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“I held her under a door frame, like we’d been taught and when the shaking stopped, we ran out like our lives depended on it. We were lucky. Our building didn’t collapse but so many others did. Thousands of people died in that earthquake.”

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Grieving feels like being tangled up, suffocating, choking on your own emotions. It feels like a wave, a tsunami of unknown and uncertain. It feels like falling through space with nothing familiar to land on.

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It feels nice to be involved in things doesn’t it? Part of a movement or something. Swinging on Russell Brand’s chest hairs.

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One television commentator who gulped down bowls of Fukushima vegetables on TV as part of the campaign resigned after he was diagnosed with leukemia. That might have been just bad luck.

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Nothing is literally more interesting than the weather. How could it be otherwise? It thoroughly defines our immediate environment. To dismiss the weather as unimportant is to suggest that we live independently of our environs, that we are actors on a stage and the stage does not inflect us.

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As a culture, we’re obsessed with our own demise, which I find to be very interesting since we don’t actually know how to deal with basic run-of-the-mill death. Being wiped out by an astroid or tsunami is much more bearable than knowing someone who choked on a piece of chicken at dinner and died. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to know that we’re all going to go out together than alone.