Lost in Space!

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It's like the Cheshire Cat!

It’s like the Cheshire Cat!

My friends in high school used to make fun of me because I was always staring at the moon. We’d be walking around  at night and I’d stop in my tracks and stare. If you stare long enough, the fuzzy light that surrounds it will sharpen and you can almost make out some of the grooves, the details. IT’S THE MOON GUYS. Whenever I would look for too long, it’s like something would short circuit in my brain, krrzzzt, because I started to move outward and away from the moon, and think about floating farther and farther and…..AHHHHHH.

Listen to this episode of The Truth while you read on and open all the links in new windows. It’s a radio drama imagining what it might’ve been like had Apollo 11 crashed on the moon. It includes a speech written by William Safire for Richard Nixon called “In Event of Moon Disaster.”

“That’s what you want in life. You want to feel relevant.” No lie, I wept like a baby girl while watching this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about the most astonishing fact about the universe. Make sure you watch it with the lights off. Ideally, wear headphones. Then cry your face off because we are all connected, we are not small, be nice to your mom, etc.

As a kid, I thought I really wanted those glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars that you put all over your ceiling and stare up at at night. But then I got them, and their sickly neon green shine was an insult to the complicated beauty of the universe (actual thought, word for word, from my 7-year-old brain, obviously). I hadn’t thought much about those stickers since then, but while looking up at my ceiling the other day, I noticed these beautiful, phosphorescent speckles. It looked like the universe splattered on my ceiling. I pretended I was camping. I want to thank the previous renters for loading up the ceiling texture crud with sparkly bits.

ALSO: NASA pointed a camera at nothing for 10 years and then BOOM, OTHER GALAXIES. This video made me krrzzt as well.

We are all star dust.

 

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