Miss Adventures in Dark Matter

I'm still ill and am going stir crazy. Last night in bed at 3 in the morning, idly thinking about writing a facebook status along the lines of that I was finally able to eat and so would not starve to death and be found a month later being nibbled at by mice, squirrels, zebra etc., I found the following thoughts mounting in my head with increasing urgency:

What is the plural of zebra?
If the plural of zebra is also zebra (it is. I checked) then what is the plural of antelope? And wildebeest?
Do all savannah animals run around in gangs with no 's' on the end? Except, like, giraffes? And hippopotamii?
Is it hippopotamii or hippopotamuses?
Do any of those animals actually live in a savannah?
What the fuck is a savannah, anyway?

Today I finished reading a book about a girl called Isabel who travels from her new home in Turkey to her home village in Yorkshire to find out exactly what caused her friend's disappearance years ago when they were teenagers, only to discover that she, Isabel, is in fact dead/a fictional character dreamed up by her mad aunt Maggie/a combination of the two (we never find out which, because the plot is so flimsy it might as well have been cobbled together by monkeys).

I also read on facebook that the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider think that they may have found the Higgs-Boson. I followed the link, thinking: 'This is a very important discovery and I should take time out of my busy day of languishing around like a Victorian consumptive to find out more about it'. I patiently read it through, trying to extricate meaning from impenetrable sentences such as: 'the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic' (Yep. I know exactly what you're saying) and worried a little at the fact that one of the scientists described themselves as being 'super-proud' (I don't know, you'd kind of hope that someone who was meddling with the stuff of the universe would sound less like an American cheerleader) but then my eyes landed on a genuinely disturbing sentence:

'All the matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the universe, the rest being made up of mysterious dark matter and dark energy.'

Suddenly my bedroom, my hand on the door latch, the hallway, the street outside looked terrifyingly unreal. The Turkish men who hang around outside the shop next door 24/7 stood about like Lego figures. My mind spiralled off into the kind of questions you ask yourself at 2am when you're a student and getting stoned with your housemates: How unlikely is the universe? How unlikely is it that any of us exist at all? What if we're all dead? What if we're all fictional characters dreamed up by Isabel's mad aunt Maggie?

Because of the zebra and dark matter, I've decided to go to work tomorrow.