2010? That's So Five Minutes Ago

I don’t know how you all do it. I haven’t had a moment to write a blog post in a week, due to ChristmasBedlamFest2009. All the shopping, all the wrapping, all the packing up and driving all over New England. Well, it’s over. And in a few hours the year will be over as well.


So, tell me Internet, what do you think 2010 will be like? I remember seeing movies when I was a kid that depicted 2010 in a way that looks radically different than 2009 actually looked. In those movies, all the people walking around in 2010 were wearing a lot of silver clothing. Their homes looked like laboratories and not a place with a cushy couch and brick fireplace. Their hairstyles were cut bluntly, and were angular looking. The family dog was replaced by a four-legged robot that chirped mechanically instead of woofing. Here it is 2010, and I do not own a stitch of silver clothing. My dogs are of the fuzzy and shedding variety. My home has the cushy couch and the fireplace, and I do not bark commands at some unseen computer when I want the lights to turn on as I enter a room.

But then, if you think about it, a lot of the things we say in everyday conversation are things that we hadn’t even heard of 20 years ago. While we are not walking around in silver clothing, I am sitting here writing on a blog that is broadcast to the world via the World Wide Web. It wasn’t that long ago when the word “blog” didn’t exist. (The word has become so commonplace that the spellchecker in Microsoft Word didn’t even flag it. The word “spellchecker” wasn’t flagged either. Telling, yes?)

And now, in 2010, state lawmakers are passing laws that prohibit motorists from writing text messages on their cell phones while driving. Lawmakers are banning a practice that did not exist 20 years ago. I remember a scene in one of the “Airplane” movies in which a character was speaking on a phone while driving in his car. It was one of those desktop phones, with the curly cord and everything. I watched this movie a few years ago with friends, and none of us cracked a smile as the man spoke into the phone while he drove. I broke the silence and said “You do realize that when this movie came out, the idea of a phone in a car was fricken hilarious, right?” Yet now we (not me, I refuse to carry a cell phone) carry phones around in our pockets, and we use them to access the Internet everyday, without thinking twice about it.

If we have made such amazing technological strides in the last 20 years, imagine what 2030 will look like. Maybe by then the silver clothing will be in style.