Experiences and People

WHY HELLO EVERYBODY. I just pulled off a Tyler Oakley intro and I have no idea why. Probably because it's like 6 am now which is right about 6 pm for me because I'm once again fucking nocturnal. Happens every fucking holiday period. Or just about any period of time where I don't go to school for at least 3 days. And it's been more than a month since I made any real blog posts, the one I made last doesn't really count because it was a rant. So I want to talk about experiences and people, without further ado, lets begin.

Experiences make people. I don't know if you've ever heard it before or or seen it before somewhere. I'll be honest with you I don't either. I've probably heard this from somewhere before but I never really got to appreciate it fully. Or maybe I just never sat down hard enough and long enough to really digest what it meant. So recently I've been watching Crash Course (please check them out yeah?), it's somewhat like Kurz Gesagt (please check these guys too), they make videos less than 10 minutes long about various topics and giving you a crash course on it. You can see where the name came from. I came upon it some couple weeks ago while studying Chemistry and a friend passed the link along to me. It was good help, got me a passing grade, not as good as I would've hoped but that's not the focus here. Anyway, so I snooped around and I found my favourite topic - Astronomy. Space has always been a huge fascination of mine, in case you've yet to realise.

So the host of Crash Course Astronomy is a fellow called Phil Plait and well he might not seem all that interesting really, hell you might not even have heard of the guy. I know I haven't but he is an incredibly knowledgeable person. He even has an asteroid named after him, 165347 philplait. Isn't it just fucking amazing? Not everyone can go around saying oh you know, I've got a rock floating in space with my name on it. And he first got hook onto Astronomy when he was a kid, 5 years old, his father brought home a telescope. According to Plait:

"He aimed it at Saturn that night. One look, and that was it. I was hooked."

And honestly I think it's just absolutely AWESOME. He even talks about it on the Saturn video. Personally I've never gotten to see Saturn with my own eyes, though this year I've managed to see Venus and Jupiter in the night sky for they were bright enough. It's a real pity that I live in bright bright Singapore, the light pollution is so incredibly intense. For city folk like me, you honestly never truly realise how bright your city is until you wander far enough into the wilderness and look back to see the glow of lights in the distance. Even then, it's still far too bright to see the Milky Way. I have no idea when it was that I got so hooked onto Astronomy and space. I couldn't place an event to it. Perhaps all along I had it in me and I just never really knew. I remember watching almost hour long documentaries on space. I actually hunted for them. At the age of merely 14 I knew about solar wind, Venus' atmosphere and what not. Most of my peers don't even know the age of the Solar System. 4.6 billion years, in case you were wondering. Or 6000, if you believe in that shit. Probably, the strongest event I'd say that shaped my passion for the stars would be that one trip when I was 16 back in 2013, when there was a farm stay organised by our school and we got to walk out into the farm at night. The stars, it was a sight I've never seen before and a sky I'd be glad to die under. And we didn't get to sit for a moment to truly appreciate the spectacle before us. Ah well.

But I digress, you see, it's truly the experiences a person's had that makes them who they are. Phil was fascinated as a child by the sight of Saturn, me by the stars I saw. And your experiences and your interpretations of it makes you. So have awesome experiences, and be an awesome person.