Monday, April 16, 2007
The other day I was walking around campus with my iPod on shuffle, head banging and jamming out on my air guitar when the long, lost Third Eye Blind hit “Semi-charmed Life” came pounding through my Apple earbuds. I realized that 1997 was a really long time ago.
A whole decade to be exact. The band and its countless fans celebrated the 10-year anniversary of their debut album just over a week ago.
With taxes due tomorrow, the nation is already in the mode of drudgingly rifling through the events of the last year so I’ve decided to rummage through the last 10 years. Based on the fact that, to my knowledge, there’s no mutually agreed upon name for our current awkwardly titled decade in the next installment of VH1’s “I Love the…” series, I think I can get away with doing a decade-in-review three years early.
nutgraf
It’s really got me wondering what life will be like in 2017.
Without commercial interruption, here is the Kansan’s premiere installment of “I Love the ‘97’s-‘07’s”
1997-2007 witnessed a lot of changes in our world, our country and in ourselves. The majority of current students on campus were going through puberty. Surely few miss the awkward period of trading in baseball cards and Barbie dolls for acne prescriptions and Midol, but those fleeting middle school romances and first, stabbing, sword-fight like kisses were truly some of our “Best Weeks Ever.”
If you’re like me, it feels like yesterday that we were building titanium reinforced Y2K shelters stocked with economy-sized rolls of toilet paper and Dasani. But that wasn’t the only fear-based instance of mass hysteria in recent memory. Not counting the Supreme Court appointment of George W. Bush to the presidency and his subsequent reelection, there were also a lot of people that freaked out about the Lawrence Microburst of ’06 and Beanie Babies.
In politics, a president was impeached. September 11, 2001 changed the world forever. A war began — and supposedly ended with some theatrics on an aircraft carrier, but I think the troops are actually still fighting. Elian Gonzalez finally got to go home thanks to those nice men with masks and automatic weapons.
In pop culture, Harry Potter apparated onto the scene and into our hearts after continually thwarting the evil Voldemort. The media thought up awful names like “Bennifer” who then repaid the favor by making “Gigli,” and Tom Cruise jumped up and down on Oprah’s coach.
The Jayhawks went to two Final Fours, not including 1997 when they fielded one of the greatest college basketball teams of all time with future NBA players Jacques Vaughn, Paul Pierce, Raef LaFrentz and Scott Pollard. At some point in the last 10 years, a lying man named Roy left town, but no one around Lawrence likes to credit his existence with talking about it. I think he was a car salesman. And his cars never made it all the way to their destination.
It’s really got me wondering what life will be like in 2017. I predict the University of Kansas will probably win a handful of national championships and that Roy person will be jailed for his atrocities to fellow men. Maybe a computer chip in somebody’s brain will start beaming down Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” from a satellite in space and a Kansan columnist will write a column like this one. The only thing we can be sure of is that taxes will be due.
Ervin is a Kansas City, Mo. junior in theatre and film and psychology.
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