Can the media ixnay on the earthquakeay?

I woke up Thursday at 5:30 a.m. to workout on my treadmill, as I do daily. Imagine my utter surprise to learn that 300 miles away from Chicago, a 5.4 on the Richter scale earthquake had hit. Now my husband said he heard it at 4:37 a.m., but assumed that it was a nearby train that had been involved in an accident. My son heard it too, and thought that my husband was angry and stomping around in the kitchen. I blissfully slept through it, but was accosted by the media explaining ad nauseum what had happened, where it had taken place, and assessing the damage to the area. As far as I could tell, one block on “Main Street” (is that some sick joke that every small town in America has a Main Street?) was affected with some falling brick, and I think 99 bottles of beer on a wall fell in a liquor store. For the entire hour, all of the major networks kept replaying the same scene, while interspersing phone conversations from ordinary citizens who described either a loud bang or mild tremor, or relayed the fact that their pets were afraid to go outside.

I joked to my husband that if I didn’t know any better, I thought the entire newscast was a skit for Saturday Night Live. The media had turned a non-news event into a Roger Corman or Wes Craven epic disaster movie. I kept waiting for Celine Dion to sing, “My heart will go on and on.”

My cousin, a music critic in New York, e-mailed me to ask if we were ok after the “earthquake”. I reassured her that it wasn’t 1906, and we didn’t reside in San Francisco. She wanted to know if locusts were next, and then she recalled that the cicadas were out in full force last summer. I told her to be on the safe side, that I was going over to Home Depot to buy supplies and build an ark (actually maybe Costco already has one preassembled?). Linda thought that it made perfect sense. Of course living in New York, EVERYTHING makes perfect sense to her!

Of course this earthquake business does have me mildly irritated, and not because of the frantic news coverage. I’m trying to finish my last two rounds of chemo, and I will be really IRKED if we have another one of these inconsequential earthquakes to “shake up” my treatment schedule. My eyes are on the prize of finishing up my last chemo on May 1st, even if I have to sift through the rubble and find the necessary poison all by myself, that’s my plan. And if the newscasters want to cover my heroic efforts to hook myself up for a treatment, that’s just fine by me.