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"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -Morrow
"Take care of the minutes, and the hours and years will take care of themselves." -Anonymous
"Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile." -F.P. Jones

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2003-09-12
Don't sweat the small things

1:46 p.m.

Sometimes it's the little things that get to you. Yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Both of the entries by Sarah and Becca talked about how while the attacks where devastating, the more difficult even was the loss of Columbia, due to the fact that while we were affected by the first because of the horror and the unwarrented aggression against the country of which we are a part, we were much more directly involved in the second, and it was a more personal tragedy. Yes, I do feel the same. However, while I know that both of them took it pretty hard, I somehow managed to block it and put it away and just deal with life as it goes on. This is a tendency that I have when bad things happen. Today, however, it all came home, and in the most unoccuous way.

One of our professors was giving lectures on neuroscience today. He is involved in a lot of the space shuttle missions, and does a lot of research and reversing the effects of weightlessness on the human body, as well as launch and reentry. In one of his slides, he had a continuously-running movie of a space shuttle coming in for landing, finishing the HAC (Heading Alignment Cone), and the vapor is trailing off of the wingtips. It is a beautiful sight. It wasn't, however, until it restarted that I realized that it was Columbia, making a perfect landing. You could always tell her apart from the others, mainly because of the extra black tiles on the wings and on the tip of her tail. All of a sudden, I saw the replays of February 1st. I wanted to leave the classroom, but the video played over and over while the professor kept talking. All I could think was, this is how it should have been. This is what's supposed to happen. I remembered how the hall of building 4S was decorated with all of the funny quotes, pictures, banners and other items that they always put up for the astronauts' homecoming. How they were immediately taken down again. How they were put back up as a memorial and testimonial to what they did, and what they stood for.

It wasn't the sight of the streaming debris shown repeatedly on TV for those shooting stars did not look like a shuttle, so one could pretend that it was not; it wasn't the flags shown at half-mast, the sober faces of my coworkers who were on console, the stories of the searchers who found the debris. Instead, it was the endless loop showing Columbia's successful return in a simple powerpoint presentation. Amazing, isn't it?

Right now, I want to go home, just be by myself. No, that is not exactly true. I want my dog.

So, there are my thoughts. That's about as sentimental as I get. I apologize for the depressing theme tdoay, but I needed to get that out.

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