What does the idea of the year 2000 (or the millenium) mean to you?

Colleen, 29
Virginia Beach, VA

For reasons I can't quite identify, I think it's kinda neat that I'm alive during a change in the way we think about time. When I think of the year 999, I think of primitive, uncomfortable living mixed with the beginnings of change for people. When I think of different centuries, like the 18th or 19th centuries, stereotypical images come to mind: Victorians or Colonial settlers. I wonder what the stereotype will be for the 20th century.

Laura, 34
Lowell, MA

On these occasions there is the expectation, almost an obligation to attach importance to the moment. If not to say something profound, to feel something profound or at least to say that one feels something profound. This expectation is like the arbitrary expectation that diamond will be more beautiful than glass..

A year ago, I traveled to Rome with the woman I married twelve years ago. With tens of thousands of fellow pilgrims, we sat in Saint Peter's square or the Holy Father's Mass. I found myself dozing.I am not an atheist. In the Cathedral of Saint Paul, I was moved to tears. In the square, the expectation that I be moved was too much for me.

If the new millennium should turn out to begin in the year 2001, will the occasion be as profound? If the 2000th anniversary of Christ's birth is actually five years from now should we westerners be less moved ten days hence?

Ten days from now, I will feel something but it will almost certainly be the reflected emotion of the people around me who have chosen to mark this particular millennium together.

Dan
Lowell, MA

I think it is so wonderful to be alive at this time to see the year 2000 arrive. There have been times when I would have doubted I would make it. John will live to a hundred so don't worry about him. He just golfed in a big tournament and came in third and that is not bad at all, do to the fact that he was the oldest by far than the other golfers from Auto Nation. He is 77yrs old but can run circles around the young ones. Bless his heart. I was supposed to marry someone else when I met him in October of 1944 and we married July 28,l945. Most of the time we were apart because he was still in the Service. For Christmas 1944 he had to send me my Friendship ring, came home on a leave May 1945 and gave me my diamond and on the next leave for 2 weeks in July we got married. When I look at our wedding pictures we look like a couple of teen agers but I was 21 and he was 22 turning 23 the next month. The guy I was supposed to marry was my sweetheart from when we were Seniors in High School. I picked the right one and I sure am glad I did. John came from Chelsea and I from Revere but we never knew each other until we met at a dance in Boston and he had just returned from Europe after 3 years. He was on B17's and had over a hundred missions.

Well, enough of this. Are you going out New Year's Eve? I think we will go out for an early dinner but this year will stay awake to welcome in the year 2000. I think it is so exciting. They say that people are stocking up on food, etc., here in Fla. like there is going to be no tomorrow. Would love to be in Times Square at midnight. When that ball goes down WOW!!!!!

Gwen

I'm not sure if at this time the idea of the year 2000 means much to me. I do remember when I was 12 or 13 thinking, wow I will be alive at the year 2000 and I'll be 34 in that year. Now I'm here and it just seems like the passing of another week. I guess alot of that has to do with perspective.The future I guess always seems so much more exciting. As for the idea of a millenium, that holds more interest to me. To think abouit 1000 years ago and a 1000 years hence. So small in the scope of time. But all of the advances that have happened. 1000 years ago we were still in the dark ages. Shakespeare, DaVinci, and the renaissance were 500 years away. The world was stil flat. Disease riddle the world. Any nations were at their infancy. Now. We are entering what seems the decline in importance in the nation state, information flows rapidly *(at least to some of us), we live longer, have access to more. But I wonder how different we really are than our ancestors of a thousand years ago. And how different will our desendents be a thousand years from now.

Felicia, 33
Somerville, MA

It's the turn of the Century. Seems like a really big deal. I'm just not sure how to respond to it. Starting in September my wife, Tina, and I slowly became stressed out about New Year's Eve and our (lack of) plans. "We must do something special on this New Year's," we said to each other anxiously. Great ideas and invites came by mail and phone from friends in disparate states. A rustic cabin in the Rockies of Colorado; a ritzy black-tie affair in Texas; or a building party in the East Village. Money soon became the bottom line - as it usually does - and the closest option ruled. Then, we thought... New York City... Millenium... hype... people... t