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I’m on an outer space kick right now. I’ve been following @nasa on twitter for a while, and I got excited when they announced some time back that they would be streaming live video from the international space station starting Feb 1st. Well, today is Feb 1st, and they did not disappoint. I’ve been watching video all morning that is equal parts extraordinary and mundane. The astronauts are floating through their daily routines in t-shirts, shorts, and fanny packs, looking more like Midwestern tourists than veterans of various military and scientific fields. I just watched one guy work out on his stationary bike for 20 minutes. I wouldn’t watch a guy on a stationary bike on Earth, but this stationary bike is IN SPACE. And…it’s happening RIGHT NOW. I’m completely enthralled…I’m here in a building in New York city, at my computer, writing jokes about nonsense, and at the exact same time, human beings in OUTER-FUCKING-SPACE are passing one another in the corridors of what essentially amounts to a building resting comfortably above the Earth’s atmosphere. Office talk: “Oh, pardon me, don’t mind if I fly around you right now. Just gonna float to the right and you float to the left, and let’s not even acknowledge how fucking cool this is.” Sometimes they’ll cut away to a shot of the outside of the space station. I’m fairly certain they do this when one of the astronauts wants to jerk off. Or maybe the cameras are just on a rotation. I’d ask NASA directly, but they stopped returning my calls after the 50th time I asked whether or not Flight Engineer Oleg Kotov was single. Oleg, Soichi Noguchi, and T.J. Creamer (yes, his last name is Creamer) are on board till May. I think I might take the next few months and do some light-hearted stalking. If weird guys are allowed to ask me to send them pictures of me for their “spank bank” then I’m allowed to develop crushes on men who fly space shuttles. But above all, I’m invested in this mission (Expedition 22, to be exact) because of science. Did that sound sincere? I wish I was smart enough to have any idea what they were doing up there. I’ve read their logs, and watched them answer questions via video. Still…I have little to no idea what they do all day. I wonder if they’d be as interested in watching a day in MY life as I am in watching theirs. Would Colonel Creamer be fascinated by me because I DON’T have a masters degree from M.I.T. like he does? Would he want to ask me what Questlove is like, and if I know that bearded guy from The Hangover? I suppose the fascination with all this space crap is simple: theirs is a world so literally removed from mine. Voyeurism is a form of vicariously living a life quite different from your own (and yes, I use the same theory to defend staring at crazy people on the bus).