Life

On the Friday after Thanksgiving my niece Autumn Rayne was born. I think she has my eyebrows, or at least my default cynical expression.

But maybe I am just looking for things that aren't there.

There are a million things I could wax philosophical about at this point. Life! There is a new person in the world! Although she is currently spending her time sleeping, peeing, and sucking, she will be rapidly learning new things in the near future... smiling! holding things! What wonders the world will bring!

There are a million things I could ruminate about, including how frustrating it is to be 5 time zones away, but I keep thinking about death. When I waxed philosophical about (mostly metaphorical) death it was to stress that without death there would be no life, because there would be no change. But that doesn't seem to work the other way around... it is not useful nor wise to think about life in terms of death. Life is the upswing, the start, the beginning of growth. Life speaks for itself, but death cannot. Life needs no explanation because life is.

Just a few days ago Autumn was safe inside her mother's womb. Things won't be so easy from now on. She will have to confront a steady stream of things-she-can't-do, one by one, and turn them into things-she-can-do. She will have 4 older brothers, 2 crazy aunts, and every toy and piece of clothing she will get for the next 10 years will be pink. What if she doesn't like pink? Let's just hope that she does!

New life means endless uncertainty. (Some good and some bad.) There is no limit to what she could do or be and we are free to speculate that it will all be awesome. And why not?

Welcome to your life, Autumn.

Midnight Thoughts

Every once in a while, I look at the clock when it's midnight. I then remember the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (what a great title!) and invariably get the song Skylark by KD Lang in my head. Sometimes I even sing it. (The full version, complete with sax solo. (yes I hum the sax solo...))

This just happened and I thought I'd share even though it isn't very deep. But it's interesting how things remind you of things that remind you of things.... thoughts fit into patterns and stay there where they are comfortable. I feel comfortable remembering Midnight and singing Skylark.

And in your lonely flight
Haven't you heard the music in the night,
Wonderful music,
Faint as a will o' the wisp, crazy as a loon,
Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon.

Oh, skylark, I don't know if you can find these things
But my heart is riding on your wings.
So if you see them anywhere
Won't you lead me there?

Cosmic Noise

The popcorn noise on old TVs is caused by leftover radiation from when the Universe was very young, emitted only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

This one might take a bit of explaining, but for that I will simply direct you to NASA's excellent "Universe 101" site, set up for the WMAP satellite that precisely measured the cosmic background radiation. In the image above, the TV noise is represented by actual data from WMAP.

Thanks again to Kara for the image and Science for the cool fact about the Universe!