an organization dedicated to righting the gender imbalance in astronomy
Autumn arrived today. I feel like I can always identify the beginning of the change of season because of a change in the way air smells – even though I know that doesn’t really make any sense. The air is cool and today when I came home, just all of a sudden, the grass in front of my apartment was carpeted by the shed dry needles of the large evergreen standing there. Leaves have been changing color for a while now, and the colors of the mountained horizon have been changing as well. The sun has been going down earlier and nights are much crisper. (So I’ll be dressing warmly tonight on the observatory deck!)
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In a month, I am moving to Colorado. In 6 months, I’m getting married.
I have no rights to this picture whatsoever.
I can expect that I will never return to my childhood home to live ever again. And I can’t take everything with me. In fact, I can’t take anything with me that Cecilia, my little blue Honda Civic, can’t cart 2000+ miles across the country with me.
So, after much delaying, I have begun the task of trying to purge all of the things that I don’t need, beginning of course, with the obvious and necessary task of deleting music I collected in college that I will never listen to.
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My relationship to India and Indians is something that has always made me… uncomfortable, mostly because I don’t really have one.
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Like most of the developed civilizations in the universe, the Manuan race rose up out of the jungles of their home planet, Yortha, through the formation of a society whose members held specialized functions. To put it into plainer terms, some Manuans farmed, some hunted, others worked metal and stone, and some sought and preserved knowledge for the advancement of Manuan civilization.
Now obviously, keeping knowledge is a useful task for the advancement of any primitive civilization. If nothing else, it allows a society to learn which things are good to eat and which things are not. But Manuans valued knowledge for it’s own sake, drawn by insatiable curiosity to store it up in large houses, built solely for holding knowledge, in all of the central cities, next to their stores of grain. Continue reading
As someone who went to school in Rhode Island but was raised in South Carolina, I’ve had a lot of cause to drive up and down most of the length of I-95. Having recently just made such a journey, I thought I would write down some of the things that I noticed while driving.
I have 2 favorite signs on I-95.
One is i
n Maryland and the towns it names are “North East” and “Rising Sun.” When I passed that sign a few days ago, I considered what it might be like to be someone running away from her life, stopping in a town to start a new life, begging a job, living out of her car if necessary until she had gathered the necessary capital to live elsewhere, just because she found the exit sign on I-95 somewhat interesting or inspirational. Continue reading
I have a friend whose uncle is an Alaskan flower farmer.
I have often found the idea of this uncle intriguing, in particular because flowers have no 
practical value to humankind, beyond the purpose served in pollination. But flowers that we cultivate to grow in front of our homes, for florists to sell, have no purpose at all – except for beauty.
And yet, somehow that is enough. It is justification enough for a man to devote his life to growing and tending these plants, and justification enough for the thousands of purchasers that support his life’s work.
We don’t ever seem to have to explain to each other why there is an industry around something as impractical as flowers. We don’t have to explain why we pause for the sunset or for a snatch of beautiful music.
Somehow, it is universal and axiomatic, this understanding we all have of the common yearning in all our souls.
‘In SC, Kirk and I were sitting on a floating dock with our feet in a creek maybe 1/4 mile wide, watching the sun set. As the sky darkened, these tiny bats came out one by one from the trees behind the marsh far to our
right.
It seemed they were all impelled to fly across the creek for food – directly into a strong wind. Tiny as they were, though they beat their wings furiously, they sometimes seemed hardly to move and occasionally disappeared, only to reappear a few meters back in the air, having recovered control after being tumbled over. And once righted, they persisted in moving forward again, back into the wind, as if it were just a matter of course, and one by one, eventually made it across, though pushed sideways and oft buffeted and tumbled.
Watching these bats just made me think about how amazing it is that this isn’t amazing, that forward is the only direction to go and that starvation from fear of seeking nourishment is just as sure a death as drowning.’
-an editted excerpt from a letter I wrote recently
Today, I left my childhood home of Charleston, SC, where I had returned for the 4th of July, to come back to Providence, RI, where I currently reside. I boarded a plane at 6AM and arrived in Providence at 10AM with a flight change in Virginia.
Every time I travel, some part of me is amazed at how quickly we can go from one place to another. The journey to California by airplane has been reduced to 6-7 hours of air conditioned, well lit, beverage and snack supplied sitting. It completely blows my mind that 150 years ago, that same journey was
the journey of a lifetime, a dangerous journey of several months, which hundreds died traversing.
I sometimes imagine that Benjamin Franklin or John Adams is riding with me in my head as a silent passenger and I play the disenchanted host, smiling at the predictable incredulity as I go from the home of Rutledge to the home of Adams in the space of a morning, while I comfortably read an airport purchased novel, ignoring the view of my window seat, of clouds that no colonial man ever saw from above.
