Clark

Well, I had fun.

I also had no time to work on my Hebrew, but whatever. Could've gone to a Hebrew class, but then I probably wouldn't have gotten home until about now.

Clark's very nice, although the city of Worcester, which it's very firmly embedded in, is not so nice. The Provost isn't a very good speaker, but what he had to say was interesting. The astronomy class that I sat in on was a bit of a joke, as I knew everything they had to say about quasars, dark matter, and dark energy. Either that or Mr. A, Brett, and I all have very in-depth discussion.

But speaking of the astronomy class! There are four people from camp that attend Clark, and one friend from NFTY (North American Federation of Temple Youth). Of course, I was avidly trying to reach Jeremy, the NFTY-ite, the entire time, but he never picked up his phone.

In the astronomy class, I spent the whole time staring at the back of the head of this one guy who looked so familiar. After the class ended, he stood up, stretched, and turned around, and I immediately went "Aaron!" He looked up, and we went, "Woah, small world. Hi." He showed me to the building I was meeting my dad in and offered to answer any questions, as he's a tour guide.

Then I spoke to the Hillel director, and while talking to him, he pointed out the window and said, "Oh, there's Dan." Dan and I worked together on the Bonim (entering fourth and fifth grade) show, Peter Pan, this summer. I face-palmed a little, on the inside, and continued the conversation, as I couldn't just walk out. When I looked up again to go find him, he disappeared, and I was very sad. But then he was ten inches away, giving me a hug. Fantastic.

The Hillel director couldn't remember the name of the last Eisner-ite, though he thought she was Israeli. I, for the life of me, could not recall a single Israeli at Eisner who attends American Uni, so I was a little confused, but that's okay.

Later in the conversation, I saw someone very, very familiar walk by. Someone Eisner-y, and...Israeli. Only not. I thought she was Israeli at camp, and I was embarrassed by my assumptions there, so I blocked it. I called to her retreating back, "Yael!" She turned around slowly, and we both went, "Well. I'm confused. Hi. Random."

Good times.

Of course, Clark has more positive attributes than merely the presence of three Eisner-ites that I ran into, another Eisner-ite and a NFTY-ite. But I don't particularly feel like detailing them now, since I've already run longer than most of my other posts.

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?