saturday, july 14

I remember a hill, steep and dressed in pale floppy weeds, stretching down and down so that when you stood looking straight ahead there was no horizon, only sky.

I was there, looking straight ahead. somewhere below my little sister's towhead had disappeared in pursuit of the grownups, and I was there alone for the first time with two old friends who had become disarmingly large since the last time I had seen them. that had been a day years earlier, when they stopped their loaded-up car at the foot of our driveway on their way south down that road for the last time, a week before our own moving date. our families left together but in different directions and so upon our reunion at their new home I was surprised, stunned really, to see how we had continued to get older.

we looked at each other, and then we started to run. it felt impossible for my legs to move fast enough to keep up with gravity, but they did, and it was like flying. arms outstretched and sky everywhere and laughing friends in the periphery, all flying, soaring.

they were here tonight, and we are once again too large and racing in different directions, but we still laugh together. it wasn't as awkward as I expected.
23:49 ++

friday, july 13

yes, I did just agree to meet my friends at eight a.m. on a saturday...

you see how much I love my swatties?

also, the new computer sits behind me, still ensconsed in plastic and styrofoam and cardboard, waiting. meanwhile this computer is being remarkably cooperative. bittersweet swansong. I still haven't figured out what to do with the eight years' worth of correspondence, not to mention all those angsty unsent emails...
22:47 ++

today I live in the futureworld where corruption is king and humanity is stuck wallowing in its own filth, like a neal stephenson book but with daylight instead of cybertech.

cool and breezy but still the sky is too bright to look at, and the asphalt is decorated with sharp dark shadows despite the huge clouds hanging above, glowing white around the edges but deep wet grey underneath. air smells like dirty chemicals, drugs and booze, pollution, poverty. even at eleven-thirty this morning the common was dotted with homeless people sleeping under stained and reeking bedrolls, strung out punks and high school alchies, instead of the usual playground bound toddler camp groups, with their little herds all dressed in yellow pinnies for easy identification and roundup.

it's garbage day in my part of the city, and as I rode to work the trucks were about halfway through with their rounds. some streets were running with greeny-white spillage from leaking trucks and sloppy tosses, and more than once I felt it spatter against my ankles while I closed my eyes and held my breath to avoid any sort of inimate with one of the swarming, buzzing flies. it was like trying to run between raindrops, though, and they smacked against my skin like little plagueish hailstones. empty-still-dirty plastic bins and barrells all along the sidewalks, rolling back and forth in the wind to make artificial thunder gave way to overflowing cans and piles of shiny garbage bags. I had to swerve to avoid the wind-caught contents of recycling bins: empty cereal boxes, plastic jugs with just a bit of souring milk still clinging to the walls, rinsed-out soupcans and the half-detatched tops with edges still sharp from being sliced by the can openers, all dancing in front of me and across the street to slide under the beds of roaring stinking trucks.

sirens, too, and squealing brakes and skidding tires (mine once, sideways at the bottom of a little hill, but mostly belonging to cars and buses). two people pulled over in the course of my twelve-minute ride, one who had been driving right behind me and so I thought I was the offender, but it turned out to be a little red car that had run the last two lights at twenty miles above the speed limit. behind them the city bus was forced to stop, unable to creep between the parked cars on the opposite side and the officer standing at the driver's side window, and so the intersections became gridlocked with cars at thirty miles below the speed limit.

when I did something blatantly illegal, jumping the median to cross a two-lane in the wrong direction, in full view of two patrol cars, nothing happened except that I felt guilty and shaved a few minutes off my travel time. in the old burying ground a little boy was throwing rocks at squirrels and a larger boy was smoking and still the air smelled like chlorine.

I brought my lunch (sushi, homemade) to work packed in a lunchbag bag, which is to say that it's plastic and on the outside in red and blue it says 100 lunch bags flat bottom paper bags with the shaw's quality since 1860 seal and money back guarantee printed in a little white box, because all the flat-bottomed paper bags were gone.

also, it's friday the thirteenth.
12:47 ++

thursday, july 12

the home depot wants you to spend your three hundred dollars on home improvements. I thought that was a bit creepy (not to mention a weird advertising strategy -- maybe you wouldn't spend money in our store normally, but now that you've got some extra cash why not give it a shot?) until I found their energy-saving section. if a bunch of people spend their rebates making the united states more ecofriendly, that would actually be a pretty good thing.

or you could give it away... twice even!
17:22 ++

looking down, I see my heartbeat in the rhythmic pulses of my navy cotton shirt-folds, and it is only when I start to get dizzy that I realize I've been holding my breath to preserve the stillness that lets me watch how something inside me changes the flow of photons around me. it beats and shadows change shape and I can feel it all the way down to my toes. so light and still so entangled in everything.

it makes me feel rather like a butterfly.
15:21 ++

wednesday, july 11

I watched the swas press conference on a freakishly large projection screen in the auditorium; several people here are involved with the project in one way or another (the all-oir email encouraged us to come "watch gary get grilled!"), so there was a sizable audience.

it's pretty cool stuff. the basic idea: in a solar system relatively similar (although thought to be larger in most respects) to our own, the star is nearing the end of its life and is getting very big and very luminous. the increased energy is vaporizing the icy bodies located at the edges of the solar system, effectively producing a whole fleet of comets that are releasing lots and lots of water into the interstellar medium.

that's cool because, well, it just is. but even if you're not captivated by the havoc wreaked by dying stars, I'm sure you know how important water is in the big picture of life. comet expert people think that the water in our oceans was deposited by comets during the early stages of planet formation. this is the first system that's been detected (besides our own) with water coming from discrete, individual sources outside the star itself. (in fact, the amount of detected water vapor is ten thousand times the amount that the star itself would be expected to produce.) maybe it will become part of a cloud that will form a next-generation solar system, maybe it will freeze into a belt object, and maybe some of it will get sent on a collision course with a baby planet and eventually end up as a molecule in an ocean, or a person.

in six billion years, the earth's oceans and the ice in saturn's rings and all the water in the rest of our solar system will be vaporized and blasted out into space. maybe some alien astronomers will be watching.

I am continually intrigued by the contrast between scientific and casual language. we talk about photoevaporation and red giants, but the headline describes "sizzling comets around a dying star," as if the whole thing were some sort of gigantic apocalyptic cooking experiment. we giggled when gary tried to soften the jargon-blow of "signal to noise" and "main sequence" and "integration time" with apologetic "as we say" and "so called" phrases, and again when he compared the satellite to a "a car radio with five preset stations, but in orbit."

I think being able to explain something in conversational english is just as important as being able to describe it technically, because I think science is for sharing and there should be absolutely no prerequisite for being allowed to think and talk about that stuff. still, I was struck by the differences in the questions from people working for science publications and those who were sent by general-audience newspapers. the reporter from science asked about alternate hypotheses to possibly explain the presence of so much water vapor around a carbon star and wanted to know what sort of follow-up experiments could be done for verification. the guy from usa today wanted the team to describe the "ah-ha! moment" when they had first discovered water. (the "moment" lasted about 170 hours, as they watched the line on their compositional spectrograph grow while the surrounding noise shrank.) and I will admit with just a touch of embarassment that I laughed along with everyone else when the washington post reporter asked what would have happened to the things living on the comets, if there were any such creatures. I guess it's good pr for nasa and astronomy in general if the usa today types go home and write something that random american number seven thousand thinks is cool, but are they doing a larger disservice to science as a whole by assuming that simpler language must by necessity describe simpler concepts?

I can't even begin to count the number of people who've told me that it would be way more useful for me to study astrology (and that's not even taking into account those who think astronomy is astrology), or who've asked me what I'm doing this summer only to decide it's going to be over their heads as soon as I say "astrophysics" and promptly tune me out. science is not fundamentally ungraspable! sure, the people who actually do science can be a bit arrogant or in love with their own overgrown vocabularies, but it's not as if anyone was born knowing what "spectroscopy" means. big words are just shorthand for ideas, and the brilliance of language is that it can express one idea in thousands of different ways.

besides. if I can understand astrophysics, so can pretty much everyone. this is knowable, shareable stuff. and everyone needs to realize that: the scientists, the press, and especially the people.
15:37 ++

(I am dumb and I forgot that netscape doesn't like inline images with double-spaced text. so... see cut & paste if you haven't already.)
00:08 ++

tuesday, july 10

exhaustion feels like this: eyelashes painted with lead, blood that travels at the speed of snails and the echo of a half-hearted pulse in your fingertips a second behind the beat, cotton instead of myelin, cacti taking root at the bone and pushing weakly against the inside layer of skin, never enough oxygen.

the only vegan food in the vending machine downstairs is plastic-packaged planters peanuts (circumstantial alliteration is always more ridiculous somehow than intentional alliteration), and while it's not the sort of thing I usually eat I thought having something to keep my fingers and my mouth busy might also help keep my mind busy, or at least conscious. at forty cents an ounce they probably cost me more money than I earned in the time it took to eat them, but considering that I'm being paid to eat peanuts and run a bunch of computer programs it's not such a bad deal.

you know these peanuts -- they come in a little plastic pouch that's decorated with primary colors and an eerily complacent-looking mr.peanut. maybe it's the colors, maybe the greasy-shine coating the package interior, or maybe it's just the brand name, but they always remind me of a moment from the spring of my senior year in high school. I was riding my bike home from harvard square, coasting uphill to stop at a traffic light, and I looked over my shoulder at the people on the sidewalk next to me. there was an old woman on the bus stop bench, wearing several shaggy layers of green and grey as if she were a tree being slowly enveloped by spanish moss, sitting hunched over with her eyes directed towards her lap. she was clutching a single-serving pouch of planter's peanuts with both rice-paper-fragile hands, looking into its open top, maybe because the meaning of life was hidden inside. or maybe it was just the last food for the day. but between the weathered, unpainted slats on the bench and her faded clothes and her grey hair that seemed to have only slightly less color than her skin, I suddenly felt as if the shiny red pouch had captured all the brightness in the world to horde, leaving the rest of us to covet it while we all turned grey ourselves.

so I remembered that and I ate my peanuts and ran my computer programs, and I think I can only pretend to know what exhaustion is.
17:39 ++

and now it's time for the not-so-daily astronews roundup!

dust storm swallows half of mars. that must be inconvenient for the martians, not to mention painful for the dust storm!

hubble snaps picture of remarkable double cluster. don't let the stupid title fool you -- it's a beautiful picture. (and sort of the equivalent of a picture with a ninety-year-old holding a nine-month-old. except that stellar material undergoes a much more dramatic transformation than humans do over the course of its existence. actually now that I think about it, maybe it's more like a mummy holding a nine-month-old. creepy.)

a stellar apocalypse aids the hunt for life on other worlds. now that's more like it! sensationalism, death, life, and aliens! the webcast that will actually explain this is happening tomorrow; it might be one worth watching.

rabi needs to get back to work! righto.
13:52 ++

in the stairwell this morning there was a gigantic roll of paper towels. really, it looked just like the bounty hanging above our kitchen sink, except that it was as tall as I am. (that's over five feet, for those of you who may have reason to think I'm some sort of midget. although I don't know why you would think that.)

what is it about size that fascinates us? a normal toothbrush is so mundane as to be nearly invisible, but a tiny one will induce squealing sessions and a gigantic one will enthrall even a baby, especially when it's accompanied by a similarly gigantic plastic molar. is it because we are entertained by the idea of properly sized people to go along with the miniatures and the monsters?

what do you suppose one does with a five-foot-tall paper towel anyway?
13:17 ++

monday, july 9

I love med students. they're all so charmingly attentive and inept.

there were little chocolate-colored twins tripping over their yellow cartoon-printed onesies in the radiology waiting room and babbling happily to each other in not-quite-english. their parents were sitting together on the pink vinyl couch, leaning against each other, watching with eyes worn soft around the edges from weariness and care. behind me was a boy in a wheelchair, hands cocked at funny fluttery angles, saliva glistening on his chin, who laughed and twittered and bubbled at me when I wiggled my fingers at him. the skinny girl with bifocals and a curly blond ponytail caught my gaze with hers for just a moment when she stood up to join the technician who had called her name, gathering the back of her gown into one hand to keep it from flapping open and crossing her other arm across her chest as if she could escape the indignities of nascent adolescence by hiding inside herself. have a fun photo shoot, I said, and she blushed, smiling.

when you look at hospitals from the outside you imagine them full of patients, but inside we are all just people.
18:15 ++

it's oddly difficult to break old internet habits when you spend most of the weekend in front of the computer. so many times I found my fingers halfway through typing a url before my brain caught up and stopped them. but it worked, I think, because I remembered why I like it here.

tired again and the fading green needle-bruise inside my elbow reminds me that sleep and renewal are my only remaining weapons, labwork having surely been processed and faxed and filed by now. (I always wonder what happens to my blood after they're done with it; as it flows into the tubes in spurting time with my heartbeat it seems too vibrant and rich to end up as something so undignified as hazardous waste shrouded in plastic and biohazard signs.) and so lilac-colored cotton and sleep and dreams are to be my next dance partners, if indeed this is all a dance, awkward as it sometimes is...

but I wanted to say thank you to everyone and to tell you that yes, I am happy.
01:22 ++