A Note On Counting

I fall into the camp that asserts decades don’t end on the nines. This is because of how numbers and counting work. When asked to count to ten, you don’t start with zero and end with nine; you begin at one and end with ten. That means the first-ever decade would have been the years 1 through 10, and the next decade would have been the years 11 through 20. And so on. As such, “this decade” should be 2011 through 2020, just as the past century was 1901-2000 — it didn’t end on Dec. 31, 1999.

But at the same time, I’m well aware that my camp is the smaller, lesser known of the two camps. Popular culture, mass media, and our common lingo has long decreed that decades are called names like “the thirties” or “the ‘90s”, and so the years typically included are those voiced “ninety-something” — therefore 1990-99, or, in the case of the current decade (“the tens”) 2010-2019. Instead of being that one guy who insists on writing his decade-in-review blog entry at the end of next year, purely to be pedantic and difficult and unique, I’m going with popular convention and looking back at the tens, 2010-2019.

What A Difference a Decade Makes

Rather than simply listing events — as I do in my year-end blog entries — it feels more relevant to show where I was then, contrasted with where I am now. A decade feels different than a year. The older I get, the more I feel that things don’t change much in a single year, a mere 365 days. But decades still feel like expanses of time that require some effort to cross. If only 52 weeks have passed, I might be mostly the same person I was at the beginning. But when more than five hundred weeks have passed — more than 3,650 days! — major things in my life have changed.

An interesting thing about this particular decade is that it’s the first one that matches up well with a chapter of my life. Each of the others must be broken up into bits and pieces of my story, but the 2010s frames a cohesive narrative from start to finish.

Ten Years Ago

Three thousand six hundred fifty-odd days ago, my young wife and I were still new to Killeen. Days earlier, our car had been stolen. Eight weeks earlier, she was at work in the emergency room at Ft. Hood during the infamous massacre. Neither of our children had yet been conceived; the site where our house now sits was still empty pasture (though brand new streets had recently been paved nearby).

For us, everything was on the cusp of change.

We knew (mostly) where we wanted to be in ten years — at least the house and two kids part. We figured we’d still be in Killeen and had made educated guesses that we would age approximately 10 years in that time. All of that came to pass more or less as we expected.

Our Household’s Changes

The visible, external changes in our lives over 10 years have been well-documented on my blogs and especially my Flickr photostream. Most of them, my wife and I had planned beforehand. Soon after 2010 began, we signed up to have our house built and by late summer we were living here. Early in 2010, we announced my wife was pregnant and before the year ended our daughter was born. Early in 2010, we bought our 2003 Dodge Neon to replace the stolen car.

Those threads are still with us ten years later — we still live in that house; we still own that Dodge (though it’s nearing the end of its lifespan); we now have two children and they are (usually) the dominant features of our lives. Most of our 2010s revolved around the house and the children.

Personal Changes

My own personal growth has been documented online as well, though perhaps not so thoroughly or consistently. Looking at my journals, blog entries, and photos from the 2009-10 period, it’s clear that I changed in ways other than the expected “got older” or “became a parent”.

One change I noticed is my increasing recognition of limited remaining time — whatever my eventual expiration date, it’s getting closer steadily. So I am less apt to waste time these days, more likely to make choices based on “is this how I want to spend the rest of my time?” My future self has a definite opinion on whether I should be doing X or Y. So if I have 30 free minutes and a choice to spend it scrolling through memes on Facebook or reading a book, I have learned to more consistently do the latter.

That perspective is part of what led me to change the way I blog. Ten years ago, my Verily blog was about camera settings and movies, complaints about mistakes in online news stories, with a few centrist and uninspiring political entries. Most of it seems to have been just “something on my mind”. Over the decade I began to take more care with my entries. Today, I blog more rarely, but make more of an attempt to make each entry meaningful and important. My other blog (this one) went through similar changes, from near-daily entries on the minutiae of my children’s lives to this year’s near blackout.

The decade also saw me wax and wane on social media. For example, I finally gave in and rejoined Facebook — connecting with new people and reconnecting with others. But by 2019 I had quit Facebook again, and curtailed my use of other social media sites. I naively entertained hopes midway through the 2010s that I could somehow “make a difference” by the way I engaged. That ended as you might have predicted: in disillusionment.

Other habits and hobbies changed too, for similar reasons and reflecting changes in my personality. Early in the decade I watched plenty of sports on TV; now I never do. I used to review mostly movies; now my reviews are of books. We quit using Amazon for any purposes, after learning the company promotes and publishes white supremacist literature and directly funds hard-right websites like Brietbart. My wife and I began donating heavily to nonprofits like MSF, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Trevor Project, Wikipedia, and others — because it seems absurd to stuff our savings accounts when so many other people need so much help.

This was also the decade that I abandoned my former political centrism. Whereas I once believed it was reasonable to look for faults on both/all sides and label myself a moderate, I now look upon that position with regret. I became the type of person who attends political rallies and meet-the-candidate events — because it finally sank into me after all these years that politics is personal and that politics matters — especially to the marginalized, the oppressed, the downtrodden.

Philosophically, I tackled the biggest question in the middle of the decade and came to grips with my atheism.

I started writing fiction again, after a burst of poetry mid-decade.

Hopes And Plans For the 2020s

As much as anyone can predict the future, I think the 2020s might be just as good for me and my family as the ‘10s were. Some things we can reasonably expect include my daughter’s graduation from high school, both children obtaining driving licenses, switching cars two or three times, and consistently replacing electronic doodads as they break down or become obsolete.

Obviously, any number of obstacles could arise that prevent those things from happening, but it is more pleasant to skip worrying about those possibilities and simply tackle them as they (if they) come.

Personally, though I loathe resolutions (about which most people later feel guilt because they didn’t keep them), I do hope to continue improving. For example, I hope to keep up my record-breaking pace of reading books, both fiction and non-fiction. I hope to write a novel that’s been in my head since 2004 or so (and maybe a few more short stories along the way). I want to attend more political advocacy events in the area (which usually means Austin). Perhaps most of all, I want to continue identifying and correcting wrong and outdated notions buried in my brain.

Conclusion

I am hesitantly satisfied with my performance as a human being in the 2010s. I did not get worse about any single thing in my life, and in fact intentionally improved myself in several ways. More than any other decade of my life, this is the one with which I am the most contented and the least regretful. Unlike any other decade in my life, this one was mostly devoted to “adulting” — at which I haven’t failed spectacularly (yet), and I think I’m still in the running for the “Acceptable Spouse And Parent” award.

And I am cautiously optimistic about the coming decade.

A Decade Of Extreme Weather

If you’ve been paying attention to my life at all, you know I watch the weather. The end of 2019 marked ten full years of daily weather notations from me, which take up an increasingly large section of my website (start here). It began when I realized personal memory is awful for comparing weather days. Any time someone would declare “it sure is warm this winter”, someone else would remark that “winter’s always this warm here” and someone else would argue that “it’s never been this warm”, and I WANTED TO KNOW FOR SURE. In the beginning, I meant only to count 100-degree days per year, because we had a whole hell of a lot of 100-degree days in 2011. But soon I was writing down the high and low for each day, measuring precipitation, making notes on the cloudy/clear skies, humidity, and wind speed. Eventually, I cut it back down to temperature and precip to save time.

Now that ten years have passed, I have a “baseline” of sorts against which to compare all future days, months, and years. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that there are no real patterns to our weather here; rain amounts don’t always match up with temperature surges, and one month being warmer than average doesn’t say diddly-squat about the following month. One thing is very certain: we have set far more daily record highs in the past ten years than daily record lows — the ratio is about 5:1.