CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – MAY 30: In this SpaceX handout image, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launches on the Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard at Launch Complex 39A May 30, 2020, at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. The Demo-2 mission is the first launch of a manned SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. It was the first launch of an American crew from U.S. soil since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. (Photo by SpaceX via Getty Images)
Last weekend, Cal called me and we got to discussing all of the social upheaval that’s recently transpired. Since I had my head down and was crazy busy studying, I actually hadn’t heard about George Floyd or anything that’d been going on. More generally, since back in mid-April, I’d simply decided to entirely detach myself from following news. I’d been very unhappy with March and how I’d lost, literally, the entire month so wrapped up in COVID-19 and had gotten nothing done. A year from now in 2021, COVID-19 will be a distant memory. But I’ll have nothing to show for my March 2020. Time had gotten away from me and it was time to get back on track.
After spending the last two weeks of April casting about, I decided on a new plan. Instead of following the stock market, and living and dying on every massive 3,000-point swing in the Dow; instead of anxiously tracking global death counts and infection rates from the Coronavirus; instead of all of that– I was going to detox. I removed Yahoo Finance, Google News, and Reddit from my phone’s home screen. And then I set about to find a new project to focus all of my time and attention on.
I fiddled with some ideas such as getting back into fiction-writing or learning new technical skills (like AWS, React, or Angular), but ultimately, I settled on pursuing a deeper understanding of data science. It was always something that intrigued me and with this great Quarantine of 2020 going on, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to retreat into my man cave, isolate from the world, and learn something new.
So, last weekend, first week of June, I finally emerged from my man cave. Nearly two months had blown by and I’d not followed the news at all. I’d registered for some online data science classes and were totally immersed in those. For two whole months, it’d been literally nothing but eat, sleep, go out for a walk with Bagel, study; repeat. And once a week we left our apartment to buy groceries together. But that’s it. The only indulgence I allowed myself was taking a break every few hours from studying when my brain was fried to go onto YouTube where I’d decompress by watching competitive Classic Tetris (1989 NES version) videos. One Saturday afternoon (May 30), I was taking a break and watching a CTWC video when I saw SpaceX was launching American astronauts to the ISS. Cool! I watched that live launch (Elon succeeded!) and then forwarded the video to Cal. She messaged me back later saying she hadn’t paid attention at all with all of the other news that’d been ongoing. I was perplexed. Some other news had happened what was bigger than spaceflight returning to America?
And that’s how I learned about George Floyd.