The realization was slow to set in, but now I am sure of it. I am graduating into the apocalypse.
Swine flu is going to kill everybody.
The recession is going to make the world’s economy collapse.
People will soon begin to ransack abandoned buildings for sustenance. Black markets will spring up around goods that have been stolen from stores that can no longer protect their own merchandise.
The Middle East is probably going to blow the world into smithereens any day now with its expanding nuclear weapons arsenal that’s in the news more and more frequently these days.
Swine flu is likely going to make my university, mired in unchangeable tradition, alter course and not conduct business quite as normal during graduation, like so many other universities have already announced, due to swine flu concerns.
I’m not going to be able to get a job after getting my degree, leaving me a failure at life stuck mooching off of my parents until I can figure out how to live off of unemployment checks and secure my position at McDonalds, if I am particularly lucky.
My graduation ceremony itself will probably be rained out, stuffing us into a smaller space which will:
All of this not to mention more long-standing concerns. For instance, the fact that global warming is going to slowly but surely melt all the ice on the planet ending life as we know it. Or the fact that solar activity that is going to kick up in the next three or four years will destroy our power grids and cause civilization to collapse (if there’s any civilization left after the swine flu kills us all, of course).
Plus the Mayans predicted the world was going to end in 2012 anyway, so I figure that they lived long enough that they could have been off by a few years. It would be understandable. I wouldn’t hold it against them.
Also, I’m willing to grant that the actual period of the apocalypse may not be as immediate as everyone expects. Perhaps I am simply graduating into the beginning of the apocalypse and the real thing will come in 2012 or so. I’d say that still fits my definition. It’s just semantics at that point. After all, the beginning of the apocalypse is still the apocalypse.
Well, at least I’ll get to graduate before the world comes crashing down around me. How much would it suck to be a junior when the world ends?
So close, then kaboom. No more world to graduate into.
There’s always someone worse off than yourself, I guess.