We're all made of star stuff....

I dreamt last night I was visiting the southern hemisphere for the first time. The stars were vivid and I was comparing a map of the constellations stored in my memory to the actual bowl of sky above me--ridiculous given the fact I haven't memorized a sky chart since 1988, and such things have long faded from memory. I was telling someone about the Southern Cross and other constellations we miss up north, and there was an extremely bright formation at the horizon that I thought was troubling. Dreaming about looking at the sky and comparing the sky seen in the dream to a map of the real sky once remembered while still dreaming--ain't that what life is all about?

I think this was probably precipitated by watching a couple episodes of Carl Sagan's Cosmos with Yahtzee on Saturday, and also by the story I read in Saturday's Sun about a comet currently visible in MD. This can only underscore my absolute nerdiness as a youth, but I was a Cosmos fanatic, and read all of Sagan's books by age 15. Watching that show again brought back the powerful youthful desire to be an astronomer, and lugging my cheap ass Celestron out to an icy field to look at Venus or Jupiter's moons or the mountains of our own moon for hours on end. In the cold. In the dark, rather near where the Traveling Joneses now live. Somehow I let that dream subside; must've been concerned about making a living, so I chose English instead. (canned laughter here)

Cha came back from taking her Mom to church today with bizarre news. Her dad, fearing he's going to die soon, decided to tell her she's got a half-sister somewhere. Apparently when he was a young man he lost a girlfriend he loved very much. Her family didn't like him and took her out of university in Manilla so she couldn't see him. They found her on the train tracks dead, with her head and legs severed. No one was sure if it was an accident or a suicide (how Anna Karenina!), but at any rate Cha's Pa was so despondent he went mad and slept by the coffin in the church for three days, not showing up at his job, not continuing his studies, and sleeping with numerous chicks, one of whom--an American expat, ended up pregnant. Her plan was to marry another man who was courting her and tell him the child was his (all we know is the child was eventually named Holly). After her parents fled Marcos' crack-down, Pa lost touch with the other daughter. Cha immediately called her sisters with the news.