This is the mission that took the fab picture of Europa rising over Jupiter. It’s on its way to Pluto and beyond.

Once upon a time, Pluto was a planet–the ninth planet. A bit eccentric, it’s true, but a planet nonetheless with a moon and everything.

Then along comes 2003 UB₃₁₃ aka Eris (that’s pronounced EEEEE-ris.) Eris, by the way, is the Greek goddess of discord and strife. She stirs up jealousy and envy to cause fighting and anger among men. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of the Greek hero Achilles, all the gods with the exception of Eris were invited, and, enraged at her exclusion, she spitefully caused a quarrel among the goddesses that led to the Trojan war. So, if you’re having trouble remembering the pronunciation just repeat after me. Eeeeeris is Eeeeevil. Got it?

So, follows the great debate. Eris is bigger than Pluto so is Eris a planet or is Pluto not a planet? My favorite manifestation of this was the ongoing argument between Scott Westerfeld (not a planet) and John Scalzi (still a planet). Scott elucidated his opinion here and John had his daughter invoke Cthullu to eat Scott in effigy here.

Now we finally hear Pluto’s opinion.

I’m not going to sue. Who am I going to sue? You think the International Astronomical Union has any money to speak of? There’s a reason the most popular event at an astronomer’s conference is the free buffet.

(This is a reprint. It originally appeared in Slate several years ago. I wish back then I’d had a camera phone so I could have published a photo.)

You probably don’t remember me–I’m a forty-something, overweight white woman with a shopping cart and after a certain age and/or weight, twenty- to thirty-something guys don’t notice women much, but I was the person you breezed in front of when you got in line at the grocery. You were talking on a small, rather expensive cell phone, and from the way you were dressed–pin stripe suit trousers and a white shirt–and from what you had in your basket–bags and bags of candy; Reeses Pieces, M&Ms, lots of bite-sized chocolate and two packages of sushi–I assume you were buying stuff for some function and your lunch. I’m one of those people with a knee-jerk prejudice against businessmen who use cell phones while walking around grocery stories, particularly if it is clear to all of us around that you are, in fact, talking to a friend about sports, but I wouldn’t have remembered you beyond that had you not leaned over and taken the sushi from the cashier and without doing more than pausing for a breath in your conversation said, “Don’t ring that up first,” and gone back to talking about, I think, football. You mentioned goals, so I assume football.

The cashier didn’t know what you meant and asked you if you wanted this rung up separately but of course she would have been interrupting your phone conversation so you didn’t answer until she’d said it a second time and then you just said, “No,” and kept talking. The cashier is in her fifties and working class and it’s pretty clear that whether you impress her or not isn’t going to have much affect on your life or career and since I suspect your wife does all the shopping, she doesn’t even have the power to make your life briefly uncomfortable in the grocery. I mean, a grocery is so clearly not your place, other people go to groceries and buy your food for you and probably, mostly, prepare it for you that it’s no wonder you are too busy to really give it your attention. I mean, you’re here, and you’re buying stuff, but it’s not real, everyday feed people kind of food. It’s party food. And the cashier doesn’t have a clue that what you want is for her to ring up the sushi somewhere in the middle of the order so that it’s buried pretty far down in the receipt–I watch you put the order on your Corporate American Express–so you can let the company pick up your twelve dollars worth of lunch without anybody in accounting noticing as they check your expense report.

I know that because I’ve actually checked expense reports. I temped for a high end cosmetics firm called Erno Laszlo and for about three months I was the person who fitted the jigsaw puzzle of your receipts against the notations of your expenditures, re-checked your math and sent you your monthly reconciliation of what you actually could expense versus whatever total you had come to. And for awhile I wore Jones New York suits and carried a Johnson & Johnson Corporate American Express and watched surly hotel clerks magically becomes courteous, even subserviant, when I took it out. But at the moment, standing behind you, forty-one, overweight, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, with a grocery basket full of Kleenax and milk and Citrucel for my eighty-five year old mother, all you know is that I’m home at one o’clock in the afternoon and so I am probably a housewife. A judgement you have come to without even knowing you have come to it, the way a predator fish will recognize the one fish acting disabled in a school of thousands of fish and zero in on it without noticing the other, healthy fish in any particular way. I am background, backdrop, the ceaseless hum of tires outside, the sound of the refrigerator motor.

And so you, without ever having bothered to explain to the cashier what you want, instead, glancing down at some point in your conversation and shoving the sushi package at her so she can ring it up now, right after the Hershey Milk Chocolate Bites and before the Nestles Crunch and Munch, stand in front of me, still on the phone, frozen in your conversation and holding the receipt suspended above your wallet, laughing, while I and the rest of the line wait for you to move so we can move us. The cashier says to me, “The longer I work here, the more I am amazed at the way people act.” But you don’t hear her because you’re not in a grocery. You’re in the cyberspace, the cellular hum, a far more interesting and important place than here.

And I have this fantasy of tapping you on the shoulder and asking you to stop talking long enough to explain that I am actually a novelist, and that I am so impressed with your behavior that I have decided to include this as a scene in my next novel. That twenty or forty thousand people will read about you and instantly make the assumption you are an asshole. And that I am in fact a pretty good writer and this scene may perhaps even strike people as memorable, and that I want to tell you this so that you know, because even though those twenty or forty thousand people won’t know who you are, you will.

But in the end, I leave you in ignorance of your own, minor immortality. I hope the party is a success. I hope you enjoy the game. I hope someday you are powerless, not forever, but for long enough to develop some empathy. And I hope that someday you are wise enough to realize that we are not all what we seem, and that you never know who’s watching.