It's the end of the world as we know it

Even though I was 99.9% sure that the Mayan Apocalypse wasn't going to happen, I was still a bit anxious for December 21st to come and go this year. I knew the world was going to still be there on the morning of the 22nd, but I just wanted to get to that point. I remember the summer I was 9, some other kid at a summer day camp I was attending told me that the world was going to end the next day at 3 pm. It was so specific, which made it even scarier, and perhaps explains why I was quick to believe him. Or maybe I was just gullible. Regardless, I kept thinking about it the next day, which was a Saturday. But then my mom took me to a movie at the Capitol Movie Theatre on Yonge Street near our house (which is now an event theatre that hosts weddings & other fancy events). I don't remember what movie we saw but I know that it engrossed me enough to completely forget about the imminent end of the world. When we left the Capitol and started walking home, I realized it was past 3 pm and the world was still there, seemingly the same as always. I felt great relief.

From the ages of 14 to about 19, Armageddon was my favourite movie. From ages 14- to maybe 16 I even had a Ben Affleck poster on my wall which I purchased at the Rogers video store on Yonge Street just north of Davisville station. L. had told me about it (she had one too) and where to buy it so one day after school I got off the subway a stop early, bought the poster and that night went to sleep with Ben Affleck staring down at me. When I was 14/15 I was obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck (who dated for a while! my Hollywood dream match at the time) and I wonder if it's because I liked them so much back in 1998/1999 and am now really embarrassed about it that I don't particularly like either of them now.

Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow

It wasn't this exact poster but somewhat similar.

 Although it's probably not my favourite movie anymore, I still love Armageddon. I just watched a few clips of it on youtube (the final 8 minutes and the scene where Bruce Willis tells Liv Tyler he's staying behind on the asteroid) and I cried. Every time I have watched it, I've cried. I think Liv Tyler is really beautiful and I think she and Ben Affleck made a good couple. I particularly like the scenes where they show people around the world coping with the fact that the world is going to end (I remember they show Paris/the Eiffel Tower) and then celebrating at the end when the world doesn't end. That connection with the rest of the world - at quite possibly the end of the world - always seemed really important.

I find end of the world scenarios generally pretty terrifying. I worry sometimes about what would happen if something awful happened - be it a natural disaster, an asteroid from outer space, or a hostile government take over/beginning of a terrible dictatorship - and what I would do. I feel certain the first thing that would happen if the world were in chaos would be that the internet would be shut down and there'd be no phone service and I wouldn't know what to do if that happened. I'd mostly just want to be at my house in Toronto, but what if I couldn't get there? K. jokes that she'd take her dad's guns and go live in the woods in BC. That sounds like a good plan for her but so implausible for me. I just hope I never have to confront these things.

Last January, a few days after my birthday, D. and I watched the movie Melancholia. Big spoiler alert coming up in case you still want to watch it and want to be surprised. I found it quite disturbing and while I would recommend it, it's not a movie I want to see again. I kept thinking about it for quite a while after I saw it and the ending just haunted me. In the movie a planet called Melancholia is on course to collide with the earth. Charlotte Gainsbourg, her husband Kiefer Sutherland, her sister Kirsten Dunst and her son are all at her large, somewhat isolated castle like house in the countryside somewhere. Kiefer Sutherland is an amateur astronomer and spends a good part of the movie trying to convince his wife and son that Melancholia will definitely not hit the earth. When it becomes clear that he was wrong and that Melancholia is going to hit the earth, he takes poison and kills himself. He doesn't bother saying goodbye to his wife or son and his wife finds him dead in the barn with their horses. What most struck - and disturbed - me was their isolation. It seemed like the 4 (and then 3) of them were the only people left on earth. They never turned on the TV or listened to the radio or tried to connect with anyone else. Kirsten Dunst - who is really depressed throughout the movie - was the most accepting of the world ending. Charlotte Gainsbourg, when she first realized the end was imminent and that her husband was dead - grabbed her kid and tried to drive into town but then realized it was futile and gave up, returning to their isolated fortress. I knew that in the face of the world ending I'd react a lot like her and her panic really scared me.

Looking at Melancholia

In the end, the three of them just sat outside in a circle and talked and waited for Melancholia to hit the earth. Even though I know they are very different movies, I kept thinking about how Armageddon showed all those scenes of the world being united in fear and hope. Here, we never saw how the rest of the world was handling this. Their isolation at the end affected me so much. It just seemed so bleak and frightening. If the world were to end I would much rather be in a city and near other people, than out there alone.

On The Other Side

 
I read this memoir a few years ago called The Sisters Antipodes by a woman named Jane Alison. Jane was born in Canberra, Australia but spent most of her childhood living in different parts of the world because her dad was a diplomat. At some point when she was under 10, her family (mom, dad, older sister, Jane) were back in Australia and became really good friends with an American family whose dad was also a diplomat (mom, dad, two daughters). The parents ended up switching partners, and the daughters ended up losing dads as Jane and her sister moved to the US with their new stepfather and their mom, and the two other girls stayed in Australia with their mom and Jane's dad. Read it - it's really good! (The amount of similarities between the families are very strange. Both women/moms end up getting pregnant again and both had sons born within a few days of each other.) But why this whole story is related to this post is because Jane returns to Australia a couple of different times during the book and she always talks about the plane rides and drawing maps of the voyages and trying to cross off all the time zones she was travelling through on the back of the Qantas napkin. I loved those parts of the book. I wish I had my copy of the book here (it's in Toronto) to give the exact quote but she wrote this line I just loved about always wishing she knew or could tell the exact moment the plane crossed the equator, so that she could know when she was back on the other side.

It wasn't until I was in Santiago that I realized the word (and country) "Ecuador" means equator in Spanish. C. visited Ecuador once and told me how the equator passes right through the country. She even went to a place where you can stand with one foot on one side of the equator and one foot of the other. So cool! It's like when you can stand on a state/province line and have your feet in two different places at once. A long time ago when we were at school together, N. told me how in Basel, Switzerland, France, Germany and Switzerland all meet. He showed me a picture of himself standing in the exact spot the three countries meet. When I did my exchange to France in the winter/spring of 1999, my dad came to visit me at one point and we went to Switzerland. At N.'s recommendation I made us visit Basel and I also have a picture of me (wish I remembered where it is) of me standing at the place where the three countries meet.  Going back to Ecuador, I really want to visit the country, and specifically the equator one day.

In Paris, I knew this guy named P. who was from Bogotá. His sister J. came to visit during the summer and I hung out with them both a few times. I was telling them how much I loved the long long days and she told me that in Bogotá, because it's so close to the equator, it gets dark around 6 pm (give or take) the whole year. She said the dark would make her tired, and that sometimes she'd go to bed at 6:30 pm and sleep 12 hours until it got light again the next morning. It was so interesting to me that for her, being in Paris in May, June and July was not only an adjustment for the language, etc. etc. but also for the long long days when she was used to darkness by early evening. Having long days in the summer and short days in the winter is so engrained in my mind I don't think I could ever get used to the length of day and night being more or less the same the whole year through.

I like how Jane Alison called the Northern Hemisphere "the other side." It does sort of seem like the two hemispheres are other sides. At the end of our semester in Santiago, Chile, C. and I took a 2 week long trip to Argentina, with a 3 day side trip to Uruguay. While in Montevideo, we went to this museum about an Uruguyan artist named Joaquín Torres García. In the gift shop there was this amazing poster (see picture below this paragraph) of an upside down (to me, but not to some people from South America) map of South America. You can't see it in this picture but there was a quote on the map that said "nuestro norte es el sur" (our north is the south). I've always liked that because it shifts the accepted centres of power and says that just because people in the Northern Hemisphere believe something does not mean those in the Southern Hemisphere necessarily believe it too.

I have new found affection for the Southern Hemisphere. I think my dislike of Chile in 2005 caused me to not like the Southern Hemisphere in general that much, mostly because I pretty much only knew Chile in the Southern Hemisphere and because June was such a dark, cold and awful month in Santiago, so different from June in the Northern Hemisphere. But now I like the Southern Hemisphere so much more. I've realized that just because I don't like Chile, I love Argentina (especially Buenos Aires) and it is also in the Southern Hemisphere. I've been there in its winter (July) and I still loved it. I also really liked New Zealand and it is also 'on the other side.' I'm glad to discover the great things about the Southern Hemisphere. I think it's so fascinating that the globe does have these two sides that are opposites of each other. And I still really want to go to Ecuador (and Bogotá, and look below in Uganda too!) and see the middle.