So today, the day when the American kids were scheduled to come to my school, for whose visit I had dedicated a week of preparatory teaching so kids could have something to do besides stare at the white guys, school was cancelled. Because of a typhoon, whose winds and heavy rains might endanger commuting students.

School cancelled I hopped a train to the center of the storm to check it out. Well, and to get my visa from the Chinese consulate. Still, I love travelling the nearly empty streets and feeling that low-level chaos that comes with a storm. Sheets of heavy rain battering the train windows. Wind rocking the cars on the tracks. Businessmen released from the bondage of their labors, edging nervously home. Disruption. Disorganization. Dysfunction.

It's like a little homeopathic dose of the end.

Underground, in the subway. My imagination recalls all the anime where the Japanese are forced to flee from the surface world and live in their cities underground. The stations are eerily empty, devoid of the usual human crush. There's no telling what it's like up there, in the storm. The subway pulls away from the station. I stare at the couple sitting silently across from me in this quickly moving capsule of light and metal in this deep cut through the dark. The last, desperate train home.

I'm totally over-exaggerating, but it's more fun to write that way. To pretend it's emergency time. Really it was just a heavy rain and some wind.

Hey mom, remember when there was that hurricane and I went out riding my bike in it and I saw that big tree get blown over? And then you came and got me in that silver dodge hatchback with the maroon interior. What a crappy car.

I used to love hurricanes. The unpredictability and chaos of quick change. Everybody in church, or in the basement. That sudden and dangerous stillness that erupts from the center of the violent wind. Salt air smell. People together helping each other. It was like Christmas inside out.