Ok, the more I watch the videos coming out of Russia the more weird-ed out I get.  It was one thing to watch it crossing the sky like a nice pretty really really big shooting star.  It is another to see the more recent videos of people who were taking the videos of the nice pretty really really big shooting star and then hearing it land.  Whoa.  It definitely LANDED.  With a major THUD.   That old song by Johnny Mercer “Something’s Gotta Give” comes to mind :

“When an irresistible force such as you

Meets an old immovable object like me

You can bet just as sure as you live

Something’s gotta give something’s gotta give something’s gotta give”

Earth and meteor, may the best piece of space rock win. But aside from that, it also brings up surreal feelings for me.  The awareness that we really are floating around in outer space and that stuff flying by really can hit us, unlikely though it may be.  I also experience this surreal feeling when there is an earthquake  – like I’m riding some kind of surfboard and could at any moment be swallowed by a dirt wave.  One other time it happened when the kids were little and they were napping.  We had a solar eclipse and I went outside when I noticed how eerie it had gotten.  I had done the pinhole in the box thing before so didn’t really care about that, but I sat there in the oddness the entire time it went on.  I remember feeling this strange connection to ancient humans and for some reason especially ancient mothers – I know that must sound so silly but it was such a primal feeling – that the sun was not doing what it usually did, and how that must have confused or even frightened early peoples.  It wasn’t like the sun going behind a cloud, because there were no clouds that day.    Everything had a strange color cast to it that didn’t correspond to a cloudless sunny day. It just didn’t make sense.

So here we are today, realizing that people really did get hurt in Russia.  Hopefully no one lost their lives, but I must say if you get killed by a random ten ton meteor falling out of the sky that just happens to land on you, it was “your time to go” as they say.  Jeez.

Addendum:  Did I say 10 tons?  I had that wrong by a bit.  Scientists are now saying it was 10,000 tons and travelling at 40,000 mph.   I stand corrected.  Ditto on the “jeez.”