The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

His crew had talked freely, or as Prime might put it, they had deepened the context of their rapport and created a shared experience.

Because if we—the species—might eventually do something like move to another planet, it would be better if we made a few improvements on ourselves first, if possible.

What if instead of being herself acting like a perfect astronaut wife, she pretended to be an insane person who was pretending to be a perfect astronaut wife?

because he was always thinking about the things that could go wrong, and arranging himself to handle them. He anticipated everything; there was no situation he had not created an internal checklist against.

I do not understand people who don't have these internal checklists.

To not be boring, but to seem boring, is the most rebellious act you can pull off.

She respects death. But she fears failure.

To stand on Earth is to fall to Earth.

To orbit the Earth is not to be shot up to some magical zone where there is no gravity, but to be shot up in such a trajectory that your subsequent fall means you won’t hit anything; you will persistently and permanently miss the Earth and circle around it. To have done this is to understand the persistence and permanence of falling and to understand that what is true does not always feel like what is true. It doesn’t feel like falling to stand on Earth. It doesn’t feel like falling and missing to circle around it.

“That Noise Is Almost Certainly Indicative of a Greater Problem”

According to the data, in about six weeks even the things people in a confined situation admire about one another will become a possible source of irritation. “Irrational antagonism” is the name for this, even though anyone who has ever heard of the phenomenon finds it entirely understandable and only wonders at it taking six weeks to manifest.

Aristotle had written that it was easy to become angry—the difficulty was in being angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.

And the Crimea was not the Crimea anymore. Miss Earth? Pfuff. The things he missed were mostly ghosts.

Sergei had looked down at Dmitri and wondered if all his weaknesses had been siphoned off and gathered in this small person, and he had wanted to beg his son’s forgiveness. And he’d looked down at Ilya and seen the self that he’d fought so hard to acquire, and he’d envied him. He takes no credit for the joy that Ilya feels but must accept all the blame for any suffering of Dmitri’s.

It is a beautiful thing, when understanding comes. Among other things, it makes you realize that your subconscious operates continually, not like a ghost in your machine, but like the parts of your program that are kept hidden just so the central console won’t be too cluttered.

“Eppur si muove,” Yoshi says. “And yet it moves.” Galileo’s supposed last words.

of practice for confrontations with people who aren’t professionally obligated to keep it together.

haha professionally obligated to keep it together. Good phrase

You could say that the planet named for the God of War points at darkness.

Considering her limited skills as an actual mother, this was more funny than offensive, but Helen knew that, without her intending it, certain words or actions would be interpreted as motherly, by virtue of her biology.

It was, of course, perfectly possible to grasp fundamentals and miss the concept.

Only, somewhere on Mars, he lost the power to imagine her.

and were now engaged in an almost competitive exchange of blandness.

Another perfect phrase. "Competitive exchange of blandness."

He only has a few minutes of exercise left, and must capitalize on the opportunity to shout bad language and call people idiots.

She is ashamed now of being ashamed. That memory will never get any better, only worse.

Since reading this, I have used this phrase to stop the spiral into trying to solve really cringey memories. "That memory will never get better," basically giving myself permission to stop working it over in my mind.

At a certain point, you probably had to stop thinking about what your mother did or didn’t do to you, and start thinking about what you did or didn’t do to your mother.

Sobering

It should hurt a little, to go to Mars.”

In fact, there’d been a rumor around Prime a while back that Red Dawn’s location had been moved. No one had seen any of The Shadows—the team responsible for maintaining the Primitus and Red Dawn sites—for months.

Kinda wish we knew.