If I'd have fallen alseep in September 25 years ago, it would have been at 10, rue Chambiere, 57000 Metz, France.  I'd bought the house where I still live the year before, but rented it out to spend a year teaching in Metz.  I had left Topeka a couple of months before the French school year began  in the mistaken assumption that if I stayed out of the country for 11 months, my French income wouldn't be taxable in the U.S.  The apartment itself was beautiful and roomy; it was an easy walk from both the city center and the university.  The main drawback was that it was unfurnished--and that included having no applicances or cabinets in the kitchen.  I made many trips to Carrefour and Conforama to make the apartment livable (when I left, I sold almost everything I bought, so it ended up not being as expensive as it seemed).  I also had to pay first and last month's rent, a month's rent to the agency, and another month's rent to the French official who came and inventoried the condition of the apartment.  At the time, I was so excited to be living in France in a great apartment that I ignored the expenses.  A month later, on October 19, when the stock market crashed and lost nearly 23% of its value in one day, I wouldn't have been so nonchalant.

Most of the students I taught my last year at Washburn wouldn't have been born yet.  Mohamed would have just turned eight.

If I'd fallen asleep then, Ronald Reagan would have been President, and Margaret Thatcher would have been elected to her third term as British Prime Minister.  The Berlin Wall wouldn't have fallen, and the USSR would still seem our number one threat (although Mitt Romney still appears to believe this in 2012). I wouldn't have heard of Bill Clinton.  And, of course, if you had told me that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama would be President when I awoke, I would have thought you were joking.  One of my friends in Metz was Shaheen, an Afghan refugee, who had been part of the mujahadeen and imprisoned by the Russian occupiers.  I had never heard of the Taliban.  Shaheen was small-framed and the most modest of men, but once when I was going to offer him a drink and asked him whether he drank alcohol, he said that he didn't because the last time he drank, he had killed a man.  I never knew whether to believe him.

In 1987, the Fox network started broadcasting.  There wouldn't have been "The Simpsons" or (my favorite) "Family Guy"; on the other hand, there wasn't Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly.  Oprah had just begun her daily talk show.  Even on cable TV, the vocabulary was far more restrained that it would be 25 years in the future.  The first time I ever heard anyone say "pissed off" on TV was on "As the World Turns."  I couldn't believe what I'd just heard.  By 2012, even Lenny Bruce would have to shorten his list of words that are verboten.  How many people in 2012 would get that reference.

If I'd fallen asleep in 1987, I might have known that Prozac had just been introduced in the U.S., but Big Phama wouldn't yet be inundating TV with ads for prescription drugs.  What percentage of drug costs are related to the barrage of advertising for drugs in 2012?  If I woke up in 2012 and saw a commercial for, say, Cymbalta, with beautiful, soothing images and a rapid voice-over listing all its terrible side-effects (potentially fatal events--how's that for a euphemism?), I'd think I was watching an SNL skit.  In the LGBT community (a term that wasn't used yet), the big issue was still AIDS.  It wasn't until 1995 that I stopped losing friends to AIDS.  But it was also in 1987 that AZT was approved by the FDA.  I would never have believed in 1987 that gay characters would be staples on American television--not only as comic sidekicks but as the main characters, as in "Will and Grace" and "Modern Family."  I certainly would never have thought that gay marriage would be legal in some parts of America, including my home state of Iowa.  Who would have thought I'd wake up to a world in which the Democratic election platform endorses gay marriage or where gays could serve openly in the military?  Or that many of the speakers at the Democratic convention talked about the latter in terms of  those who wanted to serve the country they love being allowed to do so no matter who(m) they loved?  (The speakers were about evenly divided between the traditional 'whom' and the more conversational 'who.')  Or that the President would support gay marriage and talk about it in his acceptance speech?  Or that for most Americans, the Republicans' hardline against even contraception, to say nothing of gay marriage, would seem bafflingly anachronistic? 

So if I fell asleep in 2012 and woke up in 2037, although I'd like to think that I'd easily be up to speed, if the few changes I've mentioned in the last two blogs are any indication, I'd be even more lost than Rip Van Winkle.  It was a nice thought--a free-floating consciousness that followed technology and politics and culture.  But it's not one I believe in, and now it doesn't seem very practical either.

Speaking of time, L'shanah tovah! to all those who are beginning a new year.