The Cartography of Gratitude, or: DUST

HOORAY!

False alarm.

Crisis averted.

Let us take a moment to observe the passing-into-oblivion of the blog known as "Single Girl's Guide to Impending Apocalypse" as it morphs into "The Memoir of Narrow Escape."

A couple of loose ends to tie up from the 21st:
Were you laughed at for polishing up your crossbow and hoarding cases of Aquafina? Never mind. Haters gonna hate. You will simply come out on top in a home invasion and not get caught up in the mad rush during the next nature-induced power outage. Skills are skills. Once aquired and practiced, they can only enrich our lives, and not diminish them.

I did the math, and attendance in my classes hovered around 35%. That's 35 out of 100% that showed up for the Day of Multiple Disasters That Didn't End Up Happening.

Imagine. Just imagine the number of potential disasters that Just. Never. Happen. How many are there every day, every minute? Billions? Trillions? Gajillions? As many as sands on the dune beaches or stars in the sky. More about the dune beaches later. In the meantime...if every person who decided on Friday that potential disaster was going to keep them from showing up stayed away EVERY day, the students agreed (in fact, they were the ones who said it. I didn't. They only said what I was thinking.), learning would occur and school would be fun and everyone would get along sunshine-and-kittens-and-rainbows. I said, "Write your congresspeople, kids. Write your congresspeople."

The final loose end to tie up is of course the Other Thing that happens on December 21st of every year, the Winter Solstice. I was reading the other day on a website called Time and Date that, "Although winter was regarded as the season of dormancy, darkness and cold, the coming of lighter days after the winter solstice brought on a more festive mood. To many people, this return of the light was a reason to celebrate that nature’s cycle was continuing."

The return of the light.
Come to think of it, the return of the light was the exact reason for the human sacrifices in ancient Aztec and Mayan cultures.

Now we have narrowly escaped the Formerly-Impending Apocalypse. We are on borrowed time. Of course, we have always been on borrowed time, but now we're more aware of it than ever. I seek in the next several months to explore the theme of what exactly one should do with borrowed time.

While you, my dear 12 loyal readers, wait for the lame result of such a haphazard theme, I suspect that some of you still have a hankering for the old pre-narrow-escape Zombie lore. If so, please accept my recommendation (already seen on goodreads.com if you're my facebook friend) of a novel called DUST. It takes place in Northwest Indiana, from whence this blog post is being composed. It follows Jessie, a teenage zombie, through the many trials and tribulations of her zombie life, including a great big plague that hits the entire world, human and zombie alike.

This book, in a word, is fantastic. OR maybe I only enjoyed it more because I knew I didn't have to hurry and finish it before the world ended or something. Fantastic.

And now it is time to tuck the border collie in. Let me know what you think of the book.