Apocalypse Later

I don’t know if I am handling the fake end of the world in the best way. Firstly, because all I have done today is eat soup and watch The Big Bang Theory, and secondly, because if it isn’t fake, boy will my face be red. Fortunately however, no one will be there to call me on it, because we’ll all be too busy being sublime. In a scientific way.

Oh well, I’m handling it better than last time – apparently the world ending happens at 12 year intervals. New Year’s Eve, 1999, ten-year-old me stood in a marquee wondering why all the adults were enjoying finger food and bubbly drinks when Y2K was hours away from consuming us all whole.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen, but the facts available led me to know this:

1. The media were talking about it all the time, so it had to be true.
2. It had something to do with computers and their internal clocks not being able to change to 2000. Instead we were all going to be sent back to 1900. At least in terms of computers. A time in which computers did not exist, thus creating a SUPER PARADOX which would cause all the world to dissolve into a series of numbers and pieces of string and as a result I would never get to see how Sailormoon ended.
3. People were selling bags of air, one of which a girl brought to school and took great delight in stamping on, so somehow Y2K was going to rob us of oxygen. And money.

My ability to be sceptical about the whole thing had taken a blow one year earlier as the clock clicked over from 1998 to 1999 and I turned to celebrate with my lovingly nurtured dinosaur Tamagotchi, only to find the screen blank. The horror.

As a result, I was expecting big bad things when midnight came. Instead I was met with an overwhelming wave of nothing happening whatsoever at all other than the advent of a decade no one knew how to refer to in shorthand, and a downfall in the quality of television.

Back in the present, however, so far New Zealand and Australia have “survived” the “apocalypse” but if we apply logic to this situation (much like applying peanut butter to a shoe), it’s not over until the calendar hits the 22^nd of December in the Americas. Except for the fact that the Mayan calendar doesn’t match up with ours anyway, so never mind.

Maybe the destruction of the earth is a lot more insidious and nefarious than we thought. Maybe it’s just biding its time. In the form of reality television. And “intelligent” Facebook “debates”. And Instagram.