meteor showers, etc.
Last night I stepped outside around 3AM to take a peak at the rare Leonids meteor shower. Bundled up in warm clothes, I layed down timidly in the sktechy alley behind my apartment and gazed up at the overly light-poluted LA sky hoping for a few fireballs to provoke my imagination.
Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing shooting stars….but the term ‘meteor shower’ evokes images more like the famous 1833 coming of the Leonids, when the sky was literally ‘showered’ with falling stars such that people were roused in the middle of the night to come out and witness the end of the world unfolding before them! Hype aside, that’s certainly not what I experienced last night.
I know this isn’t a direct comparison… but this gives me the same kind of feeling I got on a cold night when I was a little kid and my parents were roused to a frenzied search around the house to find that there was a, “draft coming in the front door!” Me… not understanding the word ‘draft’, was sadly looking to the front door and all out the windows up and down the street for the giraffe… Imagine my disappointment!
Now I think I’ve got most of my words figured out at this point in my life, but in my quest for idealism I must ask why they call them ‘meteor showers’ when they know that aint right? These more typical celestial events, that bring us outside to gaze at the sky for perhaps a glimpse of a small slice of happenings of the cosmos, should be called something more like ‘meteor slightly drippy faucets’. Then they won’t keep getting my hopes up!