The Eagle Has Left Us.

It's been a bad week be an Armstrong. First Lance got his seven Tour de France titles stripped, and now Neil, American hero and transcendent human, has died at 82. (And who knows, maybe Louis' reputation will suffer a crippling blow after the public once again decides that jazz is the devil's music.) After being shot into the sky in a metal tube filled mostly with a highly explosive substance, hurdling through a freezing vacuum with radioactive particles whizzing by, landed the damn thing on an object 238,900 miles away, then brought it back, all with less technology than a modern graphing calculator, Armstrong died of complications from heart surgery, a reminder that all our bodies will eventually give out, no matter how many awesome things we do with them. This is back when computers still had front doors, TVs were black and white, and America was still getting to know its good friend the microwave oven. A loaf of bread probably cost a nickel or something. But Neil Armstrong, his sidekick Buzz Aldrin, and the intrepid folks at NASA said "fuck it, we're not going to let any of that stop us," because the people who brought you Tang and pudding cups can do anything. I'm not sure if it was a special kind of madness or just confidence in what he was doing, but to go up there where there is no hope of any kind of rescue if the slightest thing goes wrong takes some serious stones.

It's hard to imagine what it would be like to be alive when it happened. I grew up knowing that people had been to the moon. But to be sitting in your living room, watching it happen in (almost, thanks to light-lag) real-time on your tiny black and white TV must have been an experience. And obviously I can't speak for the mood of the time, but I think Neil Armstrong made everyone really proud to be human. I suppose Bolt makes us feel good that a human can run really fast and Phelps makes us proud that a human with mild Asperger's can swim really fast, and that crazy Kazakh woman showed us that human beings can lift really heavy things. Shakespeare, Picasso and Beethoven made us proud of what can come out of a human's brain. The pyramids and Ankwar Wat make us proud of what humans can do when they work together. But one of our own using a contraption complied from various bits and pieces of the earth to leave it and land on another rock floating around in space, that's just remarkable.

I'll use no hyperboles, I won't say it's the most remarkable thing a human has ever done, or that it's the crowning achievement of our species. But what Neil Armstrong and his forgotten sidekick Buzz Aldrin did is something that can inspire us all to be better humans, better sentient entities, and better celestial voyagers as we travel aboard God's Spaceship Earth.

A Photo Album (In Words and Phrases)

"Where do we go from here

When there's nowhere else to go but down?"

-Nightmare River Band, Where do we Go?

As if Mark Zuckerberg weren't already enough of a dick, now he's making you depressed. According to researchers at Utah Valley University (where they apparently don't have much to study), the more time you spend on facebook, the less satisfied you are with your own life. This is presumably because on facebook, one sees only photos of the good moments, the ones they want people to see. Because no one is going to post that picture where they're puking their liver into a herpes-infested toilet.

Unfortunately, I cannot reverse this trend with an album full of photos of me at my most mundane or pathetic. But, if I could, this is what an album depicting the last few months would contain:

• My housemates and I watching six seasons of How I Met Your Mother in two and a half weeks. The look on my face is a mixture of existential despair and "what's that whacky Barney Stinson gonna do next?"
• The strange substance that came out of my nose at the end of my weeklong sinus infection, the eighth in almost as many months.
• My hands in mid-gesture, the kind I make when I'm trying to beat writer's block. Apparently the words are somewhere out there in the air and I just have to wave my hands around until I bump into them. Maybe they're in a different room. Maybe they're on facebook...
• Our laundry machine leaking, set among the miscellaneous bike parts, paint cans, and busted furniture that populates our little cement backyard.
• Me doing the dejected Charlie Brown walk, away from the closet where I have put away my running shoes for the last time.
• Me eating carrots in a seminar. There's a little drool coming out the side of my mouth, and I'm probably chewing with my mouth half open.
• Me taking nyquil so I can go to sleep.
• My half filled-out Peace Corps application, with visible crumple marks.
• Me playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
• Me playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 several hours later.
• Me checking my email for the seventeenth time in one day.
• An series of photos that depict me stealing various condiments from restaurants.
• Me doing a handlepull in the parking lot of Downtown Disney.
• Me slumped uselessly on the couch, with my laptop. I might be watching the discovery channel, it's hard to tell from this angle. (There are many photos like this one.)
• Me standing with all the nothing I caught while fishing at Lake Cachuma. I am tired because some very loud bros drove up to our campsite at four thirty in the morning.
• A celebratory meal of Ling-Ling potstickers and bin candy. I'm using some sort of filter on instagram to make it look more delicious.
• Me holding up my ticket stub from the Tacoma Glass Blowing Museum. THIS is what I came all the way to Tacoma for!
• My friend and I beta-testing a drinking game for the computer game Civilization IV at some ungodly hour of the morning.
• Me spilling a five dollar pitcher of PBR in a crowded bar. Whatever, it's only five bucks and a I'll never see these people again.
• The look in my face as I try to explain to some kid that as your tutor, I can help you write your essay, but I cannot dictate an essay to you.
• A picture of me being broke because no one wants to hire an ethical writing tutor.
• My hand reaching out from behind the bathroom door, being handed a roll of toilet paper. This also has some kind of artsy instagram filter and/or border on it.
• Easy Mac! So much Easy Mac!
• Playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 yet again. Shit, what time is it?
• Minute three (out of five) of deciding what I want from a vending machine.
• Me drinking alone.
• Arguing with my roommate over dubstep. Despite his assurances, it has not grown on me. Turn that shit off!
• Me pounding three emergen-C packs and five ibuprofen tablets to get through my midterm with yet another sinus infection.
• Me spilling a Jamba Juice as I walk into class late.
• A sequence of photos taken as I make a five hour drive listening only to Mariachi and Norteño music on the radio cause my tape deck don't work.
• Me inspecting myself for bedsores after I have only got up only to eat and relieve myself for the past three days, for no real good reason.
• Me at a coffee shop, four coffees deep and not a single word of material.
• My phone showing no new text messages.
• Me eating the free food at the meeting of some sort of club or organization, which I couldn't name for the life of me.
• Me trying to wash a dish in a sink that is literally overflowing with dirty dishes. Fuck it, I'll get it later.
• Me cleaning my housemate's blood out of my sweatpants. Because things get a little rowdy around here sometimes.
• My roommate and I holding up several mice we have just either bludgeoned to death or shot with an airosoft rifle.
• Me drinking four bottles of two-buck chuck, all to myself, as I watch the x-files, because "this is the only way I can reconcile myself with myself."
• Guys? How long has this been in the fridge?
• Me after two consecutive all-nighters, fueled by four monster energy drinks, five cups of coffee, one redbull, several doses of adderall, and God knows how many cups of tea, surrounded by a whole cart's worth of library books and candy bar wrappers.
• Me playing real-world Tetris, trying to throw all my stuff into my car after we basically got evicted.
• Me seated between a morbidly obese man and a man who smells as though he's decomposing, on a flight to Detroit, of all places.
• Me overdressed at Lou's Coney Island (evidently some sort of chain restaurant) with my great uncle Bob, a Seventh Day Adventist who comes here because "their hotdogs are all beef!"
• Me getting drunk in an airport bar with my mom.
• Me downing my emergency flask at 12:30 in the afternoon on public transportation, then one of me subsequently losing my glasses.
• Me making a mess trying to mix all four flavors of Jack in the Box dipping sauces together on the little foil thing that your burger comes wrapped in.
• Me using my inhaler, because I'm cool like that.
• Something representing my laziness about learning html, like, for example, the layout of the Ozone Shack.
• Me sitting at the computer, on facebook, wondering why everyone else seems to have such eventful lives.

Feel better now? Because let's face it, most people aren't that interesting most of the time.