2021-12-02 - 5:19 p.m.
The dreams I have again and again are about little anxieties. In one, I'm about to finish my graduate program but have signed up for three or four classes that I just never bothered to go to and I'm scared to look at my grades for fear I'll have to go at it all for another year. In another, with even lower stakes, I'm walking into a gym and want to check out a basketball but have forgotten my driver's license for the trade. These little fears, standing in for our bigger fears.
I've lately gotten into space shit. I read this history of the early 20th-century telescope world, the chain-smoking and nervous white dudes who were trying to outshine the others by making more out of the tiny wobbles they could spot in the skies. Youtube is a wonderfully amateur repository for creaky space videos, full of characterless narrators talking over misspellings about how big, how many, how far, how how how. Space is all about bigness, muchness, cold, heat, density, scarcity. It's endlessly fascinating to me, even as so much of it will never be touched by me, or you. I rewatched the movie Contact for the first time since it was made. Funny how the part that most affected me was the little love story in there, how the guy pissed off the girl with a little comment that struck bone, how they never forgot each other, how they kept circling around the other like, dare I say, binary stars.
0 comments so far
