Serendipity

[hederahelix]

This morning when I got up late, I stumbled into my already roasting living room (am still so ready for August temperatures to be over, and our heat wave is nothing compared with some of the heat waves in the country right now) when a little voice in my head said, "Ivy, turn on the news

Comments

[ctbn60]

WOW WELCOME TO THE LOVELY MAC WORLD.

DID THEY SEND YOU YOUR SECRET PASSWORD YET? *GGG*

I think you will LOVE it once you get it. Let me know!!!

[hederahelix]

I'm sure I will love it. Dude, at this point I'll be happy to have a machine that will let me watch video clips without slowing to a crawl.

Also, it's shiny and pretty, and not Dell.

[kellyfaboo]

Now you will go "Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?"

[hederahelix]

You are so right. That's pretty much exactly where I am.

and I'm irrationally annoyed that FedEx isn't telling me minute by minute.

And now, your computer is *still sitting* in the cargo hold of a plane en route from Shanghai, just like it was 23 seconds ago, you neurotic twit.

come on, wouldn't we all love snarky tracking software?

[kellyfaboo]

"Where is it? The same place it was a minute ago when you asked the same question."

[strangerian]

I'm remembering now not the first moon landing -- which I saw on TV, being That Old -- but the first orbital flights by U.S. astronauts, which I saw on TV in my grade-school classrooms (being That Old, too). It was very much a big deal for everybody. So much of Trek as we know it is the weird-fantasy plots and the unexpectedly memorable characters that spawned a subculture, but the title sequence and "space the final frontier" genuinely came out of the headlines, the Zeitgeist. Later I learned more of the political history behind it (and acquired a pin honoring the first *woman* in space, which is in Russian), but the expansion of the visible, thinkable universe happened anyway.

[hederahelix]

I sort of get irrationally nostalgic about the whole optimism of that period. I remember being a kid and thinking about how far the shuttle had come from the Apollo and Mercury rockets. And, you know, living where I did, I went to Huntsville and stood beside models of the things, and my grade school classes watched the shuttle take off.

I remember thinking, wow, finally, civilians going into space, and then it went so wrong, and, well, then I grew up. and I met people who, you know, worked for NASA, and heard their cynicism, and we all saw how things got mismanaged, and it became clear that if civilians went into space in my present lifetime, it would be because they were rich, and none of that was the hopeful, optimistic, better than we were expansionism that space always seemed to represent, and I was sad.

But every so often this little ray of hope somewhere pops up and makes me, for a moment, remember the good.