My Couple of Years

I HAVE OFFICIALLY been alive for two decades. I like to think that this is a pretty big achievements. Although two decades and a year would be a lot more fun for me, I'm willing to settle for the security of having progressed to the point in my life where I can do my own laundry.

My problem is that our constant attention to decades and history and tracing the roots of humanity back thousands of years, the search for the beginning of the universe, the search for life on other planets--it all makes my existence seem insignificant. I am a fruit fly on the time line of history.

What makes it worse is that we take so much time labeling all the previous eras and millennium of the world. Even the fact that we have names for all of these periods is disconcerting. Mesozoic, Cretaceous, Paleozoic, Cambrian. Who can name these periods except for kindergarteners who spend too much time hugging stuffed dinosaurs and trading erasers shaped like pre-historical animals?"

THE LISTING of the great millennia always reminds me of the cross-sections of soil levels that we learned in science class. Topsoil, sedentary soil, shale coal, diamonds, oil, primordial sludge, fire brimstone the boogey monster and the other side of the globe.

The message I always got from these lessons in the labeling of history was that eventually my fossilized skeleton was going to be squeezed and compressed towards the center of the earth where it would be sucked into the some unnatural and irrational void at the core of the planet. No wonder I became an English Major.

But then, in that department we have our own way of labeling literary history--Middle English, Renaissance, Classicist, Romantic, Modernist, Post-Modernist, Neo-Classicist, Formalist, Structural, Post-Structural, Deconstructionist, Post-Literal, Post-Lingual. And we think that television is killing books.

Of courses, the most common way that we label our time on this earth is by categorizing the human experience. In school, we chop history into neat lesson--plans the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the Depression, the World Wars. Our recent cultural history fits even more neatly into People magazine special issue topics or a Time-Life home series on American History.

The Cold War, Baby Boomers, the Sixties, Disco, the Reagan Years, Desert Storm. A book each month. You don't have to pay until 1999. If you order now, you get special edition of the Al Franken Decade.

The Al Franken Decade--now there's a label I can follow. Al Franken works beyond all the fuss turning our small world into the some model of all time. He's comfortable with a personal history as the categorization of his life.

For those of us who weren't allowed to stay up until 11:30 on Saturday nights in the early 1980s the Al Franken Decade was a skit on Saturday Night Live. Alan S. Franken '73 declared that the 80s were his decade.

Narcissistic? Certainly not. Not for a Harvard graduate.

In fact, the Al Franken Decade had to be the single greatest attempt to break the tyranny of history and make sure that we don't get our personal significance squashed into the crude oil to be sold in some later millennium for $1.18 a gallon.

In 1990, Franken even started a family dynasty of individual freedom by bringing his three-year-old son into the show and declaring the '90s to be the Joe Franken Decade. In his speech at the Institute of Politics on Wednesday. Franken said he didn't know what the turn of the century would hold. But he knew that it didn't start until the year 2001. I have great hopes for the Al Franken future.

HOWEVER, I feel compelled to usurp some of Joe's time. He's still in elementary school, and Franken doesn't have any other kids--so I think I can do this.

I hereby declare 1992 until 1995 the Beth Pinsker Couple of Years.

I'd take a whole decade, but in this recession, I can only afford a couple of years.

So, sit back and enjoy it folks. My couple of years are going to be characterized by the inattention to detail. In fact, my time may run over a little because I have trouble with the date most of the time. My watch also doesn't have any numbers on it so I can only approximate the time.

For a while, we should be able to forget about the numbers and statistics that numb our society into the submission to greater forces than the present. How many delegates to the Democratic Convention does Bill Clinton have? In my couple of years, who cares? What do the leading economic indicators say this month? I don't know. I couldn't tell you what they meant even if I did and you probably wouldn't want to know anyway.

These statistics only exist so that we can compare them to past data. We're supposed to be able to mark our progress and compare our relative success or failure to other relative success or failure to other relative successes and failures. Where do we fit in? Somewhere between thermonuclear destruction and environmental collapse? But let's not worry about our beginnings or our destruction now.

In the Beth Pinsker Couple of Years, none of that matters.