Apparently there was some kind of storm last night

I was busy watching a really disappointing Law & Order (the one where that guy got shot and everyone they interviewed gave conflicting stories and Angie Harmon looked really angular) and the louder the storm got, the more I just turned up the volume on my TV. Too bad there isn’t a button on my remote for turning up the interesting.

But I had a string of texts going back and forth with friends in Chicago who were thoroughly freaked out about the weather. And the brother-in-law who lives with us was hunkered down in his room with WWE on his TV and some weather-alert channel on his radio, and every five minutes (seriously … every. five. minutes.) he came running breathlessly into the front room with news about tornado threats, which I just casually dismissed so I could keep my attention span available in case Law & Order suddenly got interesting. The poor guy was probably just looking for someone to be freaked out with and I guess I’m too jaded to get worked up over a storm that to me didn’t seem so terribly bad.

I went to bed at 10:00 so I could be up at 5:45 this morning to meet my trainer. I guess the storm came back for a thunderous curtain call before midnight, but among my many magical powers is the ability to sleep through anything so I missed all the fun.

The storm was bad enough that it ripped the roof off a suburban high school and halted a friend’s enjoyment of The Dark Knight mid-movie and even sent 40,000 Cubs fans out into the streets to fight for cabs and trains and buses as the world threatened to crash down around them. But I didn’t care. I was safe at home with the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. Unfortunately, the guy who got shot and the suspects who lied to the cops weren’t that compelling, so I just wasn’t interested in their stories. Because in the consumer justice system, Jake’s interests are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the TV shows that exist solely for his entertainment and the remote for turning them off when they fail to be more interesting than a thunderstorm.