I’m sitting cross legged on a rolled up yoga mat on the floor of my attic bedroom. There is an ancient laptop that looks a bit like a tank, open in front of me. It used to be my dad’s, I think? Like. Thousands of years ago. But it still works, and that’s all I really need.
In order to run the next online lab for my Astronomy class, I need to download the most recent version of Excel. I haven’t actually done this before, so we’re teaching ourselves how. On the spot. If I don’t figure out how to do this by tomorrow, then I won’t be able to work on this lab, which would suck. Royally.
This is fine, I can totally figure out how to do this.
Meanwhile I am so glad that I randomly decided to take Astronomy as a general education credit. It’s so cool.
Last week we downloaded a program called Celestia and got to take a simulated tour of the fucking universe. It was beautiful, and fascinating, and the scale of things puts life into perspective.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. If you were to compress all of that time down into the span of a single year, all of human history would fit into the last 30 seconds of December 31st.
I’m sitting cross legged on a rolled up yoga mat on the floor of my attic bedroom, just south of a little town full of right wing religious conservatives who like to play golf. The town is situated in amoung a few lakes scratched north to south across the landscape, as by the fingers of an enormous hand. The lakes are situated in the upper righthand side of a continent that takes up a wide swath of a northern hemisphere of a roughly spherical planet that is mostly covered with water. The planet is hurtling in circles around a flaming ball of heat and light. This solar system of which my planet is a part is about two thirds of the way out from the center of a galaxy, populated will billions of similar stars.
If the sun was the size of a grapefruit and was situated in Washington DC, then the nearest other sun/grapefruit would be somewhere out in California.
On this scale, the earth is roughly the size of the tip of a ball point pen.
Philosophy says that there is no way to verify the objective nature of reality other than to start at this place where most of our subjective realities appear to overlap pretty well, and go from there.
Science says that even though it might be impossible to fully understand everything in the time that’s been given us, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try.
And the latest fucking version of fucking Excel is taking fucking forever to download, in my little attic bedroom, and somehow, miraculously, this matters.
It’s astounding.
Somehow it’s possible to feel happiness when one book out of millions of books is written. Somehow it’s possible to feel a hundred complicated feelings, listening to the words Malcolm X. Somehow it’s possible to be warm in the confines of a wooden house and freeze your ass off out in the snow when life is so impossibly unlikely in this cosmos and it’s beautiful
And I like it here.
From my attic to your place, wherever that might be, I hope it’s a good Monday.