What Were Astronauts Like When They First Returned From Outer Space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: They Have Something,

“What were astronauts like when they first returned from outer space? Nurse Dee O'Hara: ‘They have something, a sort of wild look, I would say, as if they had fallen in love with a mystery up there, sort of as if they haven’t got their feet back on the ground, as if they regret having come back to us… a rage at having come back to earth. As if up there they’re not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body. Did you know that for months John [Glenn] and Wally [Schirra] and Scott [Carpenter] went around looking at the sky? You could speak to them and they didn’t answer, you could touch them on the shoulder and they didn’t notice; their only contact with the world was a dazed, absent, happy smile. They smiled at everything and everybody, and they were always tripping over things. They kept tripping over things because they never had their eyes on the ground.’”

— Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (via m-l-rio)

in another timeline wes anderson is a middle school theater teacher bankrupting his art department with the most over-budget production of suessical the musical jr. that suburban houston will ever see

Erika Lee Sears, Double Vision Means Double the Snacks, 2021

There’s a reason a sewing kit includes scissors, a wood shop has a saw, and a kitchen is full of knives. In order to build something, to create something on purpose, you have to be prepared to cut away what’s extra. A bolt of cloth does not a blanket make, a piece of wood a shelf, nor a loaf of bread a sandwich. When you snip off frayed bits of string, cut the wood into shape, or slice the end off a loaf of bread you are creating, with the act of removal, something closer to what you desire. 

Now let’s say you’re not sewing a blanket, you’re not building a shelf, not making a sandwich. Let’s say you’re crafting a life in which you are happy. You will end up removing things. You’ll leave partners, stop talking to family members, let go of friends. You’ll move apartments, lose jobs, change wardrobes. And you will feel their absence. You’ll look at the scraps of cloth, the odd angles of wood, the stale end of the loaf. But that cloth couldn’t keep you warm and that tiny corner of wood can’t store books. You wouldn’t be full from that little bit of bread or happy with that person. In the art of creating there is the act of removal and it is essential.