Planetarium Pangs

My surroundings are relatively quiet, that level of quiet that I can manage. Total silence is totally unnerving to me. I have to have some beacon, however faint, that someone else exists somewhere. I wish I could devote the entire morning to writing but in about two hours, everyone is coming in here to take the world up a few decibels. My first instinct on entering work today to the news that nearly everyone was at a meeting and that I'd have most of the space to myself was not to run around in my underwear screaming (though I've had that inclination more than once since starting here) but rather to sit quietly at the computer and write. I think, just like a runny, smelly Roquefort, I've aged.

I've been writing my book and so far have been pretty consistent with my word counts. I'm at about 13,000 words so far and my novel is all over the freaking place but I'm getting the story down. It is way harder than writing has ever been for me. I would much rather work for several weeks on a poem, or a few hours on a blog post than try to take a big story and pare it down and transform all the pieces into a whole.

In that spirit, I need to take a trip to the planetarium soon. I find myself wanting to look up at the night sky and actually see something other than the glare of buildings. I like that you can walk in there and there's the universe, explained, whittled down and categorized, displayed in models and maps and illustrations. I also love that I am free to contemplate endless darkness and undying light for a few hours and then step outside and do something utterly mundane, like eat an apple. The universe is terrifying; the universe with a ceiling is slightly better. Don't get me wrong, I tend to get nihilistic after visits to the planetarium. Something about contemplating that timeline that is displayed in every single planetarium in the world that draws the scale of the known universe from the big bang to the puny amount of time that all of humanity has existed demands that one lie down for a spell. Still, it does a mind some good to tap into the void every once in awhile.

So who's meeting me there?