Planning 17

Today’s Song: Everybody Got Their Something by Nikka Costa

Let me tell you a day in my life. 

Well, that’s not fair, really. I have two lives perpetually. I have my life at home and my life on the road. My life at home is pretty simple- get up, make coffee, go to the office, get some paperwork done, go home. Sprinkle in a couple of rehearsals and meetings and TV time with the roomies and you have your run-of-the-mill twenty-something life. 

But my other life goes like this:

Five o’clock and the alarm clock rings. I’d hit snooze but I will be abysmally late if I do, so I get out of bed and take a shower. You can’t teach science with greasy hair. Then I put on professional-looking clothes, making sure to have a splash of Carolina blue and closed-toed shoes on. I pick up the suitcase I packed the night before, hopefully, make sure my toiletries are dry and packed and scurry out the front door. There may or may not have been coffee at this point.

Sometimes, I’ve packed the planetarium up the night before, sometimes I haven’t. The best days are the ones when I’m going to a school more than three hours away or so to the mountains and I get to pack up the planetarium the afternoon before the visit in fall air, when hauling three Pelican cases worth of equipment out to a minivan seems less like a burden and more like an excuse to go outside and move in the general splendor. But many times I roll up to the office before the sun has even bothered to get up, pick up my notebook and my directions, roll or carry hundreds of pounds of equipment out to the state van, and pack it in like a game of Tetris that only has one solution. If I’m being careful about myself, I use the back brace. 

In the fall and the spring, the sun’s probably up by the time I start to drive. I drive. And I drive. And I stop by a Bojangles for breakfast and then I drive. I roll up to a school around 7:30am, hopefully before or after but not exactly during the morning drop-off and I smile at the secretary in the office who points me around to the gym where I drive the van and unload the hundred of pounds of equipment I feel like I just put inside of it. Sometimes there’s a teacher or a janitor or an administrator to help out, sometimes there’s not. Either way, the equipment gets wheeled to the middle of what is probably a basketball court at least half the year. I set the projector down at the top of the key, like it’s going to make some clutch free throws and save the game. And then I get to work.

Setting up the planetarium is one of my favorite parts of the day. (We made a video of it and you should watch it, especially if you have no idea what I mean when I talk about a portable planetarium.) I’ve done it so often that it almost feels choreographed. It never fails to get a wow from any kids that walk by and though they make me feel like I’m in a zoo as they stop and watch the planetarium educator in her natural habitat, I’m also pretty proud of it. It’s not every day you get to set up a twelve-foot tall inflatable bouncy house of science.*

If I’ve gotten to the school on time and everything’s working fine, I’ve got a little break while I wait for the first show to start. Then it’s at least four fifty-minute shows where I’m on all the time, talking about space, asking the kids what they know, monitoring the equipment, monitoring the kids, answering questions. Most of the shows aren’t live shows, so I press play and plan out what I’m going to say during the maybe five minutes I get at the end where I could, in theory, show them all of the universe and blow their little kid minds. I’ve watched these shows literally hundreds of times so I know exactly where the oo’s and the ah’s come in and they never fail to make me smile. 

And the kids always ask the best questions, like the one who asked me if you could ride a bike on the Moon or the one who asked me if black holes slow down sound. Some of these kids are really thinking and most of them are as excited when they leave as when they came in (the implication here being that they were excited in the first place, which they were- I’m the best day of third grade when I show up and that is an awesome privilege). Sometimes they get caught on a certain topic (if you tell them how far away Jupiter is, you should be prepared to tell them the distance to all the other planets or change the subject) but sometimes they’re all over the place, asking about aliens and stars and moons and gravity. Never a dull moment. 

Once the last show is done, we stack up the cushions and pack away the cords and the projector and the dome and the flags and the fan and put it all back in the van again. Sometimes there’s help and sometimes there’s not. Sometimes there’s a teacher who wants to talk about what I do and sometimes there are fifth graders to help roll up the cords and one time there was a kindergartener who asked me if I was a spy and told me that spies wear back, so I was probably a spy in disguise. He knew these because he had seen all the Spy Kids movies. He helped me carry the Earth out to the van. 

With the van packed, I get in and I drive. Maybe I drive back to Chapel Hill, but I probably drive to a hotel an hour or so out and check in and take the projector upstairs and wonder how I never thought of a better response than awkward laughter to, “That’s a big suitcase you’ve got there.” I’ll probably watch some episodes of Castle, hit up the exercise room, troll around on the internet, and go get dinner before I set my alarm for the next morning. 

Then I get up the next day, and the day after that, and I do it all over again. Different schools, different gyms, different kids, but in a weird way, once I’ve got the dome inflated and the projector set up and the cushions out, it feels like coming home. Now, that probably means that I’ve been doing my job for too long, but the portability of a space doesn’t change the space’s existence, I think. If you could fold up your car and take it inside your office or your house with you, would that change the existence of the inside of your car? Besides, spaces carry the meaning we put into them and I like to think that I put a good meaning into mine. 

As I’m scheduling schools for the year and getting everything prepped, it’s nice to take a second and think about this crazy thing that I do for a job. It’s not something many people get to do and I don’t know of anyone who does it as often as I do. It’s a unique perspective on our schools and our state and it’s a blast. Though I deserve to be compensated for the work that I do, days on the road don’t feel like work. Not everyone gets to say that with the job they got right out of college. I’m lucky.

And you gotta enjoy the luck while it lasts, right?

*We don’t bounce in the planetarium. No bouncing. Do you want to know how much that lens cost? So much. Don't bounce.