So Bopha lost the boner it had for us and rammed into Southern Mindanao instead.

Fellow evacuee, James Kurylo, echoed my thoughts: “Now the people who didn’t take this seriously will think that they were right and will never take storm warnings seriously.”

As somebody who hates being told what to do and, even worse, being told that I have to be afraid, I had given this a bit of thought. I did wonder why I was giving Nicolas such a hard time when he was insisting that I catch the next flight out of Siargao to avoid Bopha. And then, of course, I realized that it was because:

a. he was telling me what to do

b. he was telling me that I had to be afraid

and

c. I was PMS-ing.

Initially, I dismissed Bopha like I would a tsunami warning. I could be totally wrong here and I certainly wouldn’t take anything I have to say seriously but I think that, ever since that Indonesian tsunami of 2004, it’s been SOP to issue tsunami warnings left, right and center if a sumo wrestler so much as farts in his sleep. So that scientists can say that they did their jobs. And, yes, they told you so. But they can’t really predict tsunamis, can they? Because by the time they suss it out, it’s pretty much upon you, isn’t it? Tsunamis don’t exactly tell you, “All righty then, we’ll be there in two days. We still have a spot of shopping to do.” No, in the two and half seconds that it’s taken you to figure out an earthquake’s epicenter and done the math, a whole island could have disappeared off the coast of Costa Rica.

Same with earthquakes. By the time you’ve felt a big-ass plate heave underneath the bowels of the earth, you can’t have too far to run, can you?

But, luckily, I managed to get some blood flowing into my brain and I had to admit that storms are different. Storms, you can measure with barometers and… um… weather vanes, and some such other scientific-like things. And you can actually see them via satellite, take infrared-imaging and track the bloody thing. They have all sorts of data about it, like its height, weight, horoscope and what it had for breakfast.

Let’s just say that there’s no way I can deny a storm’s existence. And therefore, proper respect for storm warnings I should have. Said Yoda.

The same would have to apply for, er, um, volcanic eruptions, which is the only other thing I can think of right now. So those are two things I should heed: storm warnings and volcanic eruption warnings.

Not everybody has to fucking crank up the brain activity to figure that out, right? Fuck me, I think I almost gave myself a stroke there. Given that most people are smarter than me, I figure that if they can’t figure out that they’re supposed to take things like storm warnings (and volcanic eruption warnings) seriously then – well, it’s natural selection, isn’t it?

Why mess with evolution?