Get Out of My Room!

As 2020 wears on, Mars is all over the news. There’s corona, there Black Lives Matter, there’s Beirut, there’s starvation, there’s Hong Kong, there’s Trump & Biden, and now there’s Mars. SpaceX has successfully launched astronauts going to the International Space Station from the US for the first time since 2011. I had no idea they did not do it regularly. Where do they usually launch from? (Apparently from Baikonur Cosmodrome, a spaceport in Kazakhstan.) The point is, I liked having Mars to myself. The more the media pick up on things I’ve spent my precious academic free-time figuring out, the more I feel encroached upon and I begin to feel that numbing of the mind I get from information overload. Mars is where I off load, a place I can think. Now I’m forced into being either a sloppy researcher or an absorber of information again. I begin to amass information instead of writing. I force myself back into Mars-mode: Noctis Labyrinthis. Kasai Valles, Valles Marineris, Ius Chasma, Chryse Chaos, Argyre Planitia, Ulysses Fossae.