Sometimes, You Just Wanna Get in a Fight

When I went to go see the space shuttle in California, my first impulse was to run the length of the room staring up at this real-life spaceship. The next one was to run from the engines up to the nose making rocket noises. I consider both of these reactions to be perfectly natural responses.

Vroom.

What I did instead was completely abandon my friend who had come there with me to walk around the shuttle, mouth open and eyes wide, ignoring every single one of the signs with all the information I could possibly need, just trying to absorb what I was seeing. This thing had been in space. It had taken people to space. People, who were once on the Earth, went up into space in this, and then other people, who were in space, came down to the Earth in this. It's been closer to the stars than I'll ever be. I felt like a cave-lady standing next to an airplane.

Well, a particularly well-read cave-lady who also has a basic understanding of aerodynamics and rocket science and is relatively conversant about the different vehicles used in various NASA projects over the years.

We're basically bros. 

I knew what I was looking at, for the most part, and if I needed to jog my memory, there were the aforementioned informational signs and the internet. So when I rejoined my friend and went over to the rocket engine they had on display in the far back corner of the room and started wondering aloud, mentally placing parts and systems together from the schematic, I didn't really expect a member of the staff to come over and start answering my questions. I also didn't expect him to be so kind and condescending at the same time.

Now, if you know me, you know that I'm a little bit proud of my smarts. It's my go-to fault. The fastest way to piss me off is to even hint that I'm less intelligent than I am. But I summoned all the patience and courage I could and I listened to this man explain concepts that were positively basic. "You say you're an elementary school teacher?" he asked at one point, clearly leaning into the common perception of elementary teachers as young women afraid of science, and in that moment, I wanted to enumerate all of the incorrect assumptions he had made in making that statement, tear them apart with logic and data, and present it with such passion that he'd never again make the mistake of treating a young woman with any less respect than he would an Apollo engineer. I wanted to eviscerate him.

I didn't, you'll be glad to know. Despite the fact that he had totally killed my happy space buzz, I smiled and listened and did what any good presenter does- I listened for good material that I could appropriate into my next talk. I thanked him for all his information when he was done and I walked off to take one more lap around the shuttle. There are some battles not worth fighting and there are some we don't need to fight right then. Plus, he was a sweet old guy who was good at his job, just not at making assumptions about me. I let it go.

But there are also battles whose time has come and that's what I want to focus on this semester. I feel settled, I feel ready, I feel like I've got the time and the ability. If it sounds like I'm giving myself a pep talk, well, maybe I am, and maybe I need to sometimes. If there's one thing a semester back at school has taught me, it's that things can be much more difficult and complex than I can ever prepare myself for. Anyway, all this is to say that I'm going to spend some time on Mondays and Fridays digging into some questions about religion and then science and religion that have come up over the past semester and then also spending some time with some of the movies and TV shows that can lean into those ideas. Wednesdays will still be the usual "Hey I made scones!" kinda personal stuff, so if you're here for that content, never fear. There will always be scones.

I kicked things off on Monday with a longer post explaining where I'm at, headspace-wise, when it comes to Christianity and it's there for you to read at your leisure. As I get more used to the vocabulary I want to use, I might go back and edit that post to tie in more concrete concepts, but it's a place to start. And really, isn't that what a new year is all about? A place to start?

Let's go.