I became fascinated by astronomy while still a young boy. My father would bring home copies of Astronomy Magazine from work and I'd pour over the glossy photos of bright red & blue nebulae and distant galactic pinwheels. I found much comfort in pondering these interstellar realms for they maintained an elegant simplicity & beauty not seen in the terrestial world which was, for me, becoming more & more ugly and awkward and false. The fusion of hydrogen atoms to form helium and so forth down the periodic table - the relationship between the elements - was much easier to understand than the endless confusion inherent in human social interaction. The general bewilderment - a reaction to the world of falsehoods - left me in a constant state of anxiety & nausea so I withdrew & became a hermit at the ripe age of 7 - a Copernicus in training - immersing myself into a world of books which detailed the ordered & mechanical perfection of a predictable clockwork-Universe - all in the hope that I could somehow apply said perfected order to my own fearful & sorrowful life. I felt I could be protected from fallacies by books and knowledge. Mathematics became the Mother Tongue as it was a language whose words were clearly defined and unalterable, and as such there was no chance of deluding one's self with earthly euphemisms, slogans and lies. In raw numbers there was truth - a solid reference point - and with it came courage. By age 11, I could glance into the night sky and easily identify every object seen and unseen and thus, know my exact place in the universe. I had become Boy-Spock ("I find your engagement in the collecting of baseball cards to be quite illogical") Then in 6th grade, I discovered girls and all that logic crap went right out the window.