The topic of the day is main sequence stars, referring to stars that appear in a certain band on diagrams that plot stellar luminosity against stellar color (the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram being the most commonly used of these). Anyone who took even a cursory interest in astronomy back in their high school / middle school days will know that the vast majority of stars in our sky at any given time are main sequence stars, and that all stars spend the majority of their lives in the main sequence. Our sun is a main sequence star, and it will remain there for roughly another five billion years, which is when it will go red giant and most likely swallow up the four inner planets.
I do have to say here that I've always been (rather irrationally) a bit disappointed that our sun is "merely" a yellow dwarf. While the fact that it will eventually become a red giant assuaged my feelings a little, I've always been a bit saddened that the sun will eventually dwindle into a white dwarf and, in some hoary far-flung future, die that truly final death - the death with no further shore - in becoming a cold, invisible black dwarf. When I was much younger, I was tantalized by stories of those hot, bright, massive stars that would expand into the red and blue supergiants, the stellar heavyweights of the cosmos. I felt like they were the cool kids of the galaxy, the ones who would eventually explode in a unimaginable cataclysm of fire and light before collapsing - coming into their own, really - into even more fantastic stellar objects. Even among these upper crust members of sidereal society, however, there was a degree of stratification. The ones that became neutron stars were all well and good, like the kids who achieved success but still looked wistfully out at the things they might have wanted to achieve. The truly rare ones, however - those annoying kids that were good looking and smart and came from well-to-do families and whom you couldn't even hate because they were just that likable - they collapsed into the fabled black holes. Ah, the black hole. The ultimate celestial object. How often I wished that our own sun would somehow surpass its own physical limitations - leapfrog, as it were, through sheer force of will to become a blue supergiant even though everyone thought it would never amount to anything more than a red giant. "Look at me!" it would say, "I did it! You all thought I couldn't, but with just a little perseverance and hard work, I did it!" And then it would go supernova and collapse into a black hole and live happily ever after.
Yes, I just turned the universe into a bad 1980's family movie.
More realistically, it's a good thing that our sun is a yellow dwarf. Anything more and the Earth would probably wouldn't even be a barren ball of iron and rock, much less a staging ground for intelligent life. Going on with the metaphor, although the sun is quite plain by astronomical standards, it's very mild-mannered and nurturing - average, perhaps a little boring, but ultimately stable in the long-term. The supergiants might be the celebrities and rock stars of the universe, but they also live brief, tumultuous lives filled with violence, ending up as mere flickers of their former selves or as hungry, all-consuming vortices of endless need and ultimate destructiveness. The sort of lives that stars like the sun look at and go, "Oh my. I'm sure glad I'm not a giant hungry tear in space-time."
So as I grow more mature, I become more cognizant of what a blessing it is that our sun is "merely" a main sequence yellow dwarf. Being one of the cool kids isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
And I just totally grabbed that metaphor and jumped ship with it to Tahiti.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
On ox carts and the Mississippi River
In an attempt to move my blog away from incessant whining about boys, I've decided to try something remarkably daring (at least for me.) I'm going to address the daily featured article on Wikipedia, whatever it may be, and see where my rambling thoughts on the article may take me. Some place witty and fancy, I hope, but I think it's going to end up remarkably masturbatory. Then again, this IS a personal blog we're talking about - these things are almost all about pleasuring yourself in one way or another.
So today's topic is...the Red River Trails. Ooooooookay. Already I can tell that time and fate and the cosmos at large are ready to do a big BM all over this pet project. On a random tangent - people often say that it's arrogant to consider that time and fate and the cosmos at large are at all concerned about us. We are, after all, less than blips on the radar when you consider the universe at large - spatially, temporally, and influentially, we teeter right at the edge of being a complete null sum. I, however, like to think that concepts and influences as large as time and fate and the cosmos at large have no choice but to be concerned with the very small AS WELL as the very grand in scale. As with God, only the truly grand can ascribe an importance to the very tiny that matches the importance of the unimaginably astronomical.
I'm not sure I communicated that concept very clearly, but I don't particularly want to go into it right now. Maybe I'll attempt to refine my argument at a later date.
Anyway, the Red River Trails. According to the glance I had off Wikipedia, they were a series of ox-cart routes that extended from what is now Winnipeg down to areas of Minnesota and North Dakota. I know nothing about them, and...that fact does not fill me with chagrin. People close to me will know that I had almost no interest in social studies back in school - I was only vaguely interested in geography and the only kind of history I liked was ancient history. Something about the far-flung pharaohs of Egypt, the antediluvian gods of Mesopotamia, and (yes) the cruel mysticism of China held an air of mystery, of mythology, and the of the exotic that, I do confess, the ox-cart routes of the Mississippi rather fails to achieve. In fact, American history generally seems so...banal...to me that despite my best efforts I could never develop more than a cursory interest in it. Mind you, I've wanted to become interested in it - for someone like me, not knowing very much about American history has been a constant gall. Summoning up the will to actually learn anything about it always feels like the thirteenth labor of Heracles, however. (Ha! You shall not redeem yourself, Heracles, until you can tell me the exact dates and locations of major battles during the Civil War, and who won each one!)
That said, I actually browsed through a book called "A People's History of the United States" during the run of "Wild Party" maybe a year ago and found it fascinating. I never quite got back to it after the run ended, but I HAVE been on sort of a nonfiction kick lately. Maybe this would be the perfect time to pick up that book again and pound some modern history into my rebellious skull.
I teeter between vaguely excited by the notion, and that feeling you might get if you realized you have to spend the next week cleaning up a men's lavatory in a major high-security prison with your own toothbrush. And then actually use that toothbrush afterward. Maybe I'll get through some other books before I get to expanding my history.
Like War and Peace, for example.
(Only one person will actually understand the meaning behind that last one, and only for him with it have the full impact that it's meant to.)
So today's topic is...the Red River Trails. Ooooooookay. Already I can tell that time and fate and the cosmos at large are ready to do a big BM all over this pet project. On a random tangent - people often say that it's arrogant to consider that time and fate and the cosmos at large are at all concerned about us. We are, after all, less than blips on the radar when you consider the universe at large - spatially, temporally, and influentially, we teeter right at the edge of being a complete null sum. I, however, like to think that concepts and influences as large as time and fate and the cosmos at large have no choice but to be concerned with the very small AS WELL as the very grand in scale. As with God, only the truly grand can ascribe an importance to the very tiny that matches the importance of the unimaginably astronomical.
I'm not sure I communicated that concept very clearly, but I don't particularly want to go into it right now. Maybe I'll attempt to refine my argument at a later date.
Anyway, the Red River Trails. According to the glance I had off Wikipedia, they were a series of ox-cart routes that extended from what is now Winnipeg down to areas of Minnesota and North Dakota. I know nothing about them, and...that fact does not fill me with chagrin. People close to me will know that I had almost no interest in social studies back in school - I was only vaguely interested in geography and the only kind of history I liked was ancient history. Something about the far-flung pharaohs of Egypt, the antediluvian gods of Mesopotamia, and (yes) the cruel mysticism of China held an air of mystery, of mythology, and the of the exotic that, I do confess, the ox-cart routes of the Mississippi rather fails to achieve. In fact, American history generally seems so...banal...to me that despite my best efforts I could never develop more than a cursory interest in it. Mind you, I've wanted to become interested in it - for someone like me, not knowing very much about American history has been a constant gall. Summoning up the will to actually learn anything about it always feels like the thirteenth labor of Heracles, however. (Ha! You shall not redeem yourself, Heracles, until you can tell me the exact dates and locations of major battles during the Civil War, and who won each one!)
That said, I actually browsed through a book called "A People's History of the United States" during the run of "Wild Party" maybe a year ago and found it fascinating. I never quite got back to it after the run ended, but I HAVE been on sort of a nonfiction kick lately. Maybe this would be the perfect time to pick up that book again and pound some modern history into my rebellious skull.
I teeter between vaguely excited by the notion, and that feeling you might get if you realized you have to spend the next week cleaning up a men's lavatory in a major high-security prison with your own toothbrush. And then actually use that toothbrush afterward. Maybe I'll get through some other books before I get to expanding my history.
Like War and Peace, for example.
(Only one person will actually understand the meaning behind that last one, and only for him with it have the full impact that it's meant to.)
Saturday, March 28, 2009
On revisited themes
I wrote some poems lately, which I will now post.
Desire
Moonlight whispers toward the midnight shadows
And silence roars like endless rolling waves.
Heartbeats thrum in cloistered darkness, waiting,
Tumbling into fireflies' graves.
Desire, desire, the spider-catching web.
Sparrow swallowing the hurricane.
Sunbeams sing toward shadow-shrouded moon face.
Sieves raise high to catch the evening rain.
Fires scream through frozen night-drenched hollows.
Snow flakes blossom thick on desert sands.
Ashes fall on springtime seas of roses.
Soft caresses touch indifferent hands.
Desire, desire, the sun-consuming flame.
Kings bowed low beneath the twisting wrack
Yet still might find an easier smile than mine
As I look into your eyes and only see your back.
**********
Perspective
The garden of my heart I water
With a rain of spite,
And let the fruiting trees of malice sink their roots and grow.
Churning envy, buried rage, and
Pride are all my seeds,
And black despairing days shall be the future that I sow.
Pain and sorrow, lonely nights,
Companion paths I stride.
N'er shall dawn come rose my skies;
Let grief stay at my side.
You fool and man-child, self-made martyr,
Slave to passions mean.
Why do you whip yourself with scourges of your own design?
Envy flees, and rage does die, and
Even pride will break.
And foolish seeming shall be things that once you did enshrine.
Pain and sorrow, lonely nights,
Shall dog your winding way.
But so too always dawn does turn
The night to golden day.
**********
I wrote those poems from very generally the same frame of mind, although I was feeling much more rhetorical and contemplative for the first, which is probably why it's so florid and purple. I like to think the slightly overdone descriptions actually help to heighten the impact of the last line, however. I may go back to revise it someday. I'm undecided as yet.
The second one I like considerably more, because I actually started writing it from a position of a little bit of pain, a little bit of despair, and a not inconsiderable need to destroy something large and memorable. I'd initially intended the theme of the first two stanzas to carry all the way through to the end. Writing it down, however, proved remarkably therapeutic, and after those two stanzas I found myself unwilling to continue it in the same vein, because I don't actually believe in what they say. The first two stanzas are so self-absorbed, so utterly emo that it HAD to elicit a proper response. And that response, I think, forms my penultimate position.
I really do worry too much about my writing. Considering that I've written almost no poetry in my literary life, I'm actually fairly pleased with how these two poems turned out. In my darker hours, writing is always there to help lift me out of whatever ridiculous rut I've entrenched myself into, and more often than not it satisfies even my critical eye.
Desire
Moonlight whispers toward the midnight shadows
And silence roars like endless rolling waves.
Heartbeats thrum in cloistered darkness, waiting,
Tumbling into fireflies' graves.
Desire, desire, the spider-catching web.
Sparrow swallowing the hurricane.
Sunbeams sing toward shadow-shrouded moon face.
Sieves raise high to catch the evening rain.
Fires scream through frozen night-drenched hollows.
Snow flakes blossom thick on desert sands.
Ashes fall on springtime seas of roses.
Soft caresses touch indifferent hands.
Desire, desire, the sun-consuming flame.
Kings bowed low beneath the twisting wrack
Yet still might find an easier smile than mine
As I look into your eyes and only see your back.
**********
Perspective
The garden of my heart I water
With a rain of spite,
And let the fruiting trees of malice sink their roots and grow.
Churning envy, buried rage, and
Pride are all my seeds,
And black despairing days shall be the future that I sow.
Pain and sorrow, lonely nights,
Companion paths I stride.
N'er shall dawn come rose my skies;
Let grief stay at my side.
You fool and man-child, self-made martyr,
Slave to passions mean.
Why do you whip yourself with scourges of your own design?
Envy flees, and rage does die, and
Even pride will break.
And foolish seeming shall be things that once you did enshrine.
Pain and sorrow, lonely nights,
Shall dog your winding way.
But so too always dawn does turn
The night to golden day.
**********
I wrote those poems from very generally the same frame of mind, although I was feeling much more rhetorical and contemplative for the first, which is probably why it's so florid and purple. I like to think the slightly overdone descriptions actually help to heighten the impact of the last line, however. I may go back to revise it someday. I'm undecided as yet.
The second one I like considerably more, because I actually started writing it from a position of a little bit of pain, a little bit of despair, and a not inconsiderable need to destroy something large and memorable. I'd initially intended the theme of the first two stanzas to carry all the way through to the end. Writing it down, however, proved remarkably therapeutic, and after those two stanzas I found myself unwilling to continue it in the same vein, because I don't actually believe in what they say. The first two stanzas are so self-absorbed, so utterly emo that it HAD to elicit a proper response. And that response, I think, forms my penultimate position.
I really do worry too much about my writing. Considering that I've written almost no poetry in my literary life, I'm actually fairly pleased with how these two poems turned out. In my darker hours, writing is always there to help lift me out of whatever ridiculous rut I've entrenched myself into, and more often than not it satisfies even my critical eye.
Friday, March 06, 2009
On hindsight
I was vaguely tempted to just delete that last blog I wrote, but decided against it. Keeping things like that will keep me honest as I write, I suppose, and anything I don't intend to leave up here just shouldn't be written in a public place at all.
But Christ, what a whiny emo piece of shit blog THAT was. You'd think my world was coming apart at the seams, when in fact the only thing that had happened was that someone didn't return my feelings. Oh wow. Big deal. As if that hasn't happened before.
If it's not obvious, I'm fine now. Fine and rather disgusted with myself. When did I turn into such a teenage girl? I'm inclined to say that if you can get over "heartbreak" in a span of just a few days, your heart probably wasn't broken. I would, in fact, be hard pressed to describe it as cracked, or even chipped. Maybe dented, or possibly scratched, would be more appropriate. Oh no. Someone scratched my heart. I must now fill my blog with purple metaphors and angst.
God, I never learn.
But Christ, what a whiny emo piece of shit blog THAT was. You'd think my world was coming apart at the seams, when in fact the only thing that had happened was that someone didn't return my feelings. Oh wow. Big deal. As if that hasn't happened before.
If it's not obvious, I'm fine now. Fine and rather disgusted with myself. When did I turn into such a teenage girl? I'm inclined to say that if you can get over "heartbreak" in a span of just a few days, your heart probably wasn't broken. I would, in fact, be hard pressed to describe it as cracked, or even chipped. Maybe dented, or possibly scratched, would be more appropriate. Oh no. Someone scratched my heart. I must now fill my blog with purple metaphors and angst.
God, I never learn.
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