Blustery Day

I was going to write something about how it is rather blustery (read: loudly and terrifyingly windy) outside today, because hey! I watched Winnie the Pooh as a kid, and I sure know some of you did, so this will be a good bonding moment. So then I Googled the clip from the movie that I was looking for and it turns out I'd totally forgotten the little song Pooh sings.

Oh the wind is lashing lustily
And the trees are thrashing thrustily
And the leaves are rustling gustily
So it's rather safe to say

That it seems that it may turn out to be
It feels that it will undoubtedly
It looks like a rather blustery day

Can someone tell me was lustily lashing winds are? Or thrashing thrustily trees? Those things all sound like they came from bad fanfiction (trind shippers, get at me), not from a cutesy little movie about stuffed animals. Disney haters and overzealous parents (have those circles completely overlapped yet??) would be all up on this, right? I could write my junior year of high school paper on this and would probably hate Baudrillard just as much coming out of it! This is outrageous! Actually, since I could literally care no less about hidden messages in Disney movies, I mostly just find it  amusing to imagine lusty winds and thrusty trees. You're welcome.
For reference:
  Though, I am hoping my attitude doesn't bring down the tornado we are on watch for and kill us all.

Caregivers

Last night I spent the better part of 6 hours helping to sort, organize, fold and package t-shirts for Relay for Life. This is something this Relay does every year, and even though I helped with it last year, it was definitely one of those things where time away from it makes you forget just how excruciating the task is. The horrendous feat was made infinitely better by the company, my Relay family as we call it, and as the clock rolled past 11pm, the sound of the bachata music, laughter of my friends, and small encouragements of "we're almost there!" and "just a little bit more!" made what seemed like an otherwise insurmountable task just a little bit easier to deal with (especially considering I was running on 4 hours of sleep and hadn't eaten dinner yet).

So when I got home around midnight, reliving the conversation from the night, I got to thinking about how much that experience parallels the experience of cancer patients and caregivers. Obviously, I'm not saying that having to fold some 500 tshirts in one night is anything close to the diagnosis of cancer for a loved one, but bear with me. Cancer affects everyone, directly or indirectly, and the people who have it and the people they love who care for them help each other in unimaginable ways, much like our little T-shirt group did, to get through the ordeal, which affects the peers just as much as the diagnosee. I've seen it firsthand a number of times. My mom was part of a group of ladies that helped a neighborhood family where the mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer by organizing 3-4 meals a day for weeks for the family during her chemo, and me and some of the older neighbor kids often babysat their 4 and 6 year old. That is called being a caregiver; it's not just the people who sit at a patient's hospital bedside (though they are supremely important as well), it's everyone, the entire community that helps a cancer patient (or anyone with serious illness really) and their loved ones with gracious support. The fight against cancer and support of those affected is a community effort, and a much needed one at that. Please consider joining a Relay for Life event near you or you can donate to me, if you'd like, HERE.

If you read all that, thank you very much. I appreciate it a lot.

Cosmos

I have acquired a new tv show (I know, I know, like I need one, right?). It's only been the pilot two episodes, and I've not seen the old one yet to compare, but already I am enamored with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. It's obviously geared for younger or probably not-as-exposed-to-science audiences, but it gave me that same feeling that watching Bill Nye the Science Guy as a kid did, and that feeling I will eloquently sum up as: OMG SCIENCE IS SO *BLEEPING* COOL!!!!
 

Anyway, Cosmos is about the universe and everything in it. The narrative was well-written, incorporating history and science and personal touches from narrator Neil Degrasse Tyson, and paired with absolutely stunning visual imagery. It's the kind of show that I think would get more kids into science, because it really displays well how literally science is all around us. One of my favorite examples of the sheer wonder of the universe is depicted in the above picture. Neil Degrasse Tyson explained how if the annual calendar represented all of spacetime since the Big Bang, all of the history of modern humans on Earth occurred in the last hour of December 31st. Whaaa?! 

Finally, something really poignant that was said that I thought was particularly poetic was that it's easy to watch something like this and learn about the cosmos and feel really small and insignificant. Instead of thinking about how temporally little you seem in the cosmic world, he said to think about how there has been all of spacetime so far, all these reactions and evolutions and chance occurrences and failed experiments of nature, and yet here you are. You and I are such improbable miracles, formed from the same stuff as stars, we should feel large.