It’s springtime, and that means allergies, lots of rain, a couple of weeks of fake summer in march (apparently) and tornadoes. Everyone who lives in the Midwest has some familiarity with tornadoes, ya know, those murderous cyclones of extremely powerful wind. I was reading up on tornado safety for the drills I’m thinking I would like to run in the neighborhood, I can’t legally call the drills mandatory, but I can write “make sure you show up, unless you want your family to die” on a brightly colored flyer.  It’s recommended to try and find shelter if you’re driving and caught in a tornado, and if that fails, you should get out of the car and hide in a ditch, or simply crouch down in your car away from the windows. 



Shelly did not respect the awesome power of the tornado

Since I have reoccurring nightmares about speeding away from a tornado, and I think laying on the ground to 'wait it out' sounds retarded, I choose to practice option D which is to drive as quickly as humanly possible away from said tornado. I’m thinking my drills will mostly consist of packing all the neighborhood kids into my car and yelling that, ‘the tornado is coming, your parents are already dead!” and then we’ll practice our escape by stepping on the gas and screaming. I imagine the kids will be jealous of the helmet I’ll already be wearing (which might have a painting of a tornado on it), and the fact that I’ll have time to put my seatbelt on, but this is all part of tornado safety awareness.



I think at some point I’ll ask the kids if the tornado catches up with us, if they think our best option is to just drive through it really fast. Because I think that’s what I would do. Who can really know though? I mean, in that kind of crisis situation, I might be forced to start throwing kids out of the car to have less drag.  And who knows, if the tornado is some kind of vengeful act of god, the sacrifice might appease him and maybe the tornado would just dissipate.

 I just hope that people are willing to participate in my drills, ya know, in order to help keep their children informed and safe.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of dreams about tornadoes, you can try and analyze that with your crystals and your dream diary if you’d like, but when you’re done with that tell me why I keep dreaming about being married to Mr. Belvedeer. Go ahead, tell me!!

In my dreams we have 5 kids and live on a farm

I think mostly I dream about tornadoes because they're terrifying and awesome, the sky turns green, sirens go off, it’s like the end of the world but Jesus never shows up.  Plus as you can see from the illistration (which is awesome and only took me like a couple minutes), they're really easy to draw. They’re also the subject of the 1996 film ‘Twister’, which I saw at age ten and of course decided that ‘Storm Chaser’ was my new career path, kind of like how after I saw ‘Jurassic Park’ I wanted to be a genetically engineered dinosaur.

Thank God I didn't wear my sansabelts today!

All joking aside, the best way to survive a tornado is to tie belts around your waists and hook yourself up to a surprisingly sturdy length of pipe. Then you’ll come out of it wanting to reunite with your estranged spouse, you’ll tear up those divorce papers because that’s what usually happens to couples in real life.

So as you can see, I’m not a storm chaser.  As it turns out, there’s not a lot of money in that racquet, I think I was misguided by the Cary Ewles crowd in ‘Twister’ and thought there would be an opportunity to ‘sell out’ and that I would maybe not have to do a lot work if I just found some dorks to steal from. Like most things in life, I never pursued it past talking about it, but it would have involved a lot of science classes and from what reality TV has recently told me, riding around in an embarrassing ‘storm mobile’ with a bunch of a virgins.