Is it just another day? Just another New Years? Or are you a little sad?

Say goodbye to the twentieth century.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Answers

Well, I was terribly excited, but now I'm all nostalgic. That bit about the '20s not being roaring got to me.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

it makes me a little sad.

you know what made me really sad, though? when beth pointed out in the log that i could be the world's oldest woman next century. gah. that scares me.

i hate new years, though. mostly because i never have anything good to do, and this year, when i do, i have too many things. bleh.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Geekily, I'll point out that this isn't really the end of the twentieth century, just the end of the 1900s.

I'm a little sad, but mostly because I'd looked forward to this day ever since I was little with my Mom, and she's no longer with us. She'd have been 84. She always loved New Year's, and would have loved having fireworks, as we are going to.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

I'm always a little sad too Beth. This year though I'm a bit preoccupied by the fact that I a) have acute bronchitis and b) Sabs is in the ER for the second time in 48 hours.

So I have more to be anxious about than I usually would. On the other hand, who has time to worry about Y2K when they're running 103 of fever?

This time of year always makes me a bit introspective and I've found over time that I prefer to spend it quietly with a few loved ones or friends than at a party with lots of drunken fools.

As for the century, I feel a vague sense of weirdness or wrongness to be saying farewell to 19xx. I mean, it will be so strange to write 2000 on things beginning tomorrow. All of our lives we've been 19xx and now that's about to change.

The 20th century had lots of bad stuff, but it had lots of good stuff too and it is odd and strange and a little sad to be leaving that behind.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

I'm a bit sad. Like you said, I'm going to be a relic now, born way back in 1971. I'm from the old century and if we have kids they'll be from the new century.

At the same time it's sort of exciting to me. I'm a technology geek and I'm a little excited to see if any time during the 21st century is really like the Jetsons.

I don't have much time to be sad though, as I have to work most of the weekend, including coming in at 8 AM tomorrow.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Well, damn. I was fine with it until I read your journal entry! *sniff*

http://www.bitchypoo.com/bitchypoo.html

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

A bit sad, but I am most New Years. I do see it as a bit step-like.
When it comes to the century, I keep thinking about what of the things that have happened in the past 100 years will still be remembered in another hundred. Not by historians or other specialists, mind you, but by average intelligent people. What do we remember from the 1800's? Or the 1500's? I have no reason to think that the events of this century are any more important than those that happened before (just more relevant to us), so I wonder what is making a lasting difference in the world. What will be the impact of computers? Or the internet? Will Watergate continue to affect people any more than all of the other presidential scandals? Will the civil rights movement be still relevant, or remote evidence of the unenlightened past? Will any of the music I listen to still exist?
In 100 years, will all of the things that my life revolves around now matter to anyone?

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

I wasn't looking forward to the New Year with any more fervancy than normal.

I have been more curious about the repercussions of short-sighted programmers and engineers, who in all reality could have forseen millions in their lives at the end of the century if they simply programmed only two digits instead of the four. However, since New Years came and went in Sydney, Australia and they haven't fallen into the ocean, I guess it's safe to assume that tomorrow this time I will be cooking on my electric range and not over an open fire in one of many Seattle-area refugee camps, where I would have paid my the last of my savings for a dented can of beans.

That aside, I have always looked forward to the New Year as a clean slate, a new crisp white page. This year, more than any other, I am finding this to be true but not because of the that alleged millennium bug. Yesterday was my last day at work, (a transition two months in the making) and we found out that my husband was being laid off, effective January 31, with a fair severance package. The news is still sinking in, but now it really is a clean slate.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Let's put it this way - I'm not sad to see this calendar year and calendar century come to a close. I tend to look to the future and focus on the present more than romanticize the past. The past is for learning from, not clinging to, the way I look at it.

So on with the future, one moment at a time. :)

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Very sad. I hate goodbyes of any kind.

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Well, I'm still holding out for a Y2K disaster that will reduce Detroit to smoking ruins, but in my heart of hearts, I know that I will be denied...

-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

"The Holocaust occurred sixty years before I was born,"

Are you sure you're that young? Was the Holocaust was in the late 30's, no?

I hadn't quite thought of the turn of the calendar as the end of "my" century...until now. I also have a home full of relics: a treadle sewing machine (with its purchase papers and guarantee) from 1912, a Victorian-era sideboard, things from the 20's, my clip-on shades for my glasses are -glass-, from the sixties, and I found them in their case at a yard sale.
I also have a few boxes of 80's clothes that would make Breakfast-Club era Molly Ringwald die with envy, but don't tell anyone I wore a remodeled tux with a pink satin bow tie and gloves.

Anyway, I plan on making 2000 mine as well. I miss the Gilded Era of the U.S., and I'll miss the 80's, and I'll eventually miss being in my 30's.

Crank up the Vistrola for me, and I will put something in my CD player for you.



-- Anonymous, December 31, 1999

Ack! Thanks for the correction; somehow I added 30+/- to 60 to come up with 69.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

I was going to make some comment about the pitifulness of both of us posting so close together, so soon after the flip of the year, so surrounded in the same neighborhood by wakeful humans, BUT

those same wakeful humans are currently blowing firecrackers off of the thankfully metal doors of my complex and whooping through fake police bullhorns over and over (12:16, note) "Happy New Year, C St!" whilst tossing beer bottles. So I suppose that I am sad now for the new millennia (or century-whatever, you nitpicky types) in that people apparently are still acting like people.

That is the report for C St. How is Doc doing with the fireworks?

reading Moby Dick and Xeney as the year turns,
heather.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

Actually, I was one of those people with the noisemakers and firecrackers, and Doc did just fine. I posted mine at about 9 p.m. PST; I didn't realize Greenspun time wasn't the same as California time. We took Doc for a walk at 12:30, after we left our party on 27th Street, and he mostly ignored the fireworks and seemed resigned to dealing with drunken owners and loud noises.

Happy new year, everyone.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

Being a resident of Australia, and therefore potentially among the first victims of the Y2K bug that never actually happened, may I firstly say how nice it was to see us getting namechecked in the Dec. 31 entry? In response to the actual question, I have two responses to the idea of the end of the century, which may or may not be conflicting or contradictory.

One, that people will be so happy with the symbolism of the date 2000 and of the new set of digits, that they'll feel like they can put the 20th century behind them and maybe try harder to do things right in the next century.

Two, that the 20th century was a very, shall we say, interesting period in human history, and that I fear the 21st century will prove to be similarly interesting.

Have a good new year, James

http://www.geocities.com/jgwr/

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

It was, all told, a pretty grim century, if you take the long view. I suppose all I can think about is the optimism with which people greeted the late century, and how utterly, completely, it was crushed before the first five decades were over. I don't see a lot of that utopianism nowadays, and that's probably a good thing.

I wonder if anyone could regard this as a "Gilded Age", Dow at 10,000 or not. They certainly weren't "Naughty Nineties". I'll be in my fifties for the "Roaring Twenties", so I doubt if I'll be roaring all that much. I dread another "Dirty Thirties", as should we all.

I suppose I'm kind of excited at the whole "blank slate" prospect, our vague dispensation to regard the new century as something new, something different, somehow untainted by the events of the old one.

Except that it would be an utter illusion. I wonder if this was what they felt a hundred years ago.

The house we live in was here a hundred years ago. Sometimes you just can't help but wish for that damn time machine.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

Ah...yes yes yes, I don't mind streetbound fireworks activities (as appeared to be happening in your pictures). But I sincerely doubt that you were among the folks actively tossing fireworks against doors in an enclosed space then gleefully flinging your bottles to the sidewalk. I was going to actually go out and stroll about a bit after the first big round of explosions, but the sheer idiocy outside my very door kept me inside. Glad it wasn't so bad a block down, didn't mean to imply anything about those who may or may not have been drunk and enjoying reasonable fire-stuff.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

Oh, yeah, we heard all of that. We also saw what looked like Roman candles going off on E Street.

I think the only major damage last night was the fire next to Dorothea Puente's house on F Street. We saw the fire trucks headed that way.

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2000

I agree with what Judy said about learning from the past, not clinging to it. Therefore, 'important' dates don't really mean that much to me - they're just numbers on the calendar. Then again, I do have my own private collection of important dates. For example, next tuesday it'll be exactly 25 years since I saw my first Led Zep-show, as a 10-year-old. Now there's a night that really changed my life!

And I don't think something like the memory of the holocaust will go away anytime soon. Books, photographs and movies have made sure of that. The memory of the civil war would still be very much alive today if they'd had tv cameras back then. And so would WWI, for that matter. I don't know about the USA, but here in Europe you don't hear anyone about that - even though battlefields like Verdun are still there for everyone to see. It's sad but true.

Then again, what about the Gulf war? Does anyone even think of that one anymore? Overhere, not really, but then it wasn't much more than a fly-by shooting marketed as a full scale war, was it? And like all marketing ploys, it quickly went the way of the dinosaur.

Happy new year, and let's try to make this a peaceful century.....

-- Anonymous, January 03, 2000

Beth, your entry summed up a lot of what I've been feeling. I felt sad and a bit wary about the whole thing. Ostensibly, I was worried that people might go insane and start doing crazy things (or crazier than usual things) because of the big change. But underneath it I think is general fear of change and sadness that "the twenties" won't be The Twenties that I've learned about and wistfully yearn for. I love the past too and this seems to move it a bit further away.

Anyway, I don't think it's the end of the century till next year. So there.

-- Anonymous, January 03, 2000