Knock on wood

Yesterday, while sitting around in the student lounge with my friend Pink Pirate, I remarked that "I wouldn't mind a little tropical storm or something." See, the quietness in the Atlantic was starting to disturb me. When it's too quiet in horror movies, you know that the character stupidly creeping through the basement is about to meet an untimely death. Well, I sort of imagined the same sort of situation here, except that the Gulf is the basement and New Orleans is the main character, wading along belong sea level. I'm sick of us getting our asses kicked. Since this lack of hurricane-y activity was making me really nervous, I figured that something tiny might stave off something huge. Funky logic, yes, but it made perfect sense to me.

Then I turned on the TV this morning and, lo and behold, there on the TV was little Tropical Depression #5, which was forming yesterday afternoon even as I was babbling about tropical storms and Pink Pirate was furiously knocking on wood and telling me to be quiet. Does that knock on wood thing really work? Will #5 (set to become Ernesto) go away through the power of knuckles on an armrest? I hope so, because as soon as I saw the news, my "I wouldn't mind..." changed to "Aaaauuuggghhhh, go away!" Despite my pronouncements, I'm a big wimp. Hurricanes scare the hell out of me. I don't even really like the random midday monsoons that happen here, with thunder and lightning and huge sheets of rain that reduce the highway traffic to a slow crawl. I sit there in my car with the windshield wipers going full blast, practically wimpering, because I'm sure that the blinding rain is going to cause me to get into an accident.

Even more than scared, though, I'm lazy. Evacuating sucks. You have to wait in line for gas, for food, for cash. Traffic slows to a maddening crawl, forcing you to creep along with increasingly frayed nerves. Things take time to fix, should anything flood, and since the government is apparently as lazy as I am, that could take forever for all I know. Then there're the missed classes and the missed work, the money spent on running away to the closest dry land. Basically, it's not fun, and I'm planning on having a good year this time around.

So, Ernesto, #5, whatever your name is, go away. We don't want any of what you have to offer, thank you very much. We have enough left over from Katrina to last a looong time.