Fingerstick - PTAS

Earlier this week I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, hence today’s macro photo of a blood droplet from a fingerstick, such as is used for testing blood glucose.

Sony A7iii w/Sony 90mm f2.8 Macro G
ISO200, 1/200, f13
Processed in Capture One 20 Pro & Photoshop

As you might imagine, I’m less than thrilled with this development, but given my family history, I am also not completely shocked. My A1C numbers have been climbing steadily over the last few years, and I fully recognize that I haven’t been as diligent with diet or exercise this past year. 2019 was rife with depressing and stressful events both personal, such as my mother’s death, my husband’s brush with unemployment, as well as national/global… *gestures at everything*. 

My father is a well-managed diabetic. His father was a poorly managed one, and plenty of other people I’m related to have lived with or died of the condition. I was warned several years ago that despite my generally healthy diet and not ideal, but certainly not sedentary lifestyle, my genetic predisposition put me at a higher risk than someone who ate and exerted themselves identically to me, but got a better roll of the genetic dice. 

My list of medical conditions is already rather considerable and I’m less than thrilled to add to it. But there’s a feeling I rarely associate with my medical status as well: shame. 

I’m intimately cognizant of the fact that not only could this development have been delayed or prevented, I was on a good course for doing so only a few years earlier, before I allowed myself to be derailed by other elements in my life. There’s little in my complex health situation that can be attributed to lifestyle choices, and I was unaware of how deeply I’d internalized some of the toxic messaging in our culture around diabetes in particular. 

With all the other daily struggles of being a visibly disabled person in our society, as well as dealing with chronic pain, and depression, I would not have expected this utterly predictable development to have thrown me off balance anywhere near as much as it has. 

It’s clear that shifting to a healthier lifestyle is going to involve more than just maintaining healthy blood sugar and getting more exercise. I’ve got some self-reflection and internal work to do, too. 

As a former student of mine was fond of saying “Oh great, another fucking oportunity for a life lesson.” 


Out In The Cold - PTAS

Today’s Picture Tells A Story finds me back in frigid Maine, where the temperature as I’m writing this is -1F. It’s a far cry from Florida’s colorful warmth, or the unseasonably high of 55F that greeted me when I got off the plane in Portland last weekend. 

There’s a stark beauty to winter in northern latitudes. Even traces of color, from evergreens, winter berries, and moss, become vibrant in their isolation. They stand out against the snow, where they’d be lost amidst the spring foliage and greenery. On a day of brutal cold such as this, the air is crystal clear, too cold to hold any moisture, and the icy blue of the sky seems to go on into infinity. 

It is profoundly quiet as well. The fallen snow deadens sound, though not as dramatically as when it’s falling, and there are no leaves to rustle or sticks to snap as I make my way through the undergrowth to where this photo was taken. Moreover, with the air bitingly cold, and the wind chill well into dangerously low digits, I am alone in the park as far as I can tell.

Sony A7iii w/ Sigma 14-24mm f2.8 DG DN Art
ISO100, 1/200, f10, @14mm
Processed in Capture One Pro 20 & Adobe Photoshop 2020

There’s a deeply rewarding sense of satisfaction at taking on the power of winter and being comfortable doing so. I’ve planned extensively for this outing, wearing four layers of clothing, stout insulated boots, heavy mittens, and carrying two electric hand warmers. Even so, I have to pace myself carefully, almost meditatively, to avoid an asthma attack, which can be triggered by both cold and exertion in my case. 

Amidst the peace and quiet of the snowy park, I’m also imminently aware of the fact that a moment’s carelessness could get me injured or killed in any number of ways. 

A slip into the waterfall or river that brought me out here to Shaw Park/Gambo Preserve could send me into shock remarkably fast, not to mention wreaking havoc on the thousands of dollars worth of camera gear strapped about my person. An ankle caught in the hidden rocks and fallen trees beneath the snow could cause a break or sprain that would make getting back to the car next to impossible, an especially dire risk in an area with poor cell reception. Behaviors I’d think nothing of in warm weather, such as stepping into a rushing stream, or kneeling on wet ground to get a better angle for a photo, risks tipping the delicate balance of protective layers between me and the dangerous air. 

Despite all of this, I know that my winter is a kitten compared to white tiger people in other areas experience. An excursion into a 12F day, even with high winds, may feel to someone on the North Dakota oil fields not unlike the weirdly balmy 55F weather that we had here last week. 

The sense of pride and relief I feel returning from taking pictures is almost primal in nature. Not only did I go out into a world where the very air was ready to kill me, but thanks to good planning, I did so in relative comfort.

It’s at once a powerful and absurd little victory, to face the elements and come through intact, but today, I’ll take it.

A Truck That's Aimin' High - PTAS

"Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day.
Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
And they said she's just a truck,
but she's a truck that's aiming high.
See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."

- Lyrics from "Fire in the Sky" by Kristoph Klover

Today's photo is of course, not of Columbia, which was lost during re-entry, along with her crew of seven, but rather of her younger sister, Atlantis. Retired along with the rest of the surviving space shuttles, Atlantis today rests on a plinth inside a purpose-built exhibition hall at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where I took this photo.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, the Space Transportation System (STS), better known as the Space Shuttle, was the lens through which space exploration was viewed in my formative years. Though lacking the earth-shattering newness of Apollo, the shuttles still provided plenty to be excited for. They were critical to building the International Space Station, humanity's lone outpost beyond our home world's atmosphere, as well as delivering (and servicing) the Hubble Space Telescope and other critical pieces of orbital infrastructure that have helped define our world, and shape our understanding of our place in the universe.

Sony A7iii w/Sony 24mm f1.4 GM | ISO640, 1/60, f1.6 | Processed in Capture One Pro 12

Despite two extremely high profile, utterly avoidable, fatal disasters, Challenger in January 1986 and the aforementioned Columbia in February of 2003, on a simple miles-traveled-per-fatality basis, no class of vehicle has ever been safer. That said, the STS program never lived up to its promises, and the retirement of the shuttles was an understandable decision.

Visiting Kennedy wasn't the end of my space-oriented day though. That evening, my father and I watched from his back porch in Poiciana, FL as SpaceX's Starlink 2 mission roared into the heavens atop a Falcon 9 rocket that was launching for its fourth time. It was the first time I ever witnessed a rocket launch in person, and even from just over fifty miles away (as the crow flies) it was an incredible sight.

If the shuttle was the defining space vehicle of my childhood, the Falcon has become that of my adulthood. With their stunning live streams, elegant vertical landings, and the kind of launch tempo that the STS program envisioned by achieved, it's hard not to be inspired by what SpaceX, and to a lesser extent their competitors in Rocket Lab and Blue Origin, have accomplished.

Yet, even among the excitement, the fact that space flight is being driven today by corporations rather than the government leaves me conflicted. I am not the biggest fan of our government, and even I know that NASA's scientific and exploratory mission was always paired with advancing the development of military technology. At the same time, nothing I've seen in the last twenty years has led me to be overly trusting of private industry either. Whether by malice, incompetence, or both, modern technology companies have shown themselves to have no compunctions around screwing over their customers in nearly uncountable ways.

The SpaceX mission dad and I watched launch is a great example of my conflicted feelings.

SpaceX's Starlink project aims to create a global network of high-speed, low-latency, satellites capable of providing internet service anywhere on earth. In the process, they will more than double the total number of objects in low earth orbit, and there are already concerns that Starlink satellites could disrupt astronomical observations and the tracking of potentially earth-impacting asteroids. Though SpaceX is taking a variety of steps to try and ameliorate those issues.

Beyond those concerns, one corporation controlling a global internet network would wield an incredible amount of power. In a world without anything resembling global net neutrality, they could shape everything from politics, to health, to people's fundamental understanding of the world and their place in it. This is especially true in parts of the world where today there is no internet access at all.

But then I look at Kashmir in India, where the government shut down all internet access, as part of their ongoing legal and societal oppression of that country's Muslim minority. Starlink couldn't be shut down by any one government or entity, unless they could convince Starlink's owners (presumably SpaceX) to do so. Additionally, as someone privileged to have reliable internet most places I go, it's arrogant as hell for me to now say that a project to bring access to such an incredible and life-changing resource, might not be a good idea.

When I was a kid watching on TV as Space Shuttles roared into space, my feelings of wonder were untainted by such nuanced concerns, and that gives me a certain nostalgia for the lovely Atlantis. But nostalgia is inherently a thing oriented to the past, and when it comes to human endeavors in space, there's plenty of excitement, albeit with a healthy dose of trepidation, on the horizon.

 

And yes, I appreciate the irony of using Klover's lyrics, with their reference Columbia's first flight, for a post featuring a picture of Atlantis. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board determined that given the chance, Atlantis could have rescued the Columbia's crew, had NASA been willing to acknowledge that Columbia's launch went awry, and devoted her mission to investigating the extent of the damage.