I don’t particularly have a “bucket list.” I have a few things in life I still want to experience, but don’t really keep them written down.

If I did have a list like that, I don’t know whether I would have ever thought to add “experience a hurricane earthquake on the fifth floor of a building” before the fact.

Like a lot of other people, I really didn’t know what to make of last week’s tremor. I had my headphones on as I plowed through work at my desk in Baltimore. After someone closed a drawer a few desks away, I noticed the empty Snapple bottle on my desk moving.

“Why did she slam that drawer?” I thought. “It didn’t seem that forceful.”

Then I noticed the bottle still trembling a few seconds later. Then I thought I saw something else moving. Then I wondered if something was wrong with me.

A lot of people I have talked to had that same thought pattern. In the back of my head, I was thinking earthquake, but the front was telling me those sort of things don’t happen around here.  I sat still briefly to make sure I wasn’t having some sort of episode then went to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.

 One of the most fascinating things about last Tuesday’s events is how many thoughts can go through your head in just a few seconds.  I can’t remember everything I considered, but I do know I ping-ponged back and forth between every possible emotion.

When you are five floors up in a building that you honestly think could come down thanks to a heavy sneeze at any moment, those kinds of things happen. The place is not dilapidated by any means. You just to tend to focus on the negatives when the building starts to sway.

That’s what bugged me most about the people I saw online criticizing the way people reacted to the earthquake. Just because no one died and damage was thankfully minimal does not mean that it didn’t make most of us wish we had a second pair of underwear handy.

When something significant happens – and this was the most powerful quake in this region in a century so I consider that significant – survival does not turn into a contest. Just because someone else had a worse event and survived does not make them a better person.

On the flip side, because no one died and damage was thankfully minimal, I believe people had every right to turn social networking sites into an open mic night. As I stood in a parking lot with co-workers waiting to see if (and when) we could get back into our building, the quips I found on Twitter made the whole experience more fun.

So maybe I should check “find the humor in a non-fatal natural disaster” off my imaginary bucket list. Having a few laughs is way more important than pretty much anything else in my book even if I have to endure a little shaking in the process.