2023: A Year of Self Exploration Rather than Space Exploration
This isn’t really a post about space. But it felt important to write nonetheless.
We didn’t get a white Christmas here in Ottawa, where I’ve been camped out for the last two months as I plan my next destination. But this morning, the end of the year, it is -5°C, and a gentle ephemeral snow is sinking down as I walk to a nearby oatmeal café. A week ago, I scoffed at the idea of a hipster café charging $9 for a bowl of oatmeal—despite most definitely being a hipster myself, sitting here in a toque indoors and adorned with tattoos and piercings on multiple appendages. But then I saw their shelf outside, stacked full of brown paper bags containing bowls of oatmeal free for anyone in need to grab, no questions asked.
I now come here daily, to write.
Sometimes I just get their orange blossom mocha. Others, a small bowl of the $9 oatmeal. Until I have a real income again, the oatmeals shouldn’t be daily….although the more reasonable among us might argue that the daily necessity in this equation shouldn’t be the coffee.
Right before stepping out the door to come here, I listened to author John Green’s annual reposting of his review of the song Auld Lang Syne, from his book The Anthropocene Reviewed. I’ve watched this annually since he started the tradition, and every…
