Yesterday a fortune cookie came with the soup I ordered for lunch. I cracked it open and found it empty. I felt an odd shiver of anxiety as if I had just seen a vision of my own extinction: empty cookie=looming void. Imminent Death. I immediately asked for another cookie, another shot at having a destiny. Then I felt enraged with the banality of the fortune: If you look in the right places, you can find some good offerings.  I longed for nothingness.

Later, I decided to direct my free-floating anxiety towards something worth freaking out about: climate change. This is the first article I have read which documents the trauma people are experiencing as a result of natural disasters and the looming threat of a warming planet. I felt oddly comforted by it. As scary and depressing as climate change is, I think it’s even weirder when people don’t talk about it. I wonder how other people feel.