Moon and Star Wars

Before anyone asks: yes, I did see the moon last night. It was big and such. Mooooon.

What I did for most of the afternoon yesterday was visit the Star Wars exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. In general, it was much like I expected: I’m never quite happy with movie exhibits because seeing the props up close breaks the illusion for me. See a historical artifact up close, and you can see tiny details you didn’t realize were there; see a prop up close, and you mostly see that the details were omitted.

I did have one of my writer brain meets anthropology brain moments, though. There were hands-on activities, and fun ones, too. You could build a little maglev from legos with embedded magnets, and you could program simple mini R2-D2-shaped robots. I wasn’t shy, I’d paid my admission, so I made a maglev too. I noticed I was the only adult who was over there who was actually doing it for herself, though. There were plenty of adults, but they were all doing it as part of “helping” (with varying degrees of “” on the word) an elementary school kid or younger. I wondered, if there was some no-kids admission time, how many adults would have been delighted to get to do it themselves, or if this was “kids stuff” and so they had to fool themselves into doing it by doing it through their kids. There were very few middle-schoolers or above doing anything, and while I expect that high schoolers are too cool to go to such exhibits, why the earlier age cut off, if people aren’t accepting that they’re suddenly “too old”?

Certainly, there were other social forces at work. If there had been one lego car left, I would obviously have given it to a child rather than have taken it myself. But it wasn’t so crowded there wasn’t still room for me. Also, probably later, at night, there would have been more unencumbered adults about–or maybe not. The Pacific Science Center is known as being “for kids”, after all. Unfortunately, it’s not worth the admission price to go again later and test it scientifically.

I just find it interesting. Who says you have to grow out of finding it cool to play around with legos to demonstrate science? If you don’t have spawn to allow you to live vicariously, why can’t you just enjoy it anyway? I do!