It's been several days of lazying around without writing anything; not that I don't have a topic, just laziness. However, now I don't really have a good topic. When I think of something writeable, I usually write down a title. This works fine if I pick it up soon enough, I can usually still remember what I want to write and some cue lines. This time when I have a couple of days-old titles, I don't have a clue on how to flesh those out.
One of the titles is Mike Mullane. That's the name of an astronaut, who wrote the book I just finished reading a couple of days ago. That guy is pretty good at writing. Sometimes he would resort to the accumulation of dazzling adjectives, to express some of the poetic thoughts; unfortunately that feels like too much condiments in a fine dish, which tends to spoil it. That said, I still like the book; simply because it's a book about his own life, and his life is as an astronaut.
I guess most boys once had a dream about space trips. What we have never realized is the risk incurred in this dream. The space shuttles have more problems than Microsoft software; some are design flaws, some are simply fatal bugs. If I were to take such a wonderful trip with a 90% chance of survival, would I take it? That's a very good question. I want to jump up and say yes, only to balk when seeing my wife's face in my mind's eye.
I like the narrative tone of Mike Mullane, he was telling his real stories, his joy when getting a mission assignment, his fear before the launch, and their faked smile in group photos before launch. These tiny little details are drastically different from the pompous official propaganda, morphing steely and brave astronauts into earthlings with joy, tear, and most importantly, fear. Therefore, the lives lost in the failed Challenger and Columbia missions are no more represented by weary numbers, they are sons, daughters, fathers, monthers, and friends.
The other book I skimmed through in this week is
Generation Debt. The author is a beautiful girl graduated from Yale. The main topic in this book is the yonger generation are facing much more dire problems than the previous generation, listing education cost, job availability, future prospect etc in a hopeless tone; although the last chapter is named Waking Up and Taking Charge, the wake up call is dry and weary. It is true that the government, and the whole elder generation, are slowly going down a path that would result in deserting the younger and providing them a dire future by living in the present. However, it is hard to be convinced that the minimum wage here is more than three times of the daily living expense for almost half of the world population. Anyway, this is a complicated problem with intricate reasonings, I'm not going to dive deeper, so that book was put away.
