Spaced

It's too easy to see nothing but the evil, the bad that's going on in the world right now. It's easy to feel that this, this heinousosity, is everything. It's too easy to feel like the rapacious fuckers who are trying to take away all our rights are winning.

Us supposed inferior types should never criticize or question the imagined imperial intelligence, authority or sanity of our overlords. They get all sniffy and toddler-ish when we do, don'cha know.

It's too easy to despair, to lose hope.

And then, in the wee hours with sleep eluding me and the fires of both personal and political horrors burning, I found NASA pics in my Instagram feed. Oh my shining nebulae! Such imagination igniting magnificence, what glorious wonderosity!

I jumped over to NASA's website for more, more, MORE. Wild stuff.

Also too, there's an International Space Station. Did you know about this? People are living in space and have been for the past 17 years! Yes yezz, I was aware of this BUT, with all that’s been goin’ down, it kinda slipped my mind – entered the realm of fantasy. This is so sci fi. Living and working in space – WOW! 

If I could live all the different alternate lives I wanted, would I be an astronaut, a space dweller, in one of them? Yup.

Taraji P. Henson, who played the brill mathmetician Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures, confessed: "Math and science scares me. It makes my heart palpitate.” (source)

I felt the same way when I was in school. Even now, on occasion, simple, non-art stuff causes me to freeze up – at first.  Women have, generally, not been encouraged in math and science. Duh! Jennifer Welsh, writing at Business Insider, lists Seven Things Keeping Women Out Of Science Careers amongst which are teasing in school, negative stereotypes, marginalization and “good old boy" networks. 'the fuck and shit?

Unsurprisingly, new research shows that …

In countries with high levels of gender equality, the math gap disappeared or sometimes even reversed, the researchers found. (source)

Huh, if you raise girls to know they're equal, they are. Waddya know?!

Now, just imagine the steep climb out of Prejudicial Bullshitville when you’re both female AND Brown or Black.

Not only did women, back in early '60s Hidden Figure days, not have the same opportunities as men but the West Computers (the team of Black women) were constantly made aware of their second-class citizen status.

They worked in a separate facility from the white computers, had to use separate washrooms, and had to sit at a colored table in the cafeteria. A few years into the program, the unmarried white computers were housed in a fancy dorm. Meanwhile, the unmarried black computers had to find lodging in town, which wasn’t always easy. (source)

Hells bells, the West Computers didn’t even have a motherfucking bathroom within the actual separate-and-most-def-NOT-equal building where they worked!

Back to the the mindboggling NASA space pics though. I used to buy big books of glossy NASA porn for The Amazing Bob. The titles should've been Cosmos Cheesecake Through the Ages, Planet Centerfolds by Hubble, Exploded Star Sex and You. Stuff like that there. I was gonna donate them all to the local library but maybe I'll hold off for a bit. Like TAB when he couldn't sleep, I'll sit in my big chair, gawking at the radient splendor.