Introducing Myself And My Sidekick Chettoh
So, here’s my first post. From now on, I’ll post about astronomy, sci-fi, and cats as often as my full-time job as a high school teacher allows. Teaching is a full-time, demanding, soul-crushing job if you do it seriously. And no, as someone might believe, we don’t get summers off. In Italy, where I live, paid teacher vacation is thirty-six days a year. It may seem a lot, especially compared to the two-week annual vacation of most workers in the private sector. But it’s just thirty-six days, one month, and a week. That’s it. I mean, during the school year, we get no free time from mid-September until the end of June. OK, maybe I’m not lecturing my students daily, but I have to spend most of my weekends, winter, and spring breaks grading tests and preparing lessons. Not to count the staggering bureaucratic tasks we must constantly attend to.
Anyway, why astronomy, sci-fi, and cats? I have a doctorate in astronomy and used to work as a professional astronomer for some time. The reason why I switched to teaching Math and Physics to (mostly) uninterested teenagers is a story for another day. Let’s say that I was a heretical astronomer. I wished to search for exoplanets, hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations when this research topic wasn’t as trendy as it is today (in the early Nineties). After I left astronomy, I tried to compensate by reading (and sometimes writing) sci-fi novels. In the last few years, however, I have found that few are worth reading. Most of the recently published material is either too far-fetched, with characters hard to relate to, too woke, or too self-published, meaning it would profit from a good editor. I plan to review some of the sci-fi novels I love in my future posts.
Finally, I’d like to introduce my sidekick and co-author, Wolfie Chettoh. He’s a black, almost seventeen-year-old male cat (see pictures above and below). All images were AI-generated, starting from real photos.
