Shark Week

I've gone back and forth about writing this, because it veers dangerously close to the dreaded TMI Zone (or maybe it sprints headlong into it, I don't know). But I ultimately decided to go for it because stuff like this shouldn't necessarily be too much information. All right, it's not exactly charming dinner conversation, so here's a warning.

WARNING (I GUESS):

DO NOT READ WHILE EATING, UNLESS YOU DON'T FIND THE INNER WORKINGS OF LADIES' BODIES ICKY AND NAUSEA-INDUCING, IN WHICH CASE, READ WHENEVER THE DAMN HELL YOU PLEASE

There seems to be a prevailing mindset, even among well-educated women, that talking about our bodies is impolite, particularly when it comes to the menstrual cycle.

I can almost hear the clicks as people calmly but briskly close this browser tab.

(Aside: I think a lot of the reluctance to discuss what one of my college friends adorably-yet-slightly-distressingly refers to as "mensies" is related to strong cultural taboos against blood. Touching blood, bleeding - these things have almost universally been thought of as wrong and unclean. It's why bloodborne diseases tend to be thought of as especially bad, and their victims correspondingly cursed/guilty. Also, people think of menstrual blood as being "dirtier" than the blood inside veins/arteries. Must research this - I don't actually know what menstrual blood is composed of; I'm shockingly ignorant about my own body.)

This reluctance to discuss Shark Week (which is probably my absolute favorite slang term for periods) is silly. Most ladies spend roughly a quarter of their time (one out of every four weeks or so) dealing with a uterine lining that's given up the ghost. We all have to figure out the bizarre world of tampons and pads and cramps and upswings in emotional sensitivity. We all have to deal, at least once, with the nighttime dilemma of either waking up our partners in the middle of the night to strip the sheets off the bed or else waiting until the morning and hoping the spot of blood you leaked doesn't set too much into the fabric.

It's embarrassing. Maybe we don't talk about it because we hope that ostriching will actually work - if I don't think about it, I won't have to deal with it.

I know some women (womyn?) wax sentimental about the beauty of the menstrual cycle, how it connects us with the moon and with other women and is a reminder of the female superpower of bringing life into the world.

I'm going to go ahead and just assume that those women have painless, tidy, neat little periods that last for two days and occur at a fixed interval.

Bully for them.

But for the rest of us, it's inconvenient if not outright annoying. Listen, I understand and appreciate the miracle of the human reproductive system. But I can tell you for sure that it's gotta be the product of evolution because it's messy, circuitous, and inefficient. Or, okay, maybe it was created by a jerk god that likes to see its creations be uncomfortable.

Here's where things get personal:

When I was twelve, I remember coming home from school and finding a book on my bed. I wasn't too surprised; when my mom ran across books she thought I'd like at the library (where she worked), she'd drop them on my bed. However, when I got around to actually taking a look at it, I realized this was different.

This felt important, but it also felt a little weird. Like, I wasn't supposed to talk about it. I closed my door and paged through it. It's a great book - informative without being intimidating, candid without being intimidating. However, if my mom was expecting me to take the initiative to bring up questions and concerns, she was mistaken. The innocent method of delivery, perfectly fine when the subject was some frivolous scifi novel, was somehow an indication that this important topic was a little shady, like a silent drug deal or something. Like it was best to pretend it wasn't happening, to deal with it in private, and to present an unruffled face to the world.

Of course, I didn't have too many questions or concerns. It all seemed pretty straightforward. When you're twelve, you deal with mood swings and irritability all the time. It's a way of life. PMS wasn't a huge issue for me, and getting my first period was surprisingly businesslike. Here's a box of tampons and the instructions, here's a mirror, here's a stack of pads if you prefer.

Getting my period was mostly about learning how to keep the blood contained. I didn't have a big talk about Becoming a Woman, or about the Gift of Childbirth. Nobody took me out to dinner to celebrate it as a milestone. It was just another responsibility - one more task to add to the list of personal hygiene, like flossing or washing your face.

I don't mind this view. It's pretty much how I think about my period now - matter of fact, a thing to be dealt with. Of course, I don't plan on having children (if I want to raise a kid and turn it into a decent adult, I'll just adopt one of the kids that already exist on the planet instead of making another one), so the whole thing is really just a nuisance. How else should i view it than a burden?

Some women see this a betrayal of the sex - like not loving and embracing a week of pain and messiness every month makes me less of a female, like it's an expression of internalized misogyny. But it's not - I am fascinated by the biology, and I think it's amazing that some ladies put it to use and GROW HUMANS with it. But for me, the whole ovaries/uterus/fallopian tubes thing is about as useful as my appendix. It's a vestigial system. It's as potentially hazardous as an appendix, too.

Here's where things get really personal:

A couple weeks ago, I was caught unawares by a Shark Week that came out of nowhere. No preceding week of being hypersensitive to criticism, no cramps, no bloating. Just, BAM, PERIOD!

On top of being unannounced, it was also the. heaviest. freaking. period. I have ever had. I'm talking soaking through a heavy-duty pad every hour for four days and nights straight, and distressing clots, too. I told you it was personal.

Menstrual blood is not part of the circulatory system, so losing it doesn't normally make you faint or anything like that. But the body does depend on it for iron. Usually, women get a little low on iron during their periods, but you usually only shed a couple tablespoons of blood. When Shark Week is particularly gory, women run the risk of becoming dangerously iron deficient.

This happened to me. I started noticing it around day two - walking even short distances left me short of breath with a pounding heart. I scheduled an appointment with the gynecologist, who ordered a complete blood count (CBC). She told me I had extremely low iron counts, and that she was surprised I had as much energy as I did. She also said that, often, clots are caused by the body in an attempt to slow the rate of blood loss.

I'm on iron supplements for the next couple months in order to rebuild the stores of iron the body keeps in bone marrow. In the meantime, I'll continue to have a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath.

What's bizarre is that, two weeks ago, I had no idea this was a fairly common issue.

I texted a friend and asked her about it. We have a history of talking about things that you're not generally supposed to talk about, so this openness about Shark Week - though unusual by the world's standards - is pretty par for the course for us. She explained that menstruation-induced iron deficiency is totally a thing.

I feel a little indignant about this. This monthly mechanism should not put me at risk of anemia. Evolution was supposed to weed that out, although, stopping to think about it, cave-ladies probably didn't deal much with periods, because they were probably pregnant all the time. Fine, evolution, you get a pass on this one.

But I still feel a little betrayed by my body. A normal function it performs has rendered me a weak, winded wimp. A woolly mammoth would definitely have caught and trampled me by now.

I know this post has been kind of aimless. Blame it on the lack of oxygen in my brain.

Basically, I think it's ridiculous how ill-informed both men and women are about their own bodies, and the taboo against talking about those bodies' mechanisms needs to be overturned.

Chris came to visit

And it was glorious!

It was totally last minute, but so much fun. Both Nick and I were able to rearrange our work schedules so we could spend the maximum amount of time with Chris. He's an old college buddy whom I haven't seen in far too long.

We packed a lot into three days.

We played a bunch of games with our friend Keefe (Star Fluxx, Nuclear War, Illuminati), who totally trounced us at Illuminati, as usual. After that, we headed downtown and got lunch at Pete's Kitchen (a little greasy spoon diner that's a Denver fixture). It was delicious. Then we set off to catch a tour of the Great Divide Brewing Co. There was a very drunk, very garrulous man on the tour who seemed to be intent on telling the tour guide lots of things the guide already knew ("You guys are such a little brewing company, but you ship all over the country! You've got a really special thing going here, do you know that?" Yeah, man. He knows that).

We hit the Tattered Cover and Red Mango (Chris fell in love with it). I lined up a behind the scenes tour at the museum, which was AWESOME. We got to go onto the roof and walked around the catwalks above the dioramas. It was so much fun. Then, the boys participated in the museum's taste and genetics study, which involves getting your tongue painted blue.

My two favorite dudes with blue tongues after
participating in the museum's research study

We played Cards Against Humanity and Chris petted the heck out of Amber, Nick's corgi. She didn't like that at all. (False. She loved it.)

Then he went home. It was sad. I've decided that Chris will now visit us at least once a month. I wish I was rich so I could make that happen.

I like having guests. It gives me an excuse to get out and explore.

What is this madness?!

Holy cow. Holy, sacred, numinous cow!

I ... I have a job. Like, a grownup job with benefits. At a science museum. Working with volunteers and wearing a labcoat and preparing frozen sheep organs for dissection and making agar plates and cultivating bottles of algae and innoculating bacteria cultures and painting visitors' tongues blue and stuff.

Mind. BLOWN.

I start officially on the first. I am so. unbelievably. excited!

Pursuit

I've been reading Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark - a birthday present from Nick (who knows how much I love books, science, and Carl Sagan).

It's mostly been talking about scientific literacy, and how important it is. Not just for scientists, but for everyone. Students. Politicians. Parents. Educators.  It's about how seductive pseudoscience and ignorance can be, and how dangerous they are, too.

I'll write some more about it when I've finished it.  Suffice it to say, it's wonderfully written and makes me want to be Carl Sagan when I grow up.





I'm considering going back to school.  For premed, maybe? So I can be an optometrist? Or a speech pathologist? Something. I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about the future, thinking about things Carl Sagan said in The Demon-Haunted World, thinking about the science teachers I had in grade school and high school.

It struck me how, after fourth grade (when I had a wonderful science teacher who made it hands-on, who showed us that science isn't a big abstract concept, that it's immediate and breathing and inseparable from existence), I didn't have any teachers who painted the big picture.

They taught their subject well, but it didn't connect to anything. I just learned about lysosomes and mitosis and balancing chemical equations and finding the coefficient of Mμ, without understanding the why behind the how.

No one stopped to point out that the beauty of the scientific method is its tireless pursuit of the truth, its ability to admit when it's wrong, its capacity to look past the obvious and seek the unknown.

I never connected what I was doing in the classroom with the concept of critical thinking. It was just a lot of rote memorization and standardized test preparation.

Not one teacher lifted off the lid of procedure to reveal the romance that lies so close to science's heart.

I've been mulling all of this over a lot lately.  Maybe I should be a science teacher.  Maybe I should be a science writer. I'm no scientist, but I do think about the future. I think about everything I don't know or understand, and I think about how there are other people out there who ask the same questions I ask, who work at chipping away at humanity's ignorance. I think about all the kids I went to school with who wouldn't even understand the point Sagan makes in The Demon-Haunted World, and of the politicians who think science is an unimportant sideshow.

I think about all of this, and I think about how it seems like so many people out there have no idea how beautiful and humbling the universe is, and I think about what it would take to show them, even just a little bit of it.

I don't really know what I want to do with my life, but this seems like something worthwhile.

birthdays

So I didn't achieve everything from my list. But in the last couple months since I posted last, I did check off

4. Go to the Celestial Seasonings tea factory in Boulder.
     (went with Nick, Sonora, and Phil - the peppermint room was amazing.)
9. Make a pitcher of lemonade from scratch.
     (made Brazillian limeade with fresh limes and sweetened condensed milk)
11. Read, at the very least, eight new books.
     (Dodger, Spook, Stiff, Packing for Mars, Bonk, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and I'm currently reading The Demon-Haunted World.)
16. Watch a sunrise.
     (saw it while waiting for the bus one morning before work.)
17. Have a picnic.
     (had cheese and bread and pickles with Kara out on her porch.)
19. Take a road trip (even if it's only an hour long).
     (went to Steamboat Springs to see an ice castle with Nick, Sonora, Phil, and Teri.)
21. Make something beautiful and sell it.
     (sold a bunch of mugs from my etsy shop over the holidays.)



 Still doing the job search thing. I had an interview at the museum for a more sciencey position. It would be amazing. Fingers crossed on that one.

Oh, geez.

Yeah.

Welp.

I.

Well, shit (as my philosophy professor used to say).  Sorry for the total blogging fuckup, guys.  I am, in fact, alive and not - as the duration of the last post's status as the most recent post would suggest - mopey and depressed.

So what exactly have I been doing with all the time I haven't spent blogging? you ask.

I went to the Denver County Fair, where I won a t-shirt and ate a delicious quesadilla and saw a cream-colored donkey with whom I felt a deep inexplicable kinship.

I picked up a terrible part time job that nonetheless pays the bills as it sucks away my patience and goodwill toward my fellow humankind.

I read Mary Roach's hilarious Packing for Mars, Bonk, and Spook, all of which caused me to literally lol as I learned interesting facts about spaceflight, sex research, and the afterlife, respectively. I reread Ender's Game in a single insomniac night. I borrowed Nick's copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book) and devoured that - the movie makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE now.

Most recently, I've been working on opening up an Etsy shop, which contains items like this:

Yes, that's a mug of Nikola Tesla, the electric Jesus.  Yes, that's a reference to a certain drunken video.

Pretty much my shop is just an excuse for me to be as deeply crafty and nerdy as I want.

So now that I've got you all caught up on my life, expect more posts soon.

luminous and happy

(video credit youtube user AgentThirtyFour)

I watched the solar eclipse with Nick last week. The internet misinformed us, and we thought we wouldn't be able to see the eclipse from home. A road trip to New Mexico or Arizona was out, given that we're broke, and Nick couldn't get Monday off of work. So we watched the eclipse online. After a while, though, we figured we'd give it a shot, and went outside to see what we could see. I'd bought a pair of flimsy solar viewing glasses a couple months ago, and we decided to give 'em a spin.

As we stepped onto the sidewalk, there was a break in the cloud cover, and we were able to see the last ten minutes of the eclipse. It was really strange, but very fun, looking at the little orange sun, grinning like the moon. A good quarter of its face was hidden in shadow. We watched the shadow sliding away and the sun slipping behind the horizon.

It was fun. I know I already said that, but it was. Fun in a summer vacation, staying up past our bedtimes kind of way - except this isn't summer vacation and I don't really have bedtimes anymore. It was nostalgic. It felt like when I was a kid and would lie in bed with the late summer sun coming in through the white curtains, falling asleep listening to the older kids playing down the street, to the irregular pong! pang! pong! of their basketball smacking the pavement. Comfortable, and familiar. Not the eclipse itself, I guess. But tumbling outside into late afternoon sunlight, getting giddy and awestruck. It was like being a kid.

Just a few days ago, Nick and I attended a friend's young brother's graduation party. It was another gloriously nostalgic day. Gorgeous weather. I sat outside and ate grapes and relaxed with friends and made plans to go backyard camping this summer. I also got involved in a lively debate about the relative believability of Voldemort's reign of terror in the wizarding world. (I love having intensely nerdy friends.)

It's weird. The stress and constant pressure of needing and failing to find a job (or rather, a job that measures its payment by the year, not by the hour) has me feeling pretty desperate and worried most of the time. But then at other times, I'm struck by these inexplicable kid-moods. Like, I'm overcome by these wild creative desires that are not at all productive or realistic. I think it's just subconscious escapism - just my mind trying to distract me from anxiety. Or maybe it's trying to motivate me? Like it's saying, "Look at all the rad stuff you could do once you're not worrying about how you're going to afford to buy groceries!"

For example (given the time and opportunity), I want to be in a big ridiculous joyful sloppy scornful loving cynical gigantic bizarro band that's like the Decemberists & the Head and the Heart & Florence + the Machine & Glittermouse & Mucca Pazza & OK Go rolled into one, all heartfelt and nerdy. With like twelve people on stage, playing weird instruments and being noisy and luminous and happy. Our shows would only be performed in the summer, at night, outdoors, with the crickets and frogs, and each performance would be accompanied by fireworks. And we'd hand out sparklers to the audience.

Realistic? Practical? Reasonable?

No. And, in all honesty, it's probably something I'll never actually do. But it's a nice daydream, and it reminds me of all the small ridiculous creative things I want to be doing. Filming youtube movies. Making music with friends. Trying out new recipes. Learning to swing dance.

It's a good reminder to myself to keep sending out applications, to keep editing and tweaking my resume, to keep churning out cover letters. Because, one day soon, I'm gonna land a decent job and I'll have time to be just as ridiculous and creative as I damned well please.

It's gonna happen soon. And when it does - look out.

Questions without answers

Lately, life has been filled with stress and uncertainty. Well. More than usual. It's mostly to do with trying and failing to find a job, attempting to figure out what I want to be doing, not knowing where to go next. The usual post-collegiate sense of failure and ineptitude, compounded by the three year gap since graduation, during which time I was supposed to have been busy getting my act together.

It's not hopeless, I know. It only feels like all that initial potential has been slowly draining away. But, I tend to think that things will work out one way or another. I tend to think that it's good to be proactive, but not useful burning up energy worrying - because one day soon, I'll find a decent job and life will continue. It's the inertia of being alive.

During a recent phone call with my parents, in which I was discussing my lack of success in finding steady employment, my father advised me to pray about it in the hopes that god would open the door to a job.

This was a loaded statement, heavy with worry for my damned soul and disapproval of my sinful ways and disappointment at my failure to keep to the religious line. It breaks my heart every time I hear it, or any of its many incarnations, come from my parents' mouths.

Of my circle of friends, I was probably the one who clung to religion the longest - at least, outwardly. I was good at it, good at acting the right way and saying the right things. It was easy, and it won me approval. Approval and acceptance were, for many years, the main motivator behind being religious. Which is terribly tragic. Sometimes I reread old journals and see myself struggling with religion, desperately repeating that I'd always believe, hoping to convince myself. It was a security blanket I held onto long after I ceased to really trust in its ability to grant protection or comfort.

One of the hardest things for me was admitting to myself what I'd known for a long time: that all the worst experiences and thoughts I've ever had have stemmed from the misplaced sense of inadequacy and guilt that was ingrained in me by religion. It was hard to admit that religion had driven a wedge between me and my parents. But my fear of letting go of the comfortable lie I'd built was overcome by my desire to live honestly. I was able to let myself say out loud that I've never seen religion do anything to edify or empower, instead of just choking back the words.

Original sin, humanity's inevitable fall, the essential brokenness and darkness of the world, any instances of good being instances of god - these are tenets of religion that have never sat well with me.

It's cheap. It's disingenuous.

To blame the horror and iniquities of life on humanity, and to credit its moments of grace and kindness to a deity, is so cowardly and despairing.

My parents want me to be religious. I know it comes from a place of love and concern; from their point of view, faith was the only thing that got them through their turbulent times. The generosity of their friends, the support of their community (which was largely religious) was attributed to a strong shared sense of faith, and to the ministrations of a god that watches out for his own. (I think it should have been attributed to the bonds of friendship and loyalty.) So I understand why they want faith for me. They find contentment and relief in "letting things go" and "giving it to god." They distrust the world, have experienced the dangers of putting your trust in people, who can fail you. They want me to think of my eternal soul, of the place I'll hold after I die. They want me to recognize and accept a loving and caring god.

And given half the chance would I take any of it back?
It's a fine romance, but it's left me so undone.

But I want to live in the world, among this flawed and imperfect people, a member of a beautiful and strange species. I'm not just a visitor here, as so many sermons have said. I'm a resident. This is my one real home.

I want to participate in the human pursuit of knowledge, in flexing our young ancient wild minds. I want to fall down and make mistakes. I want to be picked up and dusted off by other people who have fallen down and made mistakes, too. Failure is an occupational hazard, a mark of courage, a rite of passage - not something shameful, something to need forgiveness for.

I put my trust in my friends. Yes, people can fail you, can leave you wounded and lost. But shutting out the good for fear of potential pain is widely regarded as a culpably stupid course of action. It has always been my friends who supported me whether I knew I needed it or not. It was never faith that soothed me when I was hurting, never a sense of god's presence that healed a broken heart. It was the sense of camaraderie and love among friends, the immediacy of their understanding of being hurt and flawed, the balm of human empathy, and the tangibility of held hands and wordless loving embraces.

I don't need to think of a creator to feel awe when I stand at the edge of Lake Michigan, or when watching a sunset over the Rockies. I see the time, the staggeringly slow geological processes, that led to their births. And it's amazing. The thought that I'm able to stand here, aware and vibrant, is made all the more wonderful for the thought that it happened by chance rather than by design. In the heaving, roiling battle between life and entropy, this lonesome planet coughed intelligent life onto its shores. That makes us precious and rare.

For me, it's so much more freeing and humbling and awe-inspiring to think that I'm just one small, fleeting being in the vast universe, using this 1.5 kilograms of soggy brain tissue to imagine and question.

Disease and war and danger is understandable in a world that evolved by trial and error, without a master plan. It's unforgivable in a world supposedly guarded by a loving creator. The difference between living on a world that's evolving and a world that's the pinnacle achievement of an all-powerful god is that the evolving planet will keep evolving. Religion tries to take the despicable way out, running away from our problems to a different plane of existence.

I don't want the simple, narrow answers or the thin comfort that religion provides. The beauty of life lies in the risks we take, the recognition of our own smallness and worth, the marveling we might do at our achievements and the glorious world we find ourselves in, the seeking we do in the darkness, the lights and fires we set along our brief timelines.

My limitations are what make me worthwhile. My existence is made precious because it is ephemeral, because it's doomed but not despairing, because it reaches for the universe that dwarfs it, because it is so improbable and hopeful and lonely and loving.

I'm ready to suffer, and I'm ready to hope.

I'm never going to stop asking the questions, because no answer is ever going to be big enough for all the goddamned wonder I have for the minutest vibrations of atoms, the grand sweeping swirl of galaxies, the ridiculous amazing complexities of humanity.

I'm a child of four billion years of evolutionary success, and I will never stop being in love with this universe.

One down, twenty-four to go.

18. Go for an evening bike ride.

A couple days ago, my friends Bryan&Amy (who, incidentally, live in the apartment above mine) called me up and asked if I wanted to take a bike ride down to a local ice cream shop called Liks.

Obviously I said yes.  I mean, come on, I might be lactose intolerant, but it's handmade ice cream in, like, a zillion flavors.

 We took off when it was still light out.  We took back roads through quiet neighborhoods.  We've had a lot of rain here lately, and all the budding trees decided at once to unroll their leaves.  It was all golden and green and warm.  There's nothing like riding your bike in late, late afternoon to bring you straight back to childhood.

We sat out on Liks patio, where I enjoyed my supernormal stimulus of a s'mores cone.  There was a black lab tied to a nearby bench who was happily snuffling up all the scents the warm evening breeze brought him.  The light went from gold to orange to a dusky blueish purple.

We rode home in semi-darkness, as the light leaked away over the mountains, and it felt like being at summer camp.  There was the same kind of reckless happiness.  We pedaled hard, zipping down hills and racing past sleepy houses, grinning.  We joked about clothespinning playing cards to our wheels and wearing denim jackets, forming our own neighborhood bike gang.

This might have to become a weekly thing.

this exceedingly rare spark

See that little speck of blueness a little more than halfway down in the far right stripe?
That's Earth, from about six billion kilometers away. Image taken by Voyager 1.

The other day, I had a somewhat upsetting epiphany.  I realized that, in the far, far distant future, there will be no more stars in the sky.

Actually, it started with the realization that someday (should intelligent life survive so long), kids will look up into the sky, and Orion will be missing a shoulder.  That's because Betelgeuse, the massive red supergiant that's makes up the hunter's left shoulder, is due to go supernova sometime within the next million years.

And then it made me realize that we live in an absurdly brief period,when stars burn in the darkness, when galaxies bloom, when there is warmth and light and motion.  In the end, entropy wins.  It won’t be long, on the cosmic scale, before every star burns out and every spinning planet goes still.  Heat will dissipate, fusion will cease, and even the microorganisms that turn our bones to dust will have long since gone extinct.

Pretty weird to think about.  Life is an anomaly in the universe, this exceedingly rare spark that we all share.

And yet, in this brief bright time, we spend our days fearing each other, fighting over infinitesimally small differences, feeling disconnected and discontent

It's easy to forget that all life on the planet is made from the same four nucleic chemicals, built with the matter forged in the hearts of stars - each and every organism, from algae  to tigers to viruses to us.  Even the spider that just ran across my bed (sending me into paroxysms of horror - looks like I still have lessons to learn about regarding my fellow life forms as fellow life forms).

And when it comes to humanity, all of our differences lie in a single percent. I am 99% genetically identical to everyone I know, and to the people on the other side of the planet.  Unfortunately, the human brain isn't good at thinking on a global scale, let alone a cosmic one.  It's mostly just really, really good at thinking about itself and its immediate wants.

I'm not good at being considerate of people a few continents over, or a few generations down the line.  I'm not even good at being considerate of my future self, as evidenced by my continued penchant for eating french fries.  So how can I expect human beings to be thoughtful and global-minded?

I guess I don't, really.  But if humans, or whatever humans evolve into, are going to travel across the galaxy and maybe meet other life forms out in the vast wild universe (something I consider a worthwhile goal), I can at least work on trying to be a bit more far-thinking myself.

After all, life everywhere should be reaching out to find each other, so we'd be able to know, as we head toward the day the last star fades, that we're not alone.

p.s. Be sure to read my friend Becky's blog of flash fiction, Pretending to Know You.  She's putting her one wild and precious life to good, creative use.

We humans are capable of greatness.

videos by Reid Gower

In a conversation I had with Becky a few weeks ago, I started putting into words why I'm so fascinated by astronomy, and space, and how we, as a species, need frontiers. To keep us hopeful, and humble.

The idea of future space exploration fires me with hope and fear and a desperate, lonely tender love for humanity.

Humanity is so lonely - the only intelligent species on our planet, the only ones burdened with the knowledge of our own existence and limitations, with no one to talk to and no one to understand us, and we revolve all alone in space, a little blue dot full of a curious and heartbroken people. Thinking of interstellar exploration makes us aware of how rare and amazing we are. It puts us in the right perspective. It makes us realize that we have a future, and we should do everything to make sure it's long enough for us to get to the stars.

Wouldn't it be terrible if there were other intelligent species out there, ones who've been through fire and waste, ones who've come so close to self-destruction, ones watching anxiously to see us take our first wavering steps, waiting to say hello, but we killed ourselves before we even got the chance?



"Projects that are future-oriented, that (despite their political difficulties) can only be completed in some distant decade, are continuing reminders that there will be a future." - Carl Sagan