the shuttle launches today, actually in 44 minutes. at 9:39 houston time. as is customary in my office, those of us who aren’t in the control center will slowly meander to the conference room and watch on nasa tv. we’ll be 300 feet from mission control, but we’ll watch the same broadcast that any joe anywhere in the country can watch. that thought always makes me laugh.
so last night i went running with a local celebrity. not intentionally, but still. and “celebrity” is perhaps not the right word. anyway. it was cold so i decided to run on the treadmill in the workout room. i’d been running for about 10 minutes when he came in and got on the treadmill next to me. he said hi, and started up a conversation, asked if running was a new years resolution. i laughed and told him that my resolution was actually to just keep running, and that i’d started about a year ago. turns out he’s just trying to get into it, for fitness and stuff. anyway, we chatted for a bit, and when i finished my 3 miles, i left. it was interesting, i guess. one of those situations where morbid curiosity sort of takes over. that, and well, i was going to run 3 miles anyway, so…
i got back all sweaty to a phone call from a friend who needed to borrow my scanner and cd-burner. this would have been incredibly simple if i hadn’t just updated to windows xp, and therefore hadn’t gotten around to reinstalling the scanner and cd-writer software. and the installation cds i had are too old to have xp-compatible drivers on them. oops. luckily, hewlett-packard puts all their drivers online. wahoo! the scanner was installed in seconds, but the cd-burner proved more difficult. somehow it had tried to install itself, but didn’t have the right drivers for xp. so i had to delete all the old ones, download the new ones, restart my computer about a zillion times in an attempt to get xp to recognize the “new” hardware, and finally just install the drivers manually. but it did eventually work, so that is good.
tonight i have to pack, because tomorrow i go to france! wahoo! i’m soooo excited.
here’s a line from a conversation last night that made me smile. when discussing john mayer, carter said “and his lyrics are like… the blues. it’s like jazz, but like poppy jazz, but like H Johnson meets the Gap.” h johnson meets the gap. i like that.
(10:15 a.m.)
words words words. i drink them in as if they were water, and yet sometimes they hit me like rocks. there are things i wanted that i didn’t get. there are things i wanted that other people got instead. and in the end, there is nothing i can do about it and i know that, and amazingly i’ve even come to terms with that. things weren’t meant to be the way i imagined when i was young. people weren’t meant to be that way either. but in brief fiery dying flashes, it still hurts.
i need to be in france right now. i need something unconditional.
the launch went well. it’s funny; even a casual observer would be able to tell exactly what goes on during a launch if they were walking the hallway during those 8 minutes. at about 2 minutes, there is a collective sigh of relief when the solid rocket boosters jettison. then a bit after 8 minutes, the silence is broken by a lot of chatter and the halls fill with people leaving the rooms with tvs and heading back to their offices. i watched from greg’s office. the last time i watched tv in greg’s office was september 11. time flies, and yet it doesn’t.
launch days are the most inspiring days to work here.
(1:38 p.m.)
i went to the dentist over lunch break today. lovely. it’s a new dentist, of course, as i’ve only been in houston for six months, so today they did the whole x-ray/intial checkup thing. told me everything looks fine except…my upper wisdom teeth. they’re impacted. they’re pressing on my molars. they might start to cause decay, blah blah blah. basically, he thinks they need to come out, and when i go back in two weeks for my first cleaning with him, he’s going to recommend an oral surgeon to go talk to about it.
this is not what i wanted to hear.
(3:46 p.m.)
i’m too stupid to work for nasa. geez.
