Nice while it lasted...

Day two (non-consecutive) of being on to something at a young age starts here: at five years old in the English house (I call it an English house because it was in England) of my friend Stuart. He had a science book that I happened to be looking at while over for tea that mentioned something about how the Earth was slowly moving towards the Sun, and would one day get close enough that it would explode or boil or something. Point is, the Earth would cease to exist.

Being a five-year-old with an irrational fear of pretty much everything, I went downstairs to talk this over with my Mom (because she also was over there for afternoon tea, in spite of her American accent). She calmed me down by explaining that while this might happen, it wouldn't be for billions of years, by which time we would all be long gone. While the prospect of ever being "gone" scared me almost as much, I decided to accept this explanation, if only because my mom had both of the qualifications that I looked for in truth speakers those days: being a grownup and being my mom. I took her word, even though the worry of the world coming to an end in my lifetime still stuck with me a tiny bit.

Turns out, she should have said something to me along the lines of, "Yup. World's gonna blow. Now go drink your tea, you angelic, perfectly-behaved child."

I'm currently reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (a more accurate title would be A Short History of the Study of Nearly Everything), and, while I know that Bryson is doing everything he can to sensationalize what he learned, it's still some scary stuff. Huge meteors pass near earth all the time, and one could hit us at any moment. And don't think you'll get some grave "I have some bad news for you" announcement from Morgan Freeman. It'll just hit and wipe us all out. Also, cute little Yellowstone park is a massive underground volcano that's due to explode and kill us. "What?! In America?! No!" you say. Yup. Fun!

Justifying My Fears Of The World's End Week continued as I put in An Inconvenient Truth. I have to admit that I didn't have high expectations for this. Most of the people I had gotten reviews from were part of the choir being preached to, and even they said it was self-serving (which it was) and often boring (also true). But my God, those statistics. I was expecting numbers of the "well...I guess if you put it that way it might be true" variety, but what was there was much more simple and shocking. Climate change critics love framing this as a natural change in weather, but if it's not global warming/climate change, it's the apocalypse.

Point being: if you're making a list of things to do on President's Day, you might want to add "curl up in the corner and cry quietly at the futility of it all" to your list.