Space

parent-child dynamics are soooo crazy. i love you i resent you i can't stand you i adore you i pity you. and still watching your hair get a little more grey every time i see you makes my stomach feel weird

Love comes back around

Sitting at the airport at 2am

Thinking about love and relationships and how they encompass so much of our lives

How someone you think you’d never love again becomes a life long partner

How a long time friendship turns into a steamy love story

How some people could never really move on from a love that was lost

How two ex lovers, one day, can’t be in the same room because feelings

How we miss our pets when we travel for a bit

How mum’s sometimes live for their kids

We go about our little lives but there is a big part of us and simply wants to love and be loved

Franca Afegbua was a Nigerian beautician and politician who represented Bendel North in the Nigerian Senate in 1983. She was the first elected woman senator in Nigeria.

On the verge 

This is not a poem or poetry, it’s rambling, I feel close to tears not for anything in particular but because I think I feel everything and nothing all at once, i want them to come get me and make me feel better, i want them to call but i know I don’t want to pick up, I want them to stay and I want them to go, I want the opportunities but I don’t know if I can manage, I want ice cream, berry blast and suya, I want to be home so bad, I want to close the door of my room and disappear, I want to ball my eyes out.

I want to not care so much, while simultaneously caring about everything, I wish I had more bandwidth, I feel loose at the hems, I feel too overstimulated but somehow bored, I want to not exist, I want to not feel, I want to sleep so deeply and only wake up when necessary, I want love, I want to be wanted but also not care about being wanted, I want to move out but stay put.

Nothing helps, nothing helps, should I have fought harder, why does life have so much to do with fighting, even plants fight each other for sunlight, can being alive even ever be categorized as peaceful, I think to be alive is chaos, living is chaotic, the entire universe is chaos with everything hanging on a delicate balance.

This too shall pass, Abi is that this too shall end, anyone Sha, social media is shit, the economy is shit, can I manage my life, myself. Knowing there is something special about myself doesn’t make me feel special, does anyone feel so uncomfortable being seen as I do? I don’t want to need anyone or anything, why do we all need sustenance, why can’t life be just a little easier, to be Nigerian feels like you drew the short straw, do you think we draw straws for the kind of life we get to live?

I passed out once, I think about it sometimes the simple and quiet emptiness of not being conscious or could we also say of not existing, I feel nothing but a low buzz of everything, I know it’s there, I am just disconnected

Monday

Monday feels different these days, not anxious about the work I am doing or not wanting to do the work, I am doing.

I love what I do, I am happy I get to do this, but it also has its drawbacks, like, when will I get my invoices paid, will I find another opportunity to keep me fed and kept?

And so the anxiety is now about surviving, not the work and in some ways it feels like such a vicious cycle

Watching another grieve

You almost want to cut a little bit of the sadness and hold it on their behalf

But you can’t, you can only sit with them, hold them,

Try to pour all the love you can muster into them and hope the sadness doesn’t swallow them whole

Spinoffs: Space Station Innovations in Your Cart (and Heart!)

You might think NASA technology is just spaceships and telescopes, but did you know the camera in your cell phone is, too? It’s one of many NASA innovations now found everywhere on Earth.

The International Space Station has had crew living on it for 25 years straight. In that time, the space station has enabled a tremendous amount of research, helping NASA and scientists better understand long-term living in space – but it’s not just knowledge coming back down to Earth! Technologies developed for the space station and experiments conducted aboard the orbiting lab also benefit people on the planet below. Here are a few of these inventions, or spinoffs, you can find in your everyday life.

A Sunscreen That Blocks Radiation in Space – and on Your Face

After surviving for 18 months outside the International Space Station, an extremely hardy organism is now improving sunscreens and face cream products from a cosmetics company, which licensed use of the organism from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Build Muscle With or Without Gravity

Muscles atrophy quickly in space, so when astronauts began long stays on the International Space Station, they needed some specialized exercise equipment. A resistance mechanism made of a coiled metal spring formed the basis of the first way for astronauts to “lift weights” in space. Soon after, that same design became the heart of compact home gym equipment.

Fresh Greens Every Day of the Year

The need to grow fresh food in space pushed NASA to develop indoor agriculture techniques. Thanks to the agency’s research, private companies are building on NASA’s vertical farm structure, plant-growth “recipes,” and environmental-control data to create indoor farms, resulting in higher crop yields and better-quality produce while conserving water and energy and eliminating the need for pesticides.

Cultivating Hearts and Knees in Space

Gravity is a significant obstacle to bioprinting cells and growing human tissue on Earth because heavier components settle to the bottoms of petri dishes. In the absence of gravity, each cell layer stays in place, which is how it’s possible to grow heart and knee tissue on the space station. The same principle also allows mixing of complex pharmaceuticals on orbit.

Storing Oodles of Energy

NASA chose nickel-hydrogen batteries to power the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station because the technology is safe, reliable in extreme temperatures, and long-lived. NASA’s improvements brought down the cost of the technology, which is now used by large-scale utilities and renewable power plants that need to store energy generated by intermittent sources.

You can read about many more products sourced from the ISS on spinoff.nasa.gov.

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