My husband turned 33 on Wednesday, and to celebrate his encroaching agedness, we decided to honor the big ol’ little kid in him and went to the Air and Space Museum to look at some airplanes.

Jordan is proof positive that you can retain your sense of wonder well into adulthood, as evidenced by these photos:

I have to admit: I’m not quite so bowled over by mere airplanes. Oh, I do my best to see how such technology actually touched history, how people flew inside them and died or lived depending on the pilot’s action. But even staring at the Enola Gay, I have trouble wrapping my head around it. The size and the gravity. In a way, I feel the same way as I do when I look at a truck, or a bus. It’s hard to reconcile those rivets and metal with wider historical events.

No, what I liked most about the Air and Space Museum were the little things–the tiny artifacts of every day life, particularly the every day lives of the cosmo- and astronauts who were the first brave people up in space. I can see how a tube of spaceborscht or spacecoffee could fit in someone’s hand, imagine what it would look or feel like as they tried to apply make-up despite weightlessness. My fascination with these objects led to what could be considered a photo series: stuff . . . IN SPACE!

Today’s not a Tuesday, and so this isn’t supposed to be a post about writing (it is also not a Thursday, when I was supposed to post this, but we don’t need to talk about that, do we?). But I have to say that I think this fascination with the minutiae of every day life–and my inability to wrap my head around these big technological innovations–is evident in my SF. I know what kinds of knives are in my characters’ galleys. I know how their toilets work, and the kind of games the kids play on the ship. I know what kind of food they eat, of course. But ask me how the artificial gravity works on their ship–I can’t tell you without squinting and stammering. Part of this is because I don’t really have much of a Science Brain (and part of it is because it’s impossible! Really, go read about artificial gravity sometime), but part of it is because I’m less interested in that, too. I’m not so sure what my ship is fueled by, and part of me Does Not Care. But whether there are dogs on their ship, and where they get their leather, and what the little babies in the hatcheries drink? That’s the stuff I find fascinating.

Three days after the LOST finale, the smoke is beginning to clear. My own rage over the direction that the finale took us is starting to subside. While I could focus on the bits that made me most angry initially—the hackneyed, soft-focus reunions that weren’t true to some of the characters (Shannon and Sayid? Really?); the incomprehensible, slap-dash pacing and plotting (how many times does Ben Linus have to switch sides?); the small, niggling inconsistencies raised in the last ten minutes (if Unitarian-Church-Purgatory is a place without time, how can someone stay there “for awhile”?), I won’t. Other people can discuss those things, and probably more thoroughly and better than I.

Instead, what I want to focus on is what’s proven to be LOST’s overarching theme: the battle between faith and skepticism. Because, though the writers didn’t offer us many answers in the two and a half hour finale, they did offer us one: that the search for answers at all is in vain. That faith rules and science, well, drools.
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