WWF (That's the World Wildlife Fund, not to be mistaken, like I did, for the World Wrestling Federation) predicts that the world will end in 2050. Um, yeah. Great. Tree-hugging paranoia or dire cassandric prophesy? Flip a coin, please.

Sohini suggests getting zen and living life to the fullest. Formerly, I probably would have advocated that on the idea that you can never really know yer own expiration date, unless - perhaps - you had a terminal illness. Now that the upcoming armageddon has made decision-making easier, living zen is pretty much a given. Knowing the exact expiration date for the Earth (and thus, ideally, myself) allows me to easily trick myself on how, exactly, to plot the between-points and stalling-points of my life.

Which sorta reminds me of when I would write letters to everyone I ever loved, letters I never sent because I put them in a shoebox Sharpied IN CASE I DIE, with a will that stipulated that all journals were to be left with Sara Abramovitz-Hill and photographs to be distributed during the wake, because that was the remainder of me, these journals and photographs, the never-quite-right impressions of an unruly body.

I did this especially before plane flights and long car trips. This was the same time I was learning to ride a bicycle, at 20, on the sidewalks of Berkeley, crowing Wheee!

Crowing, even as my heart raced too quickly for the rest of my body to catch up. Even as I imagined my body mangled beneath the wheels of an ebony SUV driven by a harried housewife with too much money and too little time on her hands, her space confined to the house she must maintained, the mall, and the supermarket.

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