This morning, my house helper - who I struggle with, but with whom I am trying to be gracious and selfless by sticking it out as long as possible - came to me with a problem. I understood bits and pieces of what she was saying, as usual. Something about the number 21, and death, and fear, and light bulbs.
I was stumped.
I did what I always do in these situations. I phoned Daniel. When she handed the phone back to me, he said, "It's OK, Babe. She was hoping that because you have a computer you could look up the pending threat of the end of the world on December 21st. She is very afraid."
Oh good, I thought. She is not asking for 21 days off work because of a death in the family (which is what I feared she was doing). She just wants me to do an internet search for her. Whew.
Then I started searching. Call me cut off from the rest of world over here (because I am), but I had no idea the Mayan calendar was predicting the end of the world to be next Friday. Apparently, enough people are afraid of this happening that NASA released a video to calm everybody's fears. If something were hurling through space toward us right now, scheduled to crash into our planet on December 21st, it would be one of the brightest things in the sky, Nasa tried to communicate to a terrified world.
There is nothing in the sky. We are all going to be fine.
Here's the funny part: in the moment that NASA put this thing to rest, Kayla Rupp, mother of four kids under the age of 7 who home schools and cooks all meals from scratch because there is no other option and cleans bunny excrement every-other-day to keep her apartment from smelling like a barn, was just the tiniest bit disappointed.
