On a dreary day in January, I was attempting to log into one of my many Yahoo! email accounts when something caught my eye:  “Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘super storm’”

I have an unhealthy obsession with hoax news and a distinct distaste for real news.  Sensing that this article was a ludicrous attempt to terrify mindless human beings, I clicked on it. Its contents made me laugh out loud. Written by Liz Goodwin, the article described how a group of scientists had predicted a massive storm that could potentially cost California billions of dollars in damages. Determined to last as much as forty days, the destruction caused by the water would be akin to that caused to a Jenga tower by somebody’s flailing fist.

As the article acknowledges, this sounds like “the plot of an apocalyptic action movie.”  But the more I tried to push the thought away, the more it crept into my mind.

As the days passed, my mind kept running back to this impossibility.  Will California be hit by some kind of freak storm?  If so, when?  Finally, after being shunted to the back seat of my mom’s beige Sienna one day, a thought occurred to me: what if this idea wasn’t so far fetched?  What if this is actually starting?  Floods in Australia.  Mudslides in Brazil.  A super storm in California?  We had been having slightly bipolar weather: sunny when it should be two degrees, the sky suddenly crying buckets of rain.

Every single horror story that I had ever heard about the Mayan’s predicting the end of the world in 2012 came back to me.  One more year.  I began to YouTube videos showing the massive destruction from all over the world.

Unfortunately, my father does not share my love for melodramatic antics.  His only reaction to my pathetic attempts to get him to build us our very own Noah’s Ark was to scrunch his eyebrows in confusion, look at me as if I were suffering from a mental deficiency, and proceed to tell me to go play my piano.

I went.