My cousin Lindsay has had her third child, Benjamin Braxton Davis. My mother says mother and child are both well. I'm not exactly sure what the word is for one's cousin's kids, so I will leave it at that. Of eight grandchildren, only two so far have had kids -- my oldest cousin Billy and his wife have one, and Lindsay and her husband have three now. All boys.

It's 1:52. In 48 minutes I will be 36 years old.

36 years ago at this moment, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were probably getting suited up, soon to shoehorn themselves into their command module Columbia for their flight to the Moon. Briefly this week there was some hope that Discovery could be ready for launch for today, and I thought what a supreme irony it would be if they were to launch on my birthday -- Discovery and the return to flight on the 36th anniversary of humankind's first mission to land on the Moon. It would have been the perfect birthday present -- the return to flight and the return of a meaningful future for humankind in space. Alas. Well. I suppose it's better to be absolutely certain of safety. It certainly would have spoiled all my birthdays for the rest of my life if something had happened. So.

Still. It would have been perfect.

2:03. So I am soon to be 36 years old. I feel like I know less and less about my own future lately. The one I had planned for myself -- technical writing -- seems to be morphing into something else. I just have no idea what. I love science. I have never consciously considered actually being a scientist myself. That was always beyond the realm of possibility. It requires talents and skills I don't possess. I am a fairly good writer. With practice and the appropriate school work, I think I'll be a better writer. My talents have always been my imagination and my instinctive ability to translate what I see in my head into words. Real science isn't the distilled product one sees in PopSci and Discover. Real science is for the most part a lot of higher mathmatics that I haven't a prayer of understanding. In real science I can't just fling a ship out 33,600 lightyears without explanation. You can't solve your problems with a convenient Plot Device. Real scientists think science-fiction writers are gold-digging hacks who are perpetuating ignorance by misrepresenting and distorting the facts.

If I keep going on school it would most likely mean throwing away my writing career. It would mean several years of very hard work, then of course getting a job as a scientist somewhere and then I wouldn't have time anymore. Scientists work long hours. But if I choose carefully and get fairly proficient at it, I could maybe get in a place to work with probe or space telescope data. I still wouldn't be in space, but I'd be as close as I could get. Just that I don't even know which area specifically I'd want to study. Writing science-fiction I tend to use a lot of different stuff -- astronomy, physics, robotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, anthropology. I love robots, I love spaceships, I love planets and moons and all things slimy and extraterrestrial. How do you choose? With science-fiction I don't have to. To make a believable world you need them all. You have to know how the changes you make will effect the world as a whole. Classic sci-fi. Make one change and extrapolate it out. Create a gadget and figure out how it changes the world. Put your characters in a situation or in the midst of technologies that will change their world.

So what do I choose? Tracking asteroids? Finding planetoids in the Oort cloud? Analyzing probe data of moons? Do the astro-archaeology thing and try to track down old space probes?

I know what I am as a writer. I'm a good writer. I'll never be a great writer. All I want is a fan club and for my stuff to be a movie or TV show someday.

2:45.

I'm 36.

And I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.