2012? The year to end all years. Right?

If the Mayan Calendar is right, it won’t be necessary to make my house payment next December. But I don’t believe The Lord intended for the Mayans, or any of the other kooks that have predicted the end of the word, to know when he’s coming back for us. So at this point, I plan to make my house payment on time.

I believe mankind is like a teenager. We’re going through a lot of changes right now that we don’t understand. But I whole-heartedly believe that mankind is only getting started.

However, all of this doomsday talk has got me to thinking. It has me thinking about life and time. No, I didn’t leave an “s” off the word time. I meant to say time rather than times. The times of our lives are what we take from time itself. Kind of sounds like a plug for Days of Our Lives… like sands through the hour glass…

Part of our Christmas to each other was several television shows on DVD. This past week, Natalie and I have been staying up all night, watching shows like Mad Men. There is more drama on these discs than a classroom full of third grade girls.

The history buff in me loves Mad Men, a show that eloquently captures the nuances of the male-dominating world of 1960, in the advertising offices on Madison Avenue, in New York City. It’s humorous at how politically incorrect and polar opposite 1960 was from the time we live in now. I started to say, “the world we live in now,” but it’s more than that. Our world has always been here, it’s really time that changes. And for some unknown mathematical reason, time changes with the decades. Or maybe math has nothing to do it all. Maybe it’s society’s way of keeping track. People love to tell you that they grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or my beloved 80s.

Mad Men shows us things like pregnant women smoking & drinking, kids wearing dry cleaner bags over their heads for fun, and climbing over car seats without seat belts. The Audacity! The show centers on executives chain-smoking and chain-drinking like there is no tomorrow. And the core of the show’s drama is centered on the office relationships between men and women that would be one great big sexual harassment lawsuit today.

I find it funny to watch. However, I don’t blame or look down on the age of my parent’s innocence. It was simply their time. Keep in mind, they were the ones who put a man on the moon without an iPod, and they gave us the foundations of the digital world in which we live today. And they were the ones who eventually passed seatbelt laws, sexual harassment laws, and yes, they even figured out that smoking and drinking too much will kill you.

As I watch Mad Men in the wee hours of the morning, I think about how my grandkids will someday look back on the hay-day of my generation and laugh. And trust me folks, they will look back on us and laugh.

“Texting while driving!?! Seriously Grandpa Tim? Seriously? And think about all those chicken nuggets that you fed my Daddy when he was young. How did you not know that they would cause cancer!”

Don’t you know you could’ve died from doing that? What was your generation thinking? “And how could you all stand using things that had to be plugged into the wall, like your computer and those big telephones. I bet that was a real ball-and-chain! Geez, I would’ve hated living in the olden days like you grandpa!”

“OMG… little granddaughter, I don’t know how we survived it either… LOL! Now it’s your turn.”