If I’m on vacation, in the ocean, salty breeze in my frizzy hair, then yes, sure. I like the bobbly feeling of being in the middle of a soft wave.
But, when I’m sitting on a sofa in the middle of my living room, holding my 6-month-old niece, and the house starts moving from under us? No thank you.
Like most East Coasters, I felt like Friday’s 4.8 magnitude earthquake came out of nowhere. In addition to better food and the real change of seasons, keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground is one of the reasons we prefer life here over the sunshine and seismic activity of the West Coast. We don’t do rattly, paintings-fall-off-the-wall earthquakes in Jersey.
Now that this out-of-the-ordinary thing has happened, we are totally consumed by it. I sent and received more texts than I want to admit trading war stories about the 20-second rumble. I Googled, so that I felt confident enough in my earthquake expertise to hold conversations about it with friends and family. It’s what we talked about over dinner.
And then social media pointed out to me – as it so often does – that this wild occurrence is not alone. Here’s a major-weird-stuff timeline for you:
Wednesday, April 3 – the Statue of Liberty is struck by lightning, and caught on camera in stunning photos by Dan Martland that make Lady Liberty look like a pop star in the middle of a pyrotechnically enhanced show.
Friday, April 5 – The baby and I, and about 42 million other people, are literally couch surfing during the quake.
Monday, April 8 – Get your glasses out, kids. It’s solar eclipse time.
Naturally, the internet now thinks the world is ending.
I’ll admit I enjoyed scrolling through all the memes, witty comments, and nasty spats on social media about the confluence of these events. I particularly liked the posters who predicted it was all “some next level Ghostbusters marketing strategy,” or that the aliens are coming for us next week.
They got me thinking about why, when faced with strange (and thankfully in these cases not actually destructive) happenings, we immediately go to the end of the world scenarios. We all get the joke of the guy who posted the Godzilla meme – after all of this, what’s next?!
I texted Brandon Valeriano, a Seton Hall professor and all-around smart guy with a sense of humor to ask his thoughts. He pointed out to me that the three events I mentioned weren’t really as out-of-nowhere as they seem.
The Statue of Liberty, AccuWeather reports, is actually struck by lightning several times a year.
Moderate earthquakes here are rare, but they do happen. We get small ones way more often than you probably realize. (We’ve had 28 quakes in New Jersey in the past 17 years.) And, another stronger, 5.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia in 2011 rattled us in New Jersey and New York, too.
And solar eclipses don’t happen all the time, but they are a normal part of the planetary rotation and are completely predictable.
So why does X-formerly-Twitter say we’re in for it?
Professor Valeriano told me we use humor and conspiracy theories to make sense of the world.
“Humans try to look for patterns to organize … (the) world, and sometimes something that you see as a pattern, or a streak, is really just something that’s happening naturally.
“The world is vast and full of complexity,” Valeriano texted me. “A lot of conspiracies are just ways to establish order.”
So, he doesn’t think we need to prepare to be beamed up. That’s good.
But hey, I’ll still wear my pajamas inside out and hope for a May Day snow day if you guys want to. (And actually, it did snow in May in New Jersey in 2020. But 2020 was way too out of the ordinary to count.)
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