Thursday, February 24, 2011

A notable moment in my life at NASA

Today kind of sucked for me.  It was like yesterday part two.  But I didn't spill nearly boiling liquids on my ladyparts, so I'm going to say it was an improvement.

I'm attempting to reshape my upper body into something containing fragments of actual muscle, so I have started going to the gym.  Accordingly I stopped by after work today.  (Now, I don't want you to think that I have become a gym rat.  I have no desire to strain anything, and so I am starting out slowly.  One set each of a variety of exercises with weights, hopefully to the point of muscle failure.  And as many situps as I can stomach.  (See what I did there?) The whole exercise takes about fifteen minutes at the moment.  That will ramp up as I get stronger, but not too much I hope.  I really want maximum gain for my minimal time because I don't find being in the gym entertaining.  At all.)

Today as I entered the gym I noticed it was unusually empty, but I didn't think much about it.  I stomped off to the women's locker room, divested myself of overgarments, and stomped back out.  And I found a crowd staring up.  The Shuttle was launching.  They were watching it in real time on the gym's tv.

You have not seen a more serious, somber, but hopeful crowd in a gym than this bunch of NASA employees watching the Shuttle go up.  It's personal for us.  I didn't ask the guy next to me, but I know my own chest tightens up whenever I watch, in anxiety for the crew.  I don't breathe easy until the big rockets burn out.  As soon as they fell away, I nodded and moved off to my first machine.  I noticed that most others stopped watching at the same time.  So I guess we were all nervous about the same thing.

Nobody cheered.  Few people talked.  We just watched, tensely, until it was okay.  And then we went about our lives.  It's a little sad that we have very little triumph any more.  What we hope for is lack of disaster. 

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