Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
Heartbreak takes more forms than we often talk about. Relationship-based heart ache is the most commonly referenced amongst thinkers and talkers and writers and scripters. But, for me, there’s this heartbreak I’ve been dealing with for nearly two years that has nothing to do with romance.
It was one of those crazy weekends that is almost so perfect, it doesn’t make sense. You look back and think: fuck, that could have been a movie. Did that actually happen? But there was no long-term happy ending there. And in the final hours of said epic weekend, the narrative changed from the best moments of my adult life to the most painful. I was walking from a Seattle light rail stop to a hotel when I stopped in a salon to get my nails done before my flight. As I waited, my phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“Everything alright?”
“…”
It’s weird how you just know your life is about to change because of a silence. How the quiet stands in for a moment before a wave of hurt drowns you. For those that have ever lived in a place where tornadoes are prevalent, it’s the way the air feels in your lungs before devastation occurs. It is calm. And present and eerily quiet. My papa died in his front yard under his pine trees. It wasn’t a painful end. It was a perfectly simple one. He was exactly where he wanted to be. With his trees. Eyes to the skies.
All the self-help books and therapists I’ve encountered say that healing is a process. That mourning the loss of an important person in your life hits you in waves and bursts, often disrupting our lives when we least expect it. For some reason, it has been in the second year of mourning that I’ve had the most trouble. I find myself wishing he could see all the things I’ve accomplished since he left us. That I could send him the link to my name appearing in the New York Times. Wishing he would have been on the call list the day we found out my little brother got into Harvard. I think of the way he used to hold my hand, even as a grown ass woman, and ask, “what have you been up to lately?”
When I was 7 or 8, I was in the car late at night with my papa after spending a day at the lake. We were talking about the stars and each of their meanings.
“Do you see the Big Dipper? It looks like a big ladle.”
“I think I see it. That one right there?”
“Yes. And do you know what it’s good for?”
“No.”
“The Big Dipper will help you find the North Star. And if you find the North Star, you can use it if you’re ever lost in the woods or on the water. It will help you navigate your way home.”
My family spent a lot of time outdoors, so I know that my papa meant it quite literally. As an adult, I actually do know how to use the North Star to navigate. My grandfather owned a Boundary Waters Canoe Outfitters business for most of his professional life. He took thousands of people into the woods of northern Minnesota and Canada gave them the gift of nature. The gift of access to our earth. But to do that, he had to make it safe. He was proud of the fact that no one had ever been seriously injured or drowned on his watch. I think there are probably hundreds of kids around the world who learned how to find the North Star because of my papa, and that makes me feel like I’m honoring him even more.
The woods I’ve been in for the last two months wasn’t filled with trees and deer and bear. It’s been an emotional woods. One where the dipper can’t guide me home, because I literally don’t know where home is right now. As I work to figure that out, I feel my papa guiding me. Telling me to be brave. To be bold. To be unafraid. And to trust my instincts. When my instincts told me to get a tattoo, I listened.
Last year, I remember reading a blog post from Miss Melificent about getting a tattoo as part of her healing process. I thought it was a lovely marker of how life gives us chapters and sometimes we have the right to close them and open new ones. Now, two weeks after getting the tattoo, I understand it even more. The moment I stood up and saw the ink on my arm and realized its permanence there, I realized that I had felt incomplete without it.
On the hardest days, I imagine him in his canoe, paddling into nothingness. An eternal symbol of what life actually is. A journey that doesn’t always make sense, but if we keep pressing on, we’ll get home eventually.
Going out in the middle of the night to watch the Perseids Meteor shower is one of my favorite traditions. Last night, I did that very thing and it was lovely. Peak rates were about 20 meteors (super dark observatories report double that number), which means about every 3 to 5 minutes, we saw a little activity. It was lovely. It’s not too late though, you can still check out the Perseids tonight.
If you’re just getting started with astronomy and want to get yourself geared up from a technical perspective, I suggest checking out this post we did last year on all the tools, books and apps you’ll need.
Happy meteor spotting.
So many of my fandoms are grounded in one shared thing: the sky. Things traveling through it. Characters living out in it. Things blowing up in it. It’s Doctor Who. It’s Star Trek. It’s Star Wars. It’s nearly every book I loved as a child. Understanding the sky seems like a natural extension of this love.
I also had the unique experience of growing up in a place where I could see the stars any night of the week. As such, I’m really damn good at pointing out constellations and I’ve seen my share of meteorological events. Spotting a shooting star? Easy. Knowing where to go for meteor showers. Simple. If you you’ve always wanted to extend your fandom and do the same, here’s how I suggest you get started.
Get a Travel Telescope: When you get WAY into it, you can go ahead and get a much more high powered machine. But for now, you just need something portable with high magnification and clarity.I suggest the Celestron Travel Telescope.
Study up! Here’s some great books for beginners:
National Geographic Backyard Guide to the Night Sky
NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe
Apps will be your best friend: Honestly, you can’t even imagine how much easier star gazing is now than it was 10 years ago. With these apps, you will be spotting constellations in 5 minutes. It’s that easy. Try these:
Star Walk (iTunes)
Meteor Shower Calendar (Google) (iTunes)
Sky Guide (iTunes)
Google’s SkyMap
Charts are great for spots where you don’t have reception:
Orion Star Target Planisphere
2014 Moon Calendar
US Space Travel Timeline (FREE!)
Are you a novice astronomer? What do you suggest budding astronomers pick up for their newest hobby?
This week has felt disproportionately long. Maybe it’s because my birthday is coming and I wish I could run away from it. I don’t want to get older, but yet, it’s what humans do. And with no time machine in sight, well, yeah. It’s happening.
I’m celebrating the only way I know how: with copious amounts of ice cream. I’ll let you know how that goes, because there’s a DIY coming that makes sense of this caloric binge-fest, but that will have to wait for the weekend.
Until then, here’s the things that have been making me happy.
I’m not sure how else to explain this… so I’ll let the New York Times do it:
Cosmic Supermom Discovered
“Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It’s a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.”
Yeah, that’s exciting. While everyone else is freaking out about the “supermom” - I’m way more excited about the star babies. SO MANY STAR BABIES. I feel like that was a toy of my 80s childhood, but Google is failing me. Anyone else remember something like this?
Get Out of a Writing Rut
I’m notoriously manic about my writing methods. It’s all binge and purge. (Sorry for the gross analogy, but it’s true.) I write in these psychotic whirls of emotional vomit and then I go through these crazy edits that leave me with very little copy. Then, I get irritated with myself and the inevitable distaste for said habit leads me to skip the keyboard altogether. I needed a boost to get back at it. These 30 tips from crazy great authors really did help.
I just wanted to share this picture of my Lord of the Rings LEGO set with you because those damn shorty legs get me every time. SQUEE.
Hey, did you know I was a tech contributor for Apartment Therapy? Gee, hucks, wow. There’s lots of good stuff to read there, including this:
Don’t Be Afraid of Neon in the Office
Mini Smartphone Projectors: Bringing Movies to a Backyard Near You
(Picture via NASA’s Chandra)
A giant space blob glowing from within? How could I not post it!
Here’s the details:
A new research study has shed light on the power source of a rare vast cloud of glowing gas in the early Universe. The observations show for the first time that this giant “Lyman-alpha blob"—one of the largest single objects known—must be powered by galaxies embedded within it.
