Facebook is hard. I don’t want to annoy people by posting personal things that nobody cares about, but I also want to connect with my friends. How long should a status or a comment be? How much of a political/cultural stand should I put out? Is a mellow status a sign of weakness, or even worse, boring-ness? Somehow Facebook has become a campaigning platform, where we are judged by what we say and what we don’t say and how many “Likes” and comments we get. I don’t know what to write on Facebook anymore, and I usually delete my status right before I hit “Enter”, but then I get these feelings that I want to write about. Like this week, I want to write about this surreal feeling I get sitting in the control room of a radio astronomy observatory.
The observatory is southwest of the White Mountains. Outside is the desert, and the telescopes, which are moving slowly in sync to track several objects in space. The telescopes look like little big robot kids innocently gazing at the sky. Occasionally the birds catch the moths that flutter right next to the glass windows, making a small “thump” sound and fly off. (The chipmunks are smaller than a cheap hotdog sausage, so tiny!) There’s another observer on duty, but we both stare at our computers when we’re awake. Everything is silence except for the clock ticking.
If you’ve watched “Contact”, chances are you remember the scene of Dr. Arroway (Judy Foster) sitting alone (in open air) at a radio observatory, the antenna in the background, listening to the transmission with her headphones. We actually do no such romanticism. We sit in a room with four computer screens, schedule and monitor projects (with our eyes, not ears), and hope that everything does what it’s supposed to so that we don’t have to physically touch the antennas or any of the other machines.