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zeroeffortenvironment · 7 years ago

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voyager

Do you know how far Voyager 1 is from earth at this moment? It's 13 Billion miles. That's with a B. We as a species made something with our own hands and then put it in interstellar space! I'm not sure what's more inconcievable, the sheer fact of it, or that it got to where it is because we hurled it there at a rate of 38,000 miles per hour, using machinery and knowhow that came from under those same hands. that's almost 50 times the speed of sound. certainly not the fastest thing we've ever threw in the air but this one also sends picture postcards from where he at!! this is with a setup that was bolted in place in 1977. That not only predates your stupid hashtag-riddled instagram feed, but predates instagram altogether, it predates quad band phones, GSM, CDMA, digital light sensor, internet, and based on the fact that you're reading this blog, it probably predated you too...

Anyway. pictures from Voyager reach us in about 20 hours. that's from what? 13 billion miles away. So assuming that I post something here every day (which of COURSE I do), I am happy to report that I am floating in the vacuum so far up the universe's Yeah that by comparison to me the voyager just got the memo and started packing for his trip. to be precise the reason why it's been 682 days is because I'm 1.86 light years away, which, in cubic inches and football fields is 1.0984153e+13 miles out. I'd type it out but I trust google on it. this figure has more places than I have neurons within my skull.

And that, your honour, is why it may SEEEM that I've been slacking on this blog for the last ahem.. 2 years.

It's 10 am, on December 23rd, 2017. I'm on a couch, Roxanna is asleep. It's properly chilly, but I'm not wearing socks, otherwise it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. A great big factory-like window graces a concrete wall to my left, deligently trying to keep out the sounds of a noxious hvac system of a shopping center across the street. For its size it's doing a pretty respectable job. Meanwhile to the right of me the dishwasher is having a deep-tech warehouse rave. the air is a mixture of coffee that's getting cold, and that indescribable but not necessarily unpleasant smell of a place on a cold day when you just wake up. I'm surrounded by plants, plants, some plants, pictures, paper, wires, a bicycle ominously hangs off the wall on a redwood shelf quietly waiting like a panther on a tree for the perfect moment to fall onto its victim. Ahead of me is the door into the bedroom. An ages-old ikea lamp curiously sticks its head out where my desk is, beyond that, more wires, more plants, our DIY plywood bed, graced by a pile of blankets, cats, and potentially roxanna, and an 8' closet door mirror. All of this aligned like planets on Voyager's journey with a reflection of my face at its end 2.25522e-15 light years away.

I look a little disheveled. but not awful. Roxanna has been putting pins in my hair for the last couple months because I refuse to cut it. She is convinced it looks adolescent left to its own devices. At work Jeff Su, our in-house older asian guy with a gray camry and no filter, remarked that I look like a golden poodle. I think it looks fine. more importantly I couldn't care less if anyone thinks otherwise.

This is beat-matched near perfectly with how I feel about almost everything else around me lately. Christmas is in two days, and I feel like all I want this year is to be floating in the vast nothingness of space in complete silence, absence of stimuli, thought or air pressure in my lungs. Or at least in a raft in the middle of a bay. Instead what might be happening is as follows: after christmas, the very morning of the 26ths, I have to be seen in a queue at the LA Federal Building at 7 am flat - that's when they open. I will be there with a heap of documents, forms, and passport photos procuring a same-day passport made using a citizenship certificate that I have just received in the mail which has the CORRECT spelling of my lastname. Once (or rather If) I get this, I am to pack expiditiously and be on a plane with Roxanna at 1AM the following day (27th), which will fly us to Morelia Mexico, where we will be joined by some of her bdgjillion relatives who will take us to a mountain cabin retreat at Zirauen. While out there we will be enjoying great company, and scenery whilst sleeping in a tent for a few days. Come the 28th or 29th (not sure) we set out for Caretero, and perhaps Guanojuato, where we will be impromptu-crashing at the home of other relatives. On the 3rd we fly back, ah! which reminds me - I need to send an email to my colleagues saying I won't be at work until the 4th. Which should technically be 5th because I am a human afterall and don't run on aderol.

ALL of this was figured out last night, between the hours of 5pm when I picked up my certificate in the mail and midnight or so. None of it was by me. I should really be teling this to my spouce, and I guess I will soon enough - but to me planning a last-minute trip of such complexity on such short notice is batshit insane, puts an undue burden on the folks that will be hosting us, and most importantly is the direct opposite of floating in a raft in the middle of the bay. And it is so by virtue of the fact that the latter constitutes Rest, the former - doesn't.

I don't doubt that parts of it will be fun, and I'll see lovely familiar faces and some beautiful places, but the problem really isn't our upcoming trip to Zirahuen, it isn't Mexico, Roxanna, or her great big army of amazing relatives. Btw it's worth a mention that I have already been to Mexico once for a Mayra and Tonio's wedding in Morelia last year, and had a blast.

The problem is not with traveling, it's with making plans. Or rather my perpetually empty calendar and never objecting to anything that other people may want to put on it.

Let's talk about Goals. Cheryl Crow's analysis of the matter falls way short of the Noble Peace prize - it is Not wanting what you got, not getting what you want, it's wanting something in the first place. You know what the hardest thing about meeting your goals is? THE absolute hardest thing no matter whether you're perfecting plie's in an intro ballet class or building the next Voyager - the hardest thing is having a goal in the first place. Because a goal worth having is the kind you absolutely can't live without - it defines you as much as your first and last name and your reflection in the mirror you see every day. With a goal like this, everything else is machine work - resources, design, problem solving, are all a matter of logic. I am convinced that all superhuman feats in history are results of having such goals, and have been dreamed, worked out, built, launched, and remembered because people woke up every morning, looking in the mirror and seeing the voyager reflect in their cornea...

Well, to get straight to point - I don't have one of these. And the longer i think about it the more I'm convinced that I never did. And if anything, this is one thing that keeps my mind completely devoid of thought as I float in my vacuum, and it is this:

if I want nothing and make zero effort towards achieving things I don't want (read: everything), then why the hell are there three achievement awards on my desk? why is my desk electric and goes up and down with a push of a button, and costs $3000 of company cash? How did I come up with Two degrees in Architecture at Cal Poly and UCLA? How did I even get INTO either of these two schools? How did I manage to not only get a job, but to keep it from 2009 until 2014, a period in architecture that was absolutely plagued by the recession. I am not putting myself on a pedestal here. The reason I bring up all these things is because I never looked at myself in the mirror and saw an architect with two degrees, three glass sculptures with my name etched into them, or the handful of buildings that I contributed design efforts to. None of this was ever a clear goal. Neither is the advancement up the ladder that I could be striving for, nor is architectural license that is the next logical step to your advancement up the ladder as an architect. I am not looking forward to any of that. I am particularly not looking forward to my performance review in early January where I will certainly be asked questions pertaining specifically to my ambitions in the firm, the industry, and my career direction.

It's a bizarre problem and I've learned to live with it - being exceptionally good at something but arguably having little interest in it. But it also leaves me in a perpetual search for something to BE interested in, because I'm a human, and we're a curious species, and I'm wired to have goals and predispositions. And like a bit-coin mining rig, my mind is occupied with this all the fucking time, to the point that I get tired of just thinking about it. In the meantime the world around me revolves according to its own rules. And whether I like it or not until I find something worth adjusting my trajectory for, I am at the mercy of the forces that make this world turn. So far, I think, they have been good to me.

To this end I wonder if the Voyager gives two shits where it's going? here is an amazing thing - thousands of years of star gazing, invention, evolutionary thought and technological breakthroughs, wrapped up in a glistening contraption of elegant and perfectly straight trusses, it's own metallic mind and set of eyes forever traveling at 38,000 miles per hour. If the gods were to add up everything we achieved as a species and pick 10 top things - this is one of them! Here's an amazing thing that we made, and then we just sent it off away from us as fast as we fucking could. The only thing we know about the voyager's plans is that 44,000 years from now he has a date with a neighboring star. If that was ever someone's goal for it, they certainly aren't sticking around to achieve it. And thus I believe Voyager has no destination. it's moving in a straight line, occasionally adjusted by the orbits of planets it slingshots off of. And maybe the Voyager is also perfectly fine with that...

crap, I gotta pack...

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