We all scream but it’s better to scream together. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Tamara.
Like many of you, I’m guessing, I’d rather read a good book than go to a party. A room full of other people? Some of them strangers? That you have to talk to? Shudder.
But after the initial awkwardness of making sure you’re at the right location (do I knock or just walk in?), finding the drinks station, and breaking into a circle of conversation, I remember that I do actually like people. I love hearing the happy noises people make when they see each other after a long time, the joy and affection on their faces, the genuine laughter even at goofy jokes.
Throwing a party can be even more intimidating than attending one. In the spirit of encouraging more gatherings, I’d like to share some ideas I’ve tried myself or enjoyed at other people’s parties. And I’d love to hear yours.
For starters, embrace the concept of “messy hospitality.” Your friends won’t care if the house is a little shabby. If they’re that judgy, they don’t deserve to be your friends. As long as the kitchen is clear of food-borne pathogens and you’ve decluttered enough for people to find a place to sit themselves and their snacks down, it’s fine.
Look at this worm. Behold it! Is it not the most spectacular worm you have ever seen?
If you’re a loyal reader of this space, you saw this exact worm a week or so ago, in my post about Japanese botanist Tomitaro Makino and some of the plants he grew up around.
That was the first time I’d seen one of those worms, as far as I remember, and it was a shock. Who knew that a worm could be so cool?
I mean, Slimey the Worm is cool, obviously, and Lowly Worm, but I don’t remember ever being this surprised and delighted by a real live worm in the wild before.
What made it so surprising and delightful? For one thing, it was huge. More than a foot long, and at least as big around as my pinky finger. It was so big that I actually had to take a moment to analyze its movement and confirm that no, it was definitely not a snake. No slithering. It was lengthening and contracting itself, the way worms do. Because it’s a worm.
My family spent this spring break in Costa Rica. We went, of course, for the wildlife. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.
Manuel Antonio National Park, on the Pacific coast, is one of the prime spots for seeing biodiversity. I had been there before nearly two decades ago, but friends warned me that it had changed. “It has really blown up,” they said. But those comments didn’t prepare me for what awaited me. We arrived at the park, met our guide, and joined throngs of tourists streaming through the gates. We had hired a private guide, but it hardly mattered. We slowly made our way — en masse — down a wide gravel road. One guide would spot something, and then we’d all crowd around — twenty spotting scopes aimed at a particular tree, or leaf, or rock.
My favorite image from Artemis II, as of 4 p.m. Mountain time on Tuesday.
We went back to the Moon. People were just there again, going around it and then coming home. And other people will land there again soon, maybe in the next two years, assuming all goes well and as planned at the beloved, beleaguered American space agency.
Four humans were at the Moon on Monday, the Moon’s day, lunes, lunedi, lundi, Montag, 星期一(Zhouyī). This timing is a coincidence. It happened on Monday because of the time of the rocket’s launch last week, and the movements of the cosmos, but also because time is a construct made up by us, for our own use. This invention called time was possible because of the existence of our Moon.
Why did we go back? I think it depends on who you ask. There are a lot of answers. The best one, the most hopeful one, is that we did it for science, to discover something new about our Moon and ourselves. I think this is the bravest, sincerest reason.
The Orion capsule Integrity is visible in the foreground on the left. Earth is reflecting sunlight at the left edge of the Moon, which is slightly brighter than the rest of the disk. The bright spot visible just below the Moon’s bottom right edge is Saturn. Beyond that, the bright spot at the right edge of the image is Mars.
I know there are others. It happened because the current president wants more than anything to be remembered by history, and back in 2016 someone told him a Moon program would ensure that. It happened because China is also going there, and people in both political parties don’t want them to get there before we get there again, I guess, which doesn’t make a ton of sense, unless you consider a fourth main reason. We went back this week because people want to use the Moon now, and get rich from it, and so they want to lay claim to special areas that might hold riches. They want to put companies up there, and entire industries, and they want to figure out new ways to exploit and extract and generally pillage so that they can sit and laugh with other fat cats, I guess, which also doesn’t make a ton of sense. But that never does.
Anyway I like to think the most human reason we went back, the most primal, is the reason we went for the first time, and then repeatedly, a half-century ago. We went because we could. Because the Moon is there. We went not because it was easy, but because it was hard, in the words of the good young president who pitched the idea to the nation back then. We went because humans go places. The Moon was the last one we hadn’t gotten to.
The Artemis II crew went because it would be bizarre not to want to go, I guess, even though going doesn’t make a ton of sense. In my book, I wrote about the singular strangeness of Apollo:
We don’t often pause to think about how strange the whole thing was, how strange to send a bunch of strapping young men just because. How utterly odd that sentient pieces of Earth—because that’s all we are, really, bits of the planet remolded by time and sunlight—made a choice to send some of their brethren away from it.
The Moon eclipses the Sun, with the solar corona visible surrounding the dark Moon.
It’s weird, really it is. We pack a few brave beloveds into a tin can, strap it to an explosion, and hurl them farther away than any other has ever gone. Because.
I am in awe of the newest encounter between us and our Moon. I remain amazed by the fact of our presence there, off this world and visiting another. I barely slept the last two days, and I am not even in Houston with my space journalist friends, though I now really wish I had been. You should go readtheir work!
I loved watching the astronauts taking pictures and uploading them to Instagram. I know I am not the only one who feels a parasocial relationship with them now. And this is not just because I sent them my book last year.
The Artemis II crew wearing eclipse glasses. Counterclockwise from top left, they are Mission Specialist Christina Koch, Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, Commander Reid Wiseman, and Pilot Victor Glover (top right). This was the first use of eclipse glasses at the Moon to safely view a solar eclipse.
Artemis, the great goddess, the Moon personified, the Moon personed. Godspeed!
Going to the Moon is one of the most incredible things we have ever done as a species. And we did it just because.
Orion capsule Integrity at left, with the Moon and a crescent Earth.
All images are in the public domain, courtesy NASA and the Artemis II crew.
This week, I’m in Albuquerque celebrating Dad’s birthday, just as I did in 2021 and every year since. I didn’t know that our birthday bike ride in 2021 would be our last, but I’m grateful that it wasn’t his last birthday or our last chance to spend quality time together. What I’ve learned in the past five years is that the liminal spaces between one stage of life and another don’t have to be scary and bad. They can places of focus and presence. When you can no longer pretend to know what’s next, the current moment feels extra precious.
The post below first ran in April 2022.
My Dad’s birthday is this weekend, and just as I did last year, I’m going to Albuquerque to celebrate with him. Last year, I drove down the day after my second covid vaccine and it felt like the world was on the verge of returning to normal.
We celebrated Dad’s birthday last year on the patio of a nice restaurant and Dad and I went on multiple bike rides during my visit. He’d been tracking his mileage with the aim of riding 100 miles each week, and even at age 77 he had the oomph to pedal up the very steep hill back to the house without any thought.
This year, we won’t be biking on Dad’s birthday. A stroke knocked him down last summer, and he remains unable to use his left side. Mentally, he’s still his old self, but physically he is completely dependent on others (Mom) for Every. Single. Thing.
Being so physically helpless is a difficult turn of events for my tough fighter pilot dad, but the most remarkable thing about it is how resilient and upbeat he has shown himself to be. There are so many things he can’t do (biking, astronomy, driving his old pickup truck, to name just a few), but he’s focusing on the things he can — read, listen to music, visit with friends. And he’s even taken up a few new pastimes, like watercolor painting.
When he’s lying in bed, unable to get up and grab a book or look up at the stars, he’ll sometimes close his eyes and recount happy memories from his life. Some nights, he’ll lay in bed recounting all the flights he’s flown. He revisits the places he’s taken off from, the routes he’s navigated from the air, sights he’s seen, runways he’s landed on.
Some days it breaks my heart to think about all he’s lost, but on others I think about all the friends my age who have lost their fathers and focus instead on how lucky I am to have such a great dad who is still around to tell me stories and share in my life.
A few years ago when I was busy writing my book and without much time to spare, my dad made a comment that has stayed with me. “You are in the prime of your life right now. You’re busy with your work and your own life and that’s how it should be. I remember that time when I was your age,” he said.
I think that what he was saying was that our lives have seasons. Dad has entered a new era, and although his physical capacities have diminished, he is as intellectually engaged as ever. If the last few years were his age of physical motion, now is his time to exercise his mind.
Dad’s mind has always been active, and the fact that he now spends much of his time watching nerdy academics give YouTube lectures on physics and astronomy tells me that he is still totally my dad, as engaged and curious as ever.
We might not be biking up the Grand Mesa together this summer, but we can discuss the latest issues of New Scientist, the new James Webb space telescope and why it’s ok that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. I hope that we’ll even go see an Isotopes baseball game together. I love my dad with all my heart, and I intend to savor every moment we have together.
I’m currently on a walking trip in Japan that has turned into more of a walking-plus-bus-and-train trip. (Walking is great! Walking with all of your stuff on your back…is great for some people.) I’m on a pilgrimage that circles the island of Shikoku, visiting 88 temples along the way.
Because I’m a nerd, I’ve stopped along the way by some interesting-sounding local museums. One of these, the museum at the Makino Botanical Gardens in Kochi City, gave me a new mild obsession: Tomitaro Makino, who they call the “father of Japanese botany.” He was a taxonomist who discovered a lot of new species and gave many Japanese plants their new Latin names.
And he grew up, it turns out, in the town of Sakawa, where I found myself a few days later.
Sakawa is a sake-making town – the street leading to Makino’s childhood home is lined with breweries and you can smell the alcohol as you walk by. His family were successful sake brewers, and the family business helped fund his plant collecting. Their house has been turned into a museum about him – one of several museums in this historic town.
As a child, he dropped out of school and just did plants. Eventually he made his way to Tokyo University.
The town of Sakawa has gone all in for their Makino connection. About half the train station waiting area is devoted to him, with a wall-sized mural showing multiple Makinos (and tiny Makino fairies with leaves for wings) happily examining plants in a rich green forest. A mailbox nearby has a plant model on top. The big park is named for him. There’s a historical marker at the parking lot where his family’s brewery used to stand. Reproductions of his botanical drawings appear around town. (He made some of his own brushes, including some made of bundled mouse hairs. Mouse hairs!)
Behind the museum, 100 or so stone steps lead to a shrine perched high on the hill. I’m learning about the topography of Japan in a very direct and personal way on this trip. This is one of many steep climbs to religious sites that I’ve done in the last month or so. I learned in the museum that he liked to play at this shrine as a child, and did some of his first plant collecting there.
When I’m thinking about the evolution of animal forms, as one does, mostly I’m considering animals that exist, or that previously existed, and wondering what conditions and adaptations led to their rise and persistence. Which beak shape gave that bird an advantage where seeds were like stones? Which wing length made sense for a bird that needed to soar, not hop? What combination of traits meant fitness, and thus survival? And why the goofy feet, regardless?
But here’s a different question, one that takes one’s thinking in another direction: Are there forms that would seem to fit well into a particular niche but that never arose to fill it? If so, why the evolutionary no-shows? What stopped them from being?
I interviewed a biology graduate student recently named Stephanie Chia who has asked that question as part of her doctorate research. She focused on the largest group of songbirds, a superfamily called the Passeridae, which includes our little friends the sparrows and finches and warblers. She applied a tool to the problem called persistent homology, which is not just a great band name but a mathematical approach rooted in topographical data analysis. Along with some methods for piecing together ancestral shapes, it let Chia chart existing birds based on their individual combinations of morphological traits, estimate how their ancestors looked, and then find the gaps, or combinations of traits that reasonably should have, but didn’t, make up a bird in that group.
When something doesn’t arise, there’s a reason, of course. It might be an environmental factor (or more than one) that kept that form from taking shape, for example, or it’s possible the form did arise but quickly went extinct, or that some outsider snapped up the spot our bird required. In the case of these birds, the study showed that competition from a bird in another family was likely the limiting factor. Some sneaky passerine-adjacent bird, a Smith instead of a Jones, outfitted itself in the exact traits our bird would have had and leapt into the space our bird would have occupied, leaving our hypothetical feathered friend out in the evolutionary cold.
The victorious bird wasn’t even a quirky or colorful or weird bird; it would have looked and acted very similar to its kin, albeit with some tiny tweak that gave it its own identity.
I’m sharing this academic tidbit here because it struck me as fascinating, a way of thinking about lifeforms that might not come to mind organically but that demands exploration just the same. Like me, you might be interested to know why life on Earth looks like this and not that; here’s a way to peek at the not, to better understand what could have been but never was.
An elderly woman I used to know, when referring to something being done out of the typical order, would say it was “down the back stairs Bessie.” That’s how I think about this approach to evolutionary questions.
Meanwhile, I see it’s April Fools’ Day. But my missing bird, to which I’ve become rather attached, is no joke. There was a songbird-shaped gap that was pilfered by some no-name songbird-shaped bird. The missing songbird isn’t laughing, I’ll tell you that.
I’ll end with an apology. The above image was generated by AI because in these troubled times it’s becoming difficult to find images you can download for free. Plus, I needed the ghost bird in the middle. Which, as you now know, isn’t a ghost at all. Just an imposter and a thief.
When I was a kid, I pretended I was a bird, and I did it in front of anyone in early elementary school, winging around with my arms outstretched. Around fourth grade I started learning modesty and only soared when no one was watching. The ground, I imagined, was far away, ants the size of people, and above it I made languid turns, sensing the change of air on my outspread fingers. On the younger side, before the modestly, I would flap and land on rocks or at the bottom of a tree, and I remember building a nest out of twigs, scratching away the dirt, and a girl in my class came and started flying with me and we shared the nest, taking turns sitting on our eggs, flying back to spell one another.
A friend living in Argentina sent an article about Gen Z furries in the capital Buenos Aires, pictures of pubescent juveniles wearing masks and tails, leaping about in a park, hiding out in trees. How strange and beautiful, I thought. How familiar.
