Total Eclispe of the Blog

By 10 am tomorrow I will have kicked off my Junior year at Huntingdon. With only a year to completely get my life in order before I become a senior and start applying for grad schools, or not, I wanted to take a look back on a career choice I thought I would surely be pursuing by now. An astronaut.

I climbed a Japanese maple tree every night as a kid, so I could feel closer to the stars. In the 4th grade, the tree was devoured from the inside by wood beetles and I watched helplessly as it was cut down. We moved to a new house and my brother and I got to pick our own rooms. I explained to my family that I was afraid of one of the rooms because it contained the door to the attic, and there is no way in hell I was staying in there. While this is true, the other room had a window with roof access. I quickly upgraded my stargazing spot.

That fall, a dream of mine came true. I was going to Space Camp.

Me: Bottom Right

 
While I don't really remember what happened that fateful week (We were all given high doses of Traumazine* - a now illegal drug that sweeps the memory of anything out of the ordinary), I do remember the cafeteria being excellent. Also, I fell in love with a brown headed girl who looked like Winnie Copper off of the Wonder Years.

She could have looked like this, but there is no telling with Traumazine.

Out of a group of 8, I don't think I said one word to her besides the usual "Mission Control, this is Lt. Francis. We are experiencing problems with the External Tank. Request to detach early in case of further malfunction." My request was denied. Even though we were reading from a mission script, I do believe she could have let me down a bit easier.

After Space Camp, I glued a glow-in-the-dark solar system to my ceiling and painstakingly recreated constellations, with Sagittarius being directly above my bed. It's my favorite you see. Some of you infidels might refer to it as a "teapot", but it's the direct opposite of a teapot. Yes, the opposite of a teapot is a centaur.

My Centaur Swayze tat

 

 

One year for Halloween I dressed up in a M & M costume and berated people who did not recognize that I was really dressed up as Pluto, my favorite planet. The taped paper signed had fallen off both sides of my soft candy shell, so I had to spend the rest of the night looking like a completely normal 19 year old.

I knew the requirements to become an astronaut. 20/20 colored vision, smart as a whip, peak physical condition, and previous experience as a pilot. Slowly over the years I strayed from the path of the latter 3 requirements, and in some cases (The physical one), I never really had that going for me in the first place.

My grandfather was a fighter pilot in the Korean War and swore every time he saw me that I would be the next killing machine in the family, but I didn't realize that it was probably the whiskey that thought that. At one point my senior year in high school I was in talks with the Air Force Academy in Colorado, but then the whole smart as a whip requirement got in the way. They had discovered I was as good at math, as Anne Frank was at hiding. Again, probably the Traumazine.

Hey, at least I still have my vision.

In order for me to go to space without all the other requirements, I had to have some sort of skill set: geologist, computer technician, life support thingy, robot, or just ethnic for photo ops. Sadly though I majored in English, and unless they want to waste 20,000 tons of full to get me up there to blog about how crappy eating food out of a tube of toothpaste is I won't get a chance.

But then again, this man change my outlook on things.

Lance Bass Master

Because if a dude who sang in a 90s boy band that didn't write their own songs can go to space, then surely a 90s boy band lover who writes his own haikus can.

So remember kids, don't give up on your dreams. Because if Lance Bass went to space, you can do anything you damn well please with your life.



*Traumazine side effects may include but aren't limited to: loss of breath, loss of math skills, los of spelign skills, decreased sex drive, hair loss, ulcers, hair gain, hallucinations, Napoleon syndrome,  Neapolitan syndrome, total shutdown of motor capabilities, and, in rare cases, death.