Sunday Scaries: Space is Bananas and Supermoons Are Dumb

I spent a good chunk of my recent time deep in thought and annoyed, and maybe I'm trippin' but this is why. I do not, can not, and will not understand how the general public reacts to supermoons. The most recent one was some days ago (not sure when but recent enough to still be mad about it), where due to being closest in its orbit to the earth, the moon appeared a whopping 14 percent bigger and two thirds brighter than normal.

And ok a bigger moon is what's up. 

I fugswitt the moon and I guess seeing it a little bigger, brighter, or tinted red in some cases is cool. You know what else is cool? Apparently there are 285 galaxies for every person on earth (Editor's note: this fact gave me vertigo and I'm still nauseous. I thought to myself 'there's no way'. And then I asked google how many galaxies there are and the words 'one hundred billion' showed up. So, yeah). If you think about this for ten seconds, you see why supermoons of all things aren't big enough news to let you go "oooh" and "ahhhh," all annoying at work shoving newspapers in everyone's face. 

To explain why I hate that so much let me take you through something 

I have experienced at least once a day since as long as I can remember. Picture me doing the most mindless and normal thing you can possibly do. Like deleting shitty promotion e-mails, packing a miserable lunch for tomorrow, or folding clothes. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I'm reminded that right then and there I'm standing on a perplexingly big rock that's oh, I don't know, spinnning ALMOST ONE THOUSAND miles per hour while floating around a ball of hot gas (that will end up a black hole one day, which you know, huh?) in a space that stretches so far we'll never live to see it. I stop what I'm doing, look up slow, and let that all sink it. No, really sink in. With a Sad Drake empty Take Care album cover glaze. And then I look back at whatever normal thing I'm doing so confused that I can be on that big rock and worried about my t-shirts creasing at the same time. It's outrageous. But then after a second I'm like, "well yeah but I really can't have this shirt crease it's my favorite that would be the worst what if Amy sees" and I carry on.

And that is normal and necessary. You shouldn't be able to do normal stupid things that humans just made up and gave meaning to without being required to think about space and its complexity at least once a day. It's straight up disrespectful to the uni(multi?)verse that you care more about Chad's party or Kim K's new stupid whatever she does, than you do about the nuttiness that is whatever the hell we are and life is. 

So to avoid that, we should have a daily occurances that ground us, horrifies us, and then lets us go about your day. Like a checkpoint if you will. Or like how that Apple Watch has the feature where it tells you to stand up and breathe and stuff like your brand new overbearing stepmother that has no business telling you how to live your life because it's not even your real mom, Denise. But instead of saying get up, stretch and breathe, or consider calling me mommy and not Denise, a little alert pops up reminding you that you're small and insignificant and so is the spec that you and everyone you love is floating on. And then you sweat, shutter, panic, repress, and move on with more appreciation for your wack life. Or well, maybe less considering the insignificant part...but whatever. 

My whole point is that part of the human experience is existential dread so if you think you're too good to think about black holes and such, then you're not the kind of person we want to know. We don't care who you are and neither does the sun (otherwise maybe it wouldn't be set to blow up), you should still think about space because it's bananas. And not just when the moon is flexing. You owe it to space to do that much, and space don't owe you supermoons.