In 1986, my dad told me to look into a telescope lens and pointed out a blurry spot somewhere in space. He told me that was Halley’s Comet, a sight that passes by earth once in 75 years.
It wasn’t much of an awesome sight — it was more of a smudge, nothing close to comet pictures you see — but it was fascinating nonetheless. Not like Shoemaker-Levy, but I digress.
My inculcation of astronomy began earlier, when Dad pointed Orion’s belt out in the night sky. That led to the rest of Orion. And Canis Major running behind him (and Canis Minor too). And the Hunter’s shield up against the charging Taurus, the star Aldebaran its glinting, angry red eye.
Soon I was checking out Gemini’s Castor and Pollux. Then Scorpio, and its red star Antares. And Sagittarius. And the Southern Cross. And Corona Borealis. And…
By my teens, I was out in the backyard on a good night looking out for the Big Dipper or Bootes. I was more fascinated by the mythology behind the constellations, and though I wasn’t the smartest in the physics, I picked up some of it. I was in the Astronomy Club of what is probably the geekiest junior college in the country.
I’m not the most hardcore backyard astronomy enthusiast today. I kept some of my old astronomy books (out of sentimental reasons, because we have the Internet now), and a star chart in my diver’s log folder but that’s about it.
Though sometimes I look up into the night sky and go, “Hey, that’s Scorpio.” My friends would ask: “How do you see all that?” (Once or twice they said “Don’t do that. Not cool.”)
To answer: Probably, years of staring at the night sky. (And yes, maybe it’s not cool to admit that.)
Anyway.
A few months ago, I started on a project that was celestial and astronomy-related.
I recall thinking: “Great, something right up my alley. You couldn’t have picked a better writer to do this.”
The research was killer, but at least it delved into a topic I loved. Putting in the hours (and leaving this blog quiet for so long) was tiring but it was a labour of love on so many levels.
At the same time, it seemed that I might be in Shanghai in July.
On July 22, 2009, the longest solar eclipse of the century fall over northern India, central China and part of the Pacific Ocean and Japan. If I was in China, I would get to see the event.
(Totality lasted over 6 minutes; the next longer solar eclipse would occur on June 13, 2132 — you would have more luck waiting for Halley’s to swing by again.)
Never in my life did it ever occur to me that I might get to see a solar eclipse. But at the same time, I knew how things would eventually pan out.
And true enough, when the time came to send the team up, the tech guy and the art director went up. And rightly so. At one point they wanted to send just the tech guy up (it was a tech job), but I did voice out to my boss that if anything, the art director should go up too as it would be good that someone help document what’s happening and other stuff, all of which would be visual-video related. Writers, well, they write from wherever there’s a good Internet connection and send the words over. It’s often like that. On a job with sizable budget, the art guys fly to fancy places to shoot a pack shot while the writer stays behind. I have a friend who wrote easily twenty headlines for a campaign themed along the lines of Restaurants of the World. Guess who went to all of the restaurants and who didn’t.
But that’s how it is. If you’re the agency and you have a limited budget, you’d do the same thing. In a way, I understood why it’s unfair like this.
Still, it sucked. S.U.C.K.E.D.
It sucked big time last weekend when after working all of Saturday I went home and sat alone in my room and the realisation sank in. I felt so down. I felt so down a friend had to hug me from halfway across the world. I felt so down because this would have meant so much to me. Because the others wouldn’t have known or cared about the difference between astronomy and astrology, quarks and quasars, the Horsehead Nebula and the Large Magellanic Cloud, V838 Monocerotis and spaghettification.
I’m glad my colleagues will be there to see it. I just wished I could join them. But c’est la vie. Unfair. You just fight every day in the hopes of being on the winning side. This one I lost. I could write all about eclipses, I just couldn’t see one.
The funny part is, part of what I’m writing, I’m writing like I was there in Shanghai and gushing about how awesome it was. Mind you, the whole thing would have been hard work, but I wouldn’t have minded.
And now that it’s all over, everyone’s celebrating the closure of a successful project. Which I am too.
But somehow, I can’t help but feel like something’s still hanging. I’m not satisfied. Part of me is eager to jump into the next project that would give a sense of a rush of excitement again. Part of me realises that I could spend my entire life in front of a computer screen if I wasn’t careful.
I felt a great urge to get out. Again.
I was so close to the longest eclipse of my lifetime. And yet 3,800 kilometers so far.
Such is a writer’s lot.
