Tractus

I love astronomy.

It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.

Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.

Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.

We're seeing into the past.

Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.

Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?

The downside to the whoosh

I spent this afternoon with both my father and my mother, in the same room. They, jointly, told me that I need to shape up. They're going to treat me punatively, for the first time in a while.

Oh, backtrack: my economics teacher called home on Monday. I had a 35. That was, as you might expect, a bit of an issue. I dodged the bullet of super late papers and got the stuff in, and now that I'm out of the fire, they talked to me about it.

Long and short of it: they're going to be checking my homework every now and then. And, (and this is the worst of it,) they're not letting me do stagecrew for this coming quarter. I hope the company will let me help out on the nights of, and that they'll let me go to the cast parties.

Life

I found out this morning that a friend's mother died. Her father died when she was young, so now she has her grandparents and an assortment of older brothers. She's also one of the last families in our area that owns a farm, so she's always working, and she rarely has time for fun or activities (she used to be on stage crew, but she hasn't been in years because she never has time). She's a great, sweet person, with a great sense of humor; basically an all around good human being.

I don't understand life sometimes.

When I say 'whoosh' I mean 'whoosh'

I've had so many waking hours this week, I'm confused as to how I managed to not finish my homework. I finished the so-called 'important' stuff at ten last night, but the missing assignments will add up unless I get them to my various teachers by two o'clock. Which probably isn't going to happen. So it'll have to be more like five this evening. Thank god everything left is to teachers that actually check email.