Just in Case, Wear Sunscreen

As you may have heard, the Mayans predicted the 21st of December, 2012 as the END. Some people discount this, guessing they simply ran out of room on their rock calendar. Others have seen the omens all around us and concluded it's true. My deep love for my son and hope for his future happiness notwithstanding, I think this coming Friday might be a perfectly fine time for the world to end. Naturally I've conferred with many people about this. One friend confided that she is "okay with it," finding it comforting that we are all going together. (That's sweet.) My husband thinks that if the world actually is going to end anytime soon, we should certainly be there for it, and I agree; I'd hate to miss such a big thing by just a few hundred years. Anyway, a few of the reasons I might even welcome Earth's final curtain follow.

1. Robots call you on the phone, at home, during dinner. This is both weird and rude. They ask all sorts of things, usually about your credit cards or bank accounts or political preferences. If you're not busy, it can actually be fun because you can say anything to them and then hang up, but overall it's a bad sign.

2. Young people go on shooting rampages and kill innocent people. This has happened often enough to be called a "trend," and trends are never good. They start out small and grow wildly to encompass the world; just look at how far sushi and mobile phones have gone. If this shooting spree thing continues, we'll all have to stay home all the time, and do what I ask?

3. Politicians have always lied, but lately they don't even try to seem honest. Hillary Clinton recently broke the first and most important rule of successful lying: Offering more than one excuse. To avoid testifying about the Benghazi fiasco later this week, she claims to have the flu and then, in case the flu wasn't bad enough, she said she fainted and hit her head and got a concussion. Oh please, I tried that one back in high school to avoid taking my SATs and my parents just laughed at me. Hillary should have either gotten the flu or a concussion--jeez, what a dummy. (God help us if the world does not end Friday and she becomes president in 2106.)

Aunt Peska...is that you?

4. Facebook and Twitter are fighting over which one will take the lead in the photo-sharing department. I find this sad, as people of a certain age can remember that Polaroid was much better than Instagram, and that was years ago. Anyway, what is the big deal with all the pictures and why do they have to be altered? In fact, if you are going to alter a photograph, shouldn't you make a painting or a drawing? I always thought photos were meant to capture reality.

5. Twitter exists.

6. People don't age anymore, they just get new body parts, or have the first ones smoothed, lifted and tucked so they look like old young people, i.e. Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Walters, Joan Rivers, Suzanne Somers, and most disturbing, Billy Crystal, who looks more like my Aunt Peska, she should rest in peace, every day. Other folks even change gender, which is so insulting to God, inferring he/she is clueless.

7. Health-wise, humans have blown it. Suicide rates are up, as well as body weight, blood pressure, diabetes and a host of other lifestyle-related ills. People have new hips and knees inserted after running the originals into the ground. Mental illness is rampant and manufactured drugs the leading antidote, even though they cause dizziness, difficulty breathing, upset stomachs, headaches, blurred vision, loss of appetite and erections lasting more than four hours. Still, they are quite popular.

8. Marijuana, a natural herb with many restorative properties, is outlawed while alcoholic beverages, made in factories and responsible for one traffic death every 48 minutes, not to mention deaths from binge drinking on college campuses, are readily available.

9. "Cloud Atlas" flopped at the box office.

Bottom line: I hope that if it's truly over for the planet this Friday, there will still be an afterlife because I have really been counting on that.