Whimsical.

I just love that word, don’t you? It makes me think… well, actually it makes me think of cat jewelry, come to think of it, because I used to be obsessed with cats when I was little (probably because I was allergic and couldn’t have one), and I used to pore over catalogs that sold crap like that. I think they used the word ‘whimsical’ to describe every other item.

I guess the word reminds me of childhood in general, though, and all the interests I had back then that seem irrelevant to daily life now. I went through a phase when I was fascinated by dinosaurs, for instance. And the solar system. And the ocean. (Who didn’t want to be an astronaut, an archaeologist, and an oceanographer at some point? Was anyone not obsessed with National Geographic?)

I vaguely remember going to the planetarium with my family when I was little, because my dad worked at the University of Arizona. I was transfixed, and felt like I was on a spaceship looking directly into outer space. I’ve been meaning to go back to the planetarium again for a long time, hoping that I would be able to recapture that sense of wonder. Then this past Christmas, my two and a half year old nephew got this “smart” book on the solar system as a gift, which my boyfriend and I were probably more excited about than he was. I’d never heard of “smart” books before, but they’re kind of like “smart” everything else: you touch the pictures with a special pen and it tells you stuff about them. (Meanwhile I was very amused at how worked up my boyfriend became about the fact that Pluto is no longer considered a planet. “Who gets to decide that? Seriously?! You can’t just take away one of the planets!”)

Anyway, this reminded us that the planetarium had been on our “list” for a long time, so we finally went last weekend. I thought it would be a let-down, considering I’d seen so many pictures from NASA, and, I figured, what can they really do that’s cooler than an IMAX?  

But, as it turned out, I still thought it was totally amazing (probably because the ceiling is dome-shaped like you’re looking at the night sky), and I learned a lot. For instance! Did you know:

• Venus, not Mercury, is the hottest planet in the solar system. It’s like 800 degrees and full of volcanoes. Nasty place.
• Earth escapes being scorched by the sun’s solar flares because of the magnetosphere (which is shaped like an ellipse… and the Northern Lights are caused by the reentry of the magnetosphere into the poles.)
• Life is “carbon based” because… well, on one level, carbon is one of the very few elements on the periodic table that likes to make four bonds, the maximum that are allowed for a single element, which makes it a great backbone element. But also, the tiniest creatures in the ocean actually eat CO2, so they’re made up of carbon. (You are what you eat, right?) Then bigger organisms eat them, and on up the food chain. But it all starts with CO2 gas! (Technically silicon can make four bonds too, but SiO2 is a solid and not a gas at all reasonable temperatures, which makes it a lot harder for small life forms to assimilate it. Perhaps this is why we are carbon and not silicon-based life forms.)
• The whole sky is full of constellations, but the ones that were chosen for the Zodiac are the ones that happen to fall into a line across the horizon, each at its zenith during the respective month (or period) of the Zodiac.
• Not just Saturn, but all the rest of the planets from then on, have rings around them.
• Jupiter isn’t the only planet with its own hurricane (the red eye… which according to Sam Kean in “The Disappearing Spoon” is “a hurricane three times wider than the earth that hasn’t dissipated after centuries of furious storming”)… Neptune has a huge one as well.

The moral of this circuitous story is this: I don’t spend enough time just being in awe of the incredible universe we live in, do you?

Also, suddenly I find myself wanting to teach 7th grade science. (Or maybe take it again!)