Okay, this may not be the most pressing philosophical question of the 21st century, but I’m truly befuddled. What happened to the last twelve years?

There’s a Facebook status that has been circulating:

And I realized, this is true for me. For some reason, the last twelve years aren’t registering on my internal time memory stick. It’s not that they aren’t significant. They are. The most significant, actually, of my whole life.

In the last 12 years (and in no particular order) I have:

  • Given birth to my three beautiful daughters
  • Met my soul mate
  • Graduated college
  • Gone to grad school
  • Studied French at the Sorbonne in France
  • Worked as a stage manager on Off-Broadway in New York
  • Seen the Eiffel Tower at night all sparkly and full of lights
  • Sun-bathed topless on a beach in France
  • Worked as a theater critic and entertainment writer for a major Los Angeles newspaper
  • Written six books and published four of them
  • Discovered my literary home with Evolved Publishing
  • Made some of the best friends I could ever have hoped to find

This is the super-short list, but you get the idea. The last twelve years have not been without note. Very note-worthy indeed on a personal level, not to mention all the global stuff that has happened.

So what’s the deal? Why are we still stuck in the 90s?

I have a theory. It’s not scientific, and this is a blog, not a research site, so I’m not going to site sources and stuff, but basically, I think we are stuck in the 90s because it’s the last decade that has a name.

I’ve heard somewhere that without a word to describe something, our brains are unable to even register its existence.

We have the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. But what about the first two decades of the 21st century? What do we call 2000 to 2010? The 00s? Somehow this just doesn’t have the same ring to it. What do we call the decade we are in? The 10s? A bit better, but only marginally.

So we’re stuck. Until we get into the real decades again, we have no language to sum up the collective experience of the last ten years, and therefore they don’t exist.

Quite a conundrum we have found ourselves in. Maybe the world really did end when the calendars switched to January 1, 2000 and we are all recycled memories of past decades that were properly named.

Scary thought. And possibly fodder for my next paranormal novel.