Combustion

Recently, a lot of things have happened. Steve diagnosed me with vitamin D deficiency, by accident. He asked if it was possible, I said maybe, then we changed the subject. Later, I looked it up and found that mood can be greatly affected by vitamin D, which can also work towards the prevention of acne (which I've been struggling with since October). And, my recent craving for mushrooms which are high in vitamin D also points in the same direction. Steve didn't know any of the signs, he just asked intuitively. When I asked him about it, he said it just popped into his head. It wasn't a getting-ready-for-med-school moment, it was just a moment.

I'm taking vitamin d supplements now, and it somewhat improves my outlook, and the look of my face. But there are still days, winter blues days. Today is the day I would have gone out and gotten all my errands done. But my brother has my mom's car, she has mine, and I have my brother's which has no brakes. I'm pretty much house-bound in a snow-covered town in the sticks. And I'm sick and tired of looking for jobs on the internet.

I'm left with my thoughts, which aren't very good. I end up taking sides when I sit and think about the situation some people are in. This whole situation happened to two different sets of people in my life, and in both cases I have to disagree with the side who'd be most offended if they knew I disagreed.

A friend of mine started a blog, and tried to explain why he did it. I think that he summed it up very nicely with this sentence: "A means to explode and remain in text." For me, its not a real explosion, its more like the small continuous explosion that occurs in a combustion engine. 955 blog entries and I still have not finished exploding.

On Monday morning, at 4:10 am my alarm clock went off. I got out of bed and went to the computer, where I was joined by my brother and Steve. At 4:14 am, we watched the space shuttle Endeavor launch. At 4:16 am, we went to the south-facing window in my closet and knelt on the floor to wait for Endeavor to pass by. At 4:20, my brother began to doubt his calculations and went to the computer to check the flight path. At 4:22, Steve and I spotted a bright star traveling across the sky and started yelling for my brother. He did manage to get back in time, and we followed its path from due south to due east. At 4:24, the NASA announcer on the streaming video declared that the shuttle was now in orbit, and we all could go back to sleep. I was reminded of the 6th grade, when I just knew I was going to be an astronaut some day regardless of my opinion of math and physics. The whole junior high spent months preparing for a field trip to a mock space station, where each person works as part of mission control, or as the flight team. It was probably the best field trip because instead of learning facts, we learned skills, communication and teamwork. I miss those days of dreaming. Now, I can't dream, I just have to pick a profession and chase it.

I still love to watch the stars though.