Have I mentioned I’ve got a telly now? I moved into a house with one. It’s ace. I watched the Channel 4 thing about the space shuttle a few days ago and got MEGA-EMOTIONAL and then on twitter someone said I should watch the BBC2 documentary about the space shuttle’s last mission, which aired last night. The telly doesn’t get BBC2 though, because life is just fucking like that sometimes.
I just iplayered it though (yes that is a verb), and it was WONDERFUL. The presenter used to work at NASA so they’d granted him access to loads of people and places that you don’t normally get to see. He interviewed the catering ladies who take sandwich orders from the astronauts on launch day, and the guy who sits on a massive camera a mile away from the launch site to make sure any damage can be assessed properly, and another guy with an AMAZING moustache, and the big boss dude who cried because Atlantis was the first shuttle he was ever on. But best of all was the footage of the astronauts in some café talking about the way they breathe a sigh of relief every time they survive the moments when malfunctions caused the loss of Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. It felt a bit like that Werner Herzog film about Antarctica where he spoke to the guy who always went everywhere with a packed survival kit because he’d once escaped from a prisoner of war camp.
People are amazing all the time and we just kinda get used to the general overarching amazingness of life without remembering the individual amazingnesses.
NEW RULE: Remember individual amazingnesses more often.
