I'm not from here. I grew up in a temperate climate. With a beach. And sand and palm trees and a single season called "tourist." And now I live in the midwest. Where the tornados are.

The fall leaves, spring blossoms and winter snow are all well and good, but this tornado crap bites.

A tornado is the vengeful finger of a wrathful god wrapped up in an angry swarm of iceballs from hell. When one is coming your way, common sense dictates that you get your sorry ass down in to the basement, no matter how musty or snake-filled it may be. But apparently common sense is as rare as non-GMO corn around here: the natives all stand outside and watch. And laugh at me as I cringe and whine underground with my cell phone and a change of underwear clutched to my chest.

Bastards.

While I may turn into a quivering mass of jelly in the face of a tornado, I'm positively cavalier about earthquakes. Because on the great scale of natural disasters, earthquakes kick tornado ass. You don't have to sit and wait for hours for an earthquake to come kill you. The weather sirens don't wake you up at all hours of the night to tell you an earthquake is imminent. And earthquakes are nicely democratic: Everyone is equally screwed. Tornados are unfair, like some PMS-ing omnipotent being playing duck-duck-goose: hate YOU, like YOU, hate YOU, and HATE every trailer park in Oklahoma.

At the county fair last year, this old lady was complaining that all her purple ribbons had been lost when a tornado swept her farm away. Then she thanked God for watching out for her. What!?!? He wasn't watching out for you! Would someone watching out for you TAKE YOUR WHOLE FREAKIN' FARM!?!?

I don't get it.

I don't have a picture of an actual tornado (because I was in the basement, of course), but I do have proof of its masculinity: the rarely-seen tornadic scrotum.

Yup, during tornado season we get gigantic water vapor testicles that just hang there for hours. I'm waiting to see God's hand sneak down to scratch 'em.