What was your best decade?

I'd have to say from my mid-thirties through mid-forties.
Fell in love, got married, bought a house, became a father three times.
Had some of the best years of my career.
Ran a marathon, got into canoe racing.

I loved 1- 10- I had a wonderful childhood.

10-20 was a little bumpy but fun overall- you know adolescence and all that.

20-30 - I have to say that is the decade I found most mediocre. I liked being in school, but I wasn't that confident in my skills around my job yet, so I didn't enjoy my work nearly as much as I do now. I think I was just waiting a lot of those ten years to see what would happen next.

30-40 - SO MUCH FUN. I had my kids and I loved playing with them and seeing and learning about the world through their eyes. Physically - I felt in my absolute prime.
If I had to pick an absolute favorite - this would be it.

40-50 - exciting because I moved overseas and found a new home that I love. Sad, because I lost my father.

If I could go back to any decade and could only pick one - I'd go back to my thirties when my kids were small and school-age and my parents were both alive and healthy and I knew that I would probably have them with me for a while longer.

I’m 27 and if this is my best decade I don’t have much to look forward to.

You apparently peaked too early in life JC. Nice house and two great pups. You prefer PCs over Macs.

Next thing you're going to explain to us that you have superhuman powers and such.

Nope. Not jealous. Not one bit.

I second that. And I was 38 when I moved, so my investment into my old-world social network was even greater than CJ's and The Pentacle Queen's.

I was forty when I began studying to change careers (you know this already), and that took another batch of years, for which I'm not sorry. PQ, life can be more expansive than you seem to be thinking, and not just re land miles.

Not to knock your having that take on things - I remember a serious discussion with a friend when we were in our early twenties, her take being how she never wanted to live on Peach Street. Oddly, in the intervening time, though I was involved for a few years in housing tract design, I never heard of a street called Peach. I never thought I would live on one of those, being too peculiar or so I thought - thinking urban or shack but not tract - but now I live on the equivalent and, if I do not just love it, am absorbing the experience, one more in the layers.
To some extent, being trapped is in your mind, though this varies. I think the thing to worry about is the Peach Street of the mind, or whatever they would call that in England. I don't mean that re class, I'm not class oriented.

I think this is true even for people enmired in obligations they are in retrospect sorry for engaging, and people who can't just fly about for a lot of other reasons. The world is smaller now, even for those in a chair.

Well these are really an excellent set of answers.

I'd like to just state that the inspiration for this thread was, basically, the fact that I keep getting told, 'Oh make the most of it whilst you're young!' etc. And I just felt that those type of perceptions weren't based on memories so much as idealized conceptions of youth based on things on not held by the people make the statements currently, e.g. mobile life structure, transience rather than 'progression' etc.

I have a lot of trouble selecting a decade.
I think the first ten years of my life, but not by much.
During that time, I already had all the freedom that I wanted.
I was alone most of the time, with plenty of $$$$$, so no one limiting my freedom.

I 've had nothing to complain about for any of the decades.





David

That 's GOOD ADVICE, Your Majesty!





David

I can remember my 3rd Birthday Party, and time leading up to it.





David

SO STIPULATED!





David

Don't you think your visit to Hong Kong worth something? Now you can talk about knowing a bit more about the world than your friends. I hope now you will not make snap judgments and be more reasonable about other cultures and people. We are basically all the same in most ways but differents in some ways because of geography, education and diet and what not.

Of course I do, it was worth loads! I just got bored of not being able to work on my career out there because there aren't as many arts organisations.


Well, everyone does this to some extent, but I'm unaware of a time when I've been 'unreasonable' about other cultures and people.

There are a lot of art in Chinese culture but I guess it would mostly be in Chinese. If you tried going to the local Universities you could have gotten onto some. Music wise the Chinese suck I can't stand Chinese Opera at all. It is all about war. There are a lot Indians in Hong Kong and could have learnt something about Indian music. Chinese art would mostly be painitng, calligraphy and the kung fu movies.

I love Hong Kong.

I like to stay at the Regent, with a Harbor Vu.





David

No it's not mainly in Chinese, I think probably because it's best if art can speak an international language if it's going to be recognised/'accepted' in a big way. I saw some exhibitions at the Arts University and I really loved the Hong Kong Arts Centre and gallery called Osage which were quite conceptual, but mainly, yes, it's calligraphy and poorly put together contemporary exhibitions. I loved the opera, actually, I saw two, oh, and a contemporary opera which looked really promising but was actually dire.

I hate to break it to you, but art-wise, it's hard to improve on London. I'm not even sure New York has anything on it, and I like New York a lot. If you didn't like London, the rest of your art life will be one of pining and boredom. No more good decades for you, Miss!

For quite a while I followed an art website that artists from all over posted on, including one of those that showed with us, which was how I found the website. There were many chinese artists posting and I liked a lot of the work - not expectedly typical painting and not schlocky stuff, but alas, the website (whatever its name was) disappeared.

Haha, oh no, Thomas! Not even New York? I was thinking of moving there for a bit, Berlin too...

I was too busy going to school and crossing the harbor. I took French by a Vietnamese and German at the Goethe Institute but never practised. It was here that notice that low German is practically English.

I was in New York when the subway was full of graffiti. See the movie 'Saturday Night Fever' with John travolta when he is in the subway. That is what it looked like. Of course, Mayor Guiliani cleaned it up the whole downtown into Disney Land. You could see actors in their weird costumes walking thru the Times Squire with long wild feathers and so on about the theaters.