All my life, I’ve wanted to be in an earthquake. Yes, I know earthquakes are deadly and destructive — one of Earth’s consequential revenges on the parasitic creatures that pilfer her largess and upend her symmetry — but I’ve always wanted to experience the earth quaking. In French, the term for “earthquake” is tremblement de terre, a similarly behooving term for what is happening: the trembling of earth. It is scared. It is beholden to abnormal forces. Our normally-comely and gracious planet is out of control. It’s like when Britney Spears shaved her head, only on a much more monumental scale. It is a taste of apocalypse.
Plus, earthquakes always sounded fun, so long as you avoid getting buried in a pile of rubble or incinerated in fire caused by a disrupted gasline. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, like a weathered trampoline. Of course, if I really wish to experience recoiling ground, I should move to California and egg on the Big One. But Boston still does afford enough perks that I can resist the San Andreas siren song and remain in mostly faultless New England.
And then… today. A rare opportunity. A 5.0-magnitude Canadian earthquake occurs 300 miles from Boston today at 1:41pm (here). I know exactly what I was doing at 1:41pm: I was preparing for a 2pm meeting about Microsoft Word templates for the Content Development team by reviewing the previous template-less documents on my laptop while drinking a cup of hot ginger tea to help digest the pork-and-cabbage that I had for lunch.
The earth quaked, the earth trembled, and I didn’t feel a freaking thing.
