[I Was Naked]
When I Wrote ThisForever Young
2007-03-08
Probably one of my favorite Mel Gibson movies. Premise is simple enough, as listed on the IMDB; A 1939 test pilot asks his best friend to use him as a guinea pig for a cryogenics experiment. Daniel McCormick wants to be frozen for a year so that he doesn't have to watch his love lying in a coma. The next thing Daniel knows is that he's been awoken in 1992.I think we all remember what happens as Daniel starts to age, and looks for his friend and realizes Helen still lives. The one part they could have expanded on more as he spends the night in the tree house, browsing history, is the emotional impact trying to grasp what happened in the world over fifty years. This came to mind because as I heard on the news tonight that a woman has now awakened from a coma after six years. Curious about how it would feel, I looked at what was going on six years ago. It does not seem that long ago, but historically this is what was happening.
I was going to do a then and now, but since life is about perception and how it affects us, you can formulate your own opinion, knowing what has transpired from then until today. These are just top stories culled from the headlines.
In the news 2001:
January- George W. Bush is sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States.
February-NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt is killed instantly in a crash on the last lap of the Daytona 500
March-The Russian space station Mir re-enters the atmosphere near Nadi, Fiji, and falls into the Pacific Ocean.
April- Former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milošević surrenders to police Special Forces, to be tried on charges of war crimes.
May-Washington, DC police declare Chandra Levy missing (her remains are discovered a year later).
June-Andrea Yates drowns her children in a bathtub and confesses to her crime. She is sentenced to life in prison.
July- I celebrated my 38th birthday. (Ok, Ok, that wasn’t newsworthy)August-A Cessna 402 aircraft carrying 9 people, including R&B singer Aaliyah, crashes in the Bahamas, killing all aboard.
September-Almost 3,000 are killed in the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center in New York City, The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and in rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
October-Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants breaks the single season home run record with his 71st and 72nd home runs of the year. Both are off Chan Ho Park of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
November- Microsoft releases Windows XP and releases the Xbox.
December-Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 5 days after Dynegy cancels a US$8.4 billion buyout bid. At the time, this is the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
The most watched shows were (in no particular order)
Everybody Loves Raymond
The West Wing
Law & Order
Survivor: Africa
CSI
Will & Grace
ER
Most watched show of the year: FRIENDS
Musically we were still challenged in my humble opinion.
Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
Shaggy - Hotshot
Backstreet Boys - Black & Blue
Enya - A Day Without Rain
Janet Jackson - All For You (And we’re not talking nipple yet Ms. Wardrobe Malfunction)
Alicia Keys - Songs in A Minor
Destiny's Child - Survivor
Creed - Weathered
Aaliyah - Aaliyah
Film
1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
3. Monsters, Inc.
4. Shrek
5. Ocean's Eleven
6. Pearl Harbor
7. The Mummy Returns
8. Jurassic Park III
9. Planet of the Apes
10. Hannibal
So in essence, life does go on, and as the news story played on, this woman has come out of this coma four times in the past six years, but never to this degree where she is cognizant of questions her mother asks her. There is a possibility that she could slip back into her coma, maybe she will, depending on what she remembers as of November of 2001 when she first slipped into her coma.
As it is said the more times change the more things stay the same. It shouldn’t be that way. It is up to us to be the change the way we want the world to be.
I would hate to think if a fighter pilot is cryogenically frozen in 2009, he wakes up in 2062, and as he reviews history on his virtual reality contact lenses, the following has transpired. We are still fighting the terrorists, economically the cost of housing is so high, and the only way to afford one is to get a mortgage for your baby as a shower gift. Gas and oil prices are pennies as we were able to utilize Solar energy and that whole PECO Wind thing really took off as we figured out a way to use Global Warming to our advantage, but from a fashion standpoint we all have to wear Teflon. Microsoft has finally fixed all the bugs in Windows M.E just to prove they could but since the world runs strictly on a PC MAC Unix conglomerate, it is a moot point. On television, everything is still in syndication except maybe Survivor: Jupiter, so he can catch up on his own, and looking in the theaters, everything is or was a sequel, spare us from another Jurassic Park XXV. Music, hmmm I'm thinking we actually will have to turn on the silence.
I hope the next fifty years turns out better, I’ll be 93 so I’ll check back on this post and see how many I got right.
FinalyFree (2007-03-09)
I've never been a big fan of aging in general, however, I find that the longer I do it the easier it becomes.
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