Before I dive into this tail of seismic happenings, I feel I have to preface it with some zoological background (if you don't feel like reading this opinion piece on the virtues of certain birds and would rather get to the part of how I almost died (YES IT'S TRUE!!!) then skip ahead). It's become common knowledge among the people I'm with here that I'm an outspoken opponent of animals. That's right, I said it, I don't like animals. None of them. I can tolerate certain ones, and I am interested in them from afar, but as soon as the start interacting with me, affecting my life in anyway, I generally, without qualms, just dislike them. Cats, dogs, mice, birds, bats, you know, the usual suspects. But since coming to Thailand I have a new enemy, who has quickly climbed the list to the top: the rooster. I'm pretty confident that there's no animal more annoying, more purely, excrutiatingly bothersome in its general comportment than the rooster. In the States, where we don't typically live with roosters, we are privileged enough to maintain the romantic illusion that roosters are Nature's Kind Alarm Clock, that they crow once a day, at sunrise, of course. After living with roosters, I now understand that they are alarm clocks in a way, except instead of being able to be turned off, they are endlessly put into snooze mode. Thus, not only do they give a proud cockadoodledoo at sunrise, but they give the same, gut-wrenching, Lord-Take-Me-Now squeel consistently for the first few hours of the day (usually beginning around four or five AM), and then continue at irregular intervals for the rest of the entire day, in addition to the crows they frequently emit in conversation with the other local roosters. I had to deal with this at my host family, as our neighboors raised them. And then when I lived in the villages I witnessed it on a whole new scale, as everyone in the village raised them, so when morning came I was typically woken up by painfully loud and dischordant orchestra of crowing. With the move to my apartment, an eighth story number in the middle of downtown Chiang Mai, I thought I had seen the last of my rooster mornings. But no. There's one lousy bird that lives across the street, and nobly carries on the tradition of his forefathers. Amazingly enough, the crow is able to cross the street, rise hundreds of feet in the air, penetrate concrete and glass, and still be loud enough to wake me up in the morning. I hate it, naturally, but I've learned to deal with it in the morning. Last night, however, the rooster decided to start crowing at around midnight, issuing his screach every ten seconds or so for a good five minutes. So there I was, awake in bed, unable to fall asleep, and now on top of it all I had to deal with that rooster.

And then the room started to shake. I wasn't so sure at first, as I was a little in-and-out of it that night, but sure enough, yes, the room was shaking. My bed was shaking. The bed next to me was shaking. Well, not so much shaking as eerily swaying.

It was an earthquake.

We were having an earthquake.

We were having an earthquake and I was on the eight floor of a concrete building. Once the swaying stopped, which only took fifteen seconds or so, and I had my wits about me, I ran into the main room, looked out the window, didn't notice any widespread devastation / rivers of lava / mushroom clouds billowing in the background, and went through the catalogue of saturday morning public service announcements I keep in my brain. Despite growing up in Michigan, the "What to do in case of an earthquake" card came right up: a) stand in a doorway, bracing yourself, or b) get under a table. I did neither, but I was proud that I had that sort of trivial capacity. Instead I threw some clothes on and went in the hall, where I found the other students. We all double checked to make sure the others felt the building shake too, and of course we all did. So we talked a bit, calmed down, theorized the possible large scale sources of such a tiny tremor, and of course joked about it. For the record, we have now joked our way successfully out of 1) a coup d'etat, and 2) an earthquake. So long story short, I've asked around and looked on the internet and it seems it was no big deal at all. It was an undersea earthquake in Indonesia, but was too far below to cause a tsunami. So all is well.

So what do roosters have to do with all of this? Why did you waste time reading about them when you could have been reading about my lived experience with complex tectonic processes? Well I was just thinking that the rooster was probably predicting the earthquake (you know how animals can do that, right?), and so thought it should go in the story. I also really do just hate roosters.

GEOLOGY LIVES!!!!!!!!