I would just like to state for the record that I am extremely disappointed that the world did not come to an end on New Year’s Eve.

I don’t know precisely what I thought was going to happen. Maybe, through some computer glitch, all the televisions in the world would simultaneously begin broadcasting "Shasty McNasty," and everyone’s head would explode. Maybe a plane carrying the most important leader in the known world—yes, the Backstreet Boys’ Howie—would fall from the sky, leading to widespread teen violence.

But according to every expert in the known universe, we were all going to die on New Year’s Eve. There wasn’t a day in the waning months of the last millennium that a news show didn’t do a report like "Are your pets Y2K compliant? Because if not, they’re probably going to grow super sharp claws and teeth and rip you to shreds in the night, and then take your Mac card and withdraw all your money and use your computer to wreak havoc on the New York Stock Exchange."

By the end, I was so ready for widespread disaster (my God! I thought to myself. What if our chimney isn’t Y2K compliant, and a bunch of birds fly down it and peck our eyes out!) that I began to welcome it. I just wanted to see what was going to happen.

Which is why I was so thoroughly bummed when I didn’t spontaneously combust or something at midnight.

I just kept waiting for something to happen. Peter Jennings would come on, having been up for approximately eight hundred hours in a row, and I thought, this is it, he’s going to blow everyone away for making fun of his Canadian accent. But he never did.

It’s not like I have a death wish or something. I was one of those kids who used to sit and think about death when I was like four years old, when other kids were still eating paste and trying to kill each other with rocks. And my main thought about it was that it didn’t seem like very much fun, and wasn’t anything I planned on doing any time soon.

It basically came down to sheer boredom. Which is, I realize, not a good reason to wish for mass destruction. But when New Year’s rolled around I was deeply engrossed in my job at an insurance company, which is fine for grown-ups (I mention this because my parents both work at one) but can irreversibly damage the mind of a twenty-year-old, particularly when their boss spends a great deal of his time saying very stupid things. For example, upon informing me that our cleaning crew was from the Ukraine, he cautioned me against talking to them, saying, "you see, Kim, they’re foreign. They can’t speak."

First of all, just the fact that he started the statement with, "you see, Kim," makes me want to punch him. But the fact that he seems to assume that because they are foreign they are also mute just made me want to clean out his ears with a flaming Q-Tip.

Another very good reason to look forward to disaster is that invariably in all disaster movies, some man comes to help the distressed maiden and they kiss passionately, and he’s usually all sooty and studly looking. And I wouldn’t mind that, either. I’m all about being kissed passionately by sooty men.

So anyway, I guess I’m just going to have to settle for my old, boring, disaster-free life. At least now I can comfort myself with the fact that Howie from the Backstreet Boys is still all right, and if I meet anyone who won’t speak to me, I’ll know that they’re foreign.