Someone on Twitter said, “This decade began with Y2K and ended with WTF.” Indeed. How the world has changed, and yet not changed, in this decade. For me, Y2K is sort of a mile-marker. (or something; not sure what to call it) Every time people start getting all worked up about the latest Imminent End of the World As We Know It, I think of Y2K and how everyone was all worried and stressed out over it and then… nothing much happened.

Of course, the reason that nothing much happened was that a lot of IT people worked a lot of overtime to make sure nothing much would happen. But there were a lot of ridiculous worst-case-scenario predictions that could not have happened in any case. The problems we have today are sort of like that. They are real problems; they’re not just something groups of evil conspirators made up for the purposes of power and control, as some people think, but many of the claims of what will happen if we don’t Do Something! are ridiculous and the level of anxiety is way, way out of proportion.

It’s always that way. Nothing ever turns out to be anywhere near as bad as the worst case scenario and yet we keep on getting worked up about stuff over and over again. The really bad things that happen are almost always unexpected. Maybe we think that if we worry about everything nothing can take us by surprise but there will always be something we didn’t think of, or something obvious that we ignored while we were getting all worked up over something that would not happen.

So I would like to tell the world to just relax, but no one’s going to listen to me, especially not the people who most need that advice. The worst thing about this is that our lawmakers only listen to people who are worked up about stuff and they react and try to give those people what they want whether it makes any sense or not.

Oh well. Four paragraphs later and I’m not where I intended to be. Strange how that happens sometimes. You just start typing and there’s no telling where you’ll end up. This has been a pretty good year for me, and a pretty good decade. I know it hasn’t been for everyone but looking back on hundreds of years of history, in spite of some genuinely bad things – 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian Tsunami – it honestly hasn’t been all that terrible.

I decided to look back and see what I had so say last year at this time and found this post from December 29, 2008. I think I like that post better than this one.

One thing I wanted to be sure to say – and this is the reason for the title – can we please say “twenty-ten” not “two thousand ten”? No? Probably not. It seems like I’m hearing a lot of the latter and not much if any of the former.

It’s slightly stunning to see “2010″ everywhere. We’re actually entering the second decade of the new millennium! Remember how excited we were ten years ago – how happy, upbeat, hopeful? So much has changed since then. It hasn’t turned out like we expected. Now we talk about “hope and change” and there’s something a little bit desperate about it. Or maybe a lot desperate. To me, though, the new millennium still seems new and cool (Far out! I’m living in the future!) and it feels strange that we’re this far into it.

Yesterday I pinned together the layers of my next quilt and started the actual quilting. I am quite excited to have started it before the end of this year. I have a picture of the top that I’ll post later. I’m already thinking ahead to the next two quilts. It’s going to be a good year.