The Final Frontier

One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting on the couch with my mom watching the news coverage of the Challenger explosion. I was too young to fully grasp what was going on (I was a few weeks short of my 4th birthday at the time), but I was fascinated by the prospect of a spaceship.

I got a star chart for my birthday when I was 5. When I looked up into the night sky, I decided that one day I would go there. When my classmates would make fun of me and say that being an astronaut was only for boys, I pointed to my childhood hero, Sally Ride, to prove to them that girls could be astronauts, too.

When Discovery launched in 1988, my mom let me stay home from school to see the launch on TV. Throughout the rest of my childhood and early adulthood, I would watch every shuttle launch. I learned everything I could about outer space. I loved going to planetariums, and I loved looking through my dad's telescope.

When it became clear that I was too short to be an astronaut, I decided I would be an astronomer instead. By the time college rolled around, I had changed my mind and decided to become a lawyer, but I was still fascinated by space. I worked in the astronomy lab on campus and was a teaching assistant in the introductory astronomy class.

While I was a TA, my class was following the experiments onboard the shuttle Columbia. I remember waking up on the day it was supposed to land, turning on the radio, and hearing the tragic news that the shuttle had burned up on reentry. The mood in class that week was somber as we considered the sacrifices that people have made for the advancement of human knowledge.

Around this time, civilian space flight was starting to look like a viable possibility for more than just a few super rich people who could afford to pay the Russians millions of dollars. I decided that one day, when the price gets lower, I would still live my dream of going to the stars.

When the space shuttle fleet was retired last year, it felt like the end of an era. Then this summer, Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong both passed away. Today was the final flight of the final space shuttle, Endeavour, before it goes to its resting place in a museum. The shuttle did a flyover of the SF Bay Area, so I walked outside to say goodbye to such a huge piece of my childhood.

I took a few pictures:

Endeavour over Mountain View, CA

Endeavour over Mountain View, CA

I hope that even though there will be no more space shuttle flights, that we will still continue to reach for the heavens, so that the sacrifices of the crews of Challenger and Columbia will not have been in vain.

Ad astra!

Wanderlust

I'm feeling restless.

I'm torn in two directions. On the one hand, I've never stayed in one place for very long. On the other hand, I yearn for permanence.

When I was a kid, I moved around a lot. By the time I was in 5th grade, I had gone to 5 different elementary schools. It was pretty miserable always being the new kid. As an adult, I've moved every year or two. I've always stayed in the Bay Area, but I've lived in multiple cities.

The Bay Area is my home, but I'm starting to feel like there's no real reason for me to stay here anymore. When it comes right down to it, the only reason I'm still here is because my job is here. I'm in a job that pays the bills (barely) but doesn't make full use of my skills. It's not a terrible job, by any means. It's a pretty inoffensive way to earn some money, but it's not what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I'm not responsible for anyone but myself, so I have the freedom to go anywhere without having to consult anyone else. It's so tempting to pack all of my belongings into my car and head out into the great unknown to start a new life.

Maybe I've spent so much time moving around that I don't know how to stay in one place. Or maybe I just haven't found the right place yet. Or maybe I'm really looking for a metaphysical place, not a physical place. Maybe if I had a fulfilling job I wouldn't spend so much time daydreaming about the green grass on the other side of the fence.

If I get a job teaching at a law school, the chances are pretty good that I'll end up moving. But that's at least a year or two away. I'm not sure what to do until then.