunno. Just a thought.

On a more personal level, if you read a recent blog entry you know I rang in the 00’s (and the millennium) with my wife at work. We had just moved to Jacksonville, FL in the spring of ‘99 for a salary that at the time made us think we were rich, but that I can’t imagine living on now…at the other end of the decade. On an even more personal level, I weighed somewhere around 40 pounds or so less than I do now. That’s a scary thought. I was still a musician as far as income goes and that was the year Sony contacted me with mild interest in music I had been posting at mp3.com – it never panned out, but it was exciting at the time. I came closer than most to becoming a professional rock star. It was shortly after that that I registered coasterimage.com and bought some photo equipment – all on a whim and a budding interest in amusement parks. Here at the other end of the decade, that budding interest and in turn the photography aspect it introduced me to provides the income.

Interestingly, at the time my wife had two distinctly different job offers on the table. We took the Jax one as I mention, but the other would have taken us to New Jersey and we seriously considered it. I wonder what my life looks like in that alternate universe where the decision to go to Jersey is playing out?

In 2001 things were on cruise control for most of the year. We found out early in the year that my wife was pregnant and we’d be parents again. In February we made our first park visit (to Busch Gardens Tampa) with intentions of taking photos that would begin to make up a website. In September our car was crushed during a Disney World visit and we ended up getting our first brand new car out of the whole ordeal. We picked up that new car on 9/11. Two weeks later, my son was born. Crazy times. We left Jacksonville in November of that year and spent Thanksgiving eating subs in a hotel room. All in all, we were glad to be leaving Jax at the time, but in hindsight it’s a fondly remembered period.

I can’t say the same for our destination – Allentown, PA. To this day the only two things about the area that we liked were our proximity to both NYC and Dorney Park. Other than that we hated everything – my wife’s job, our apartment, our neighborhood – everything. This period is not fondly remembered with the exception of my 29th birthday extravaganza which was a blowout 4 day weekend party in NYC. I suspect that when all is said and done it will go down as the greatest birthday celebration of my life.

We were in Allentown long enough for my daughter to start school than the planets aligned and our personal plans came to fruition and my wife was offered a job “back home” in the Pittsburgh area. We moved in September of 2003 and my daughter was in her second school already and still in Kindergarten. We were glad to be home. That was the year my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer and most of 2004 was a generally scary time. I don’t believe in fate, but the timing was perfect and it’s nice to think that a greater force made sure we were home at the time to help out. 2004 was also the year I finally shaved my head and lost the crazy haircuts for good. I shaved it just before we headed to Canada (for amusement parks, of course). That same week we traded in the Disney car for another new car (that we ended up driving to Canada) – that car still sits in the driveway today.

2005 was the year that my wife decided she needed to make a change with her work situation and after almost 10 years with the same company she walked on them in the middle of the year. It was a huge leap of faith and we took a huge income hit at the time. Looking back, I still don’t know how we made it as long as we did.

We struggled into the spring of 2006 when the offer to take a position in the Dayton area came along. We were pretty excited about the position as it offered some much needed money and was with a company with a solid rep in the industry – oddly enough she interviewed with them back on 2003 when we were trying to get the hell out of Allentown and it didn’t pan out. We were less enthusiastic about everything else – moving away from ‘home’, the Dayton area in general, moving the kids yet again, etc. In the end we went for it (as we’ve always done in life) and surprisingly found ourselves quite happy with our decision and pleasantly surprised with our liking of the area.

In February of 2007 I started this blog and you can read about things from then on. It’s quite a collection of thoughts and such.

My wife and I have always said, “You never know where you’ll be in a year” for as long as I can remember. It’s even crazier if you try to look at 10 years. Flat out insane if you try to look forward. All I know is that in 10 years, my youngest will be 18. Hopefully, I’ll have two successful, well-adjusted adult children who are out in the world to some degree (not a big fan of kids lingering around forever, I don’t think – ask me again in 10 years) and a wife that I can continue to enjoy spending time with (as a couple again!) and feel nostalgic about now.

But if that’s the case I’m going to grow my hair and start getting high again. Man, the 20’s are gonna be awesome!