So I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news or my Twitter feed or wherever it is that you get your pressing information these days, but pretty much one of the coolest astronauts this side of Buzz Lightyear made his trip home from the International Space Station earlier this week.

For the last five months, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been living in space.

I’m going to say that again, and this time I want you to imagine me telling it to you in a really awesome voice – for the last five months, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been living in space!

Now I know that he certainly isn’t the first guy to have done this – in fact, eight other men lived right alongside Chris during his two overlapping expeditions aboard the International Space Station recently and in total over 200 people have spent time up there since it first was launched in the year 2000. And the reason I’m absolutely gushing on and on about this like some 7th grade science geek who absolutely loves space and probably looks surprisingly similar to how this humor columnist looked around that same time period (spoiler: glasses, braces, conveniently just the right size to fit into your standard-issue middle school locker) is that simply put – LIVING IN SPACE WOULD BE SOOOO AWESOME!!!!!

Though I have to admit that the commute there would be a little nerve wracking for yours truly – you know, just on account of sitting on top of 250,000 tons of rocket fuel and all! But once Earth is in the rearview and that five-bedroom hacienda in the heavens is coming up fast on the horizon at 17,239 miles per hour, that’s when you start to see the world through gold-tinted glasses because not only will a home address in Low Earth Orbit look mighty impressive on the old Christmas cards that year, but I’m not sure if I mentioned it earlier … it would be totally awesome to live in space!!!

The more I think about it, I think that I could be a pretty valuable member of the crew once that pesky, little getting me there is out of the way. Just think of all of the great space tests that yours truly could pull off in six months floating 230 miles above the Earth’s surface…

  • Video Game Testing – As far as know, despite 36 dedicated ISS expeditions to date, astronauts have still yet to experiment on marathon, 16-hour gaming sessions featuring the likes of Galaga, Space Quest, or maybe even a little Super Mario Galaxy!
  • Legos in Space! – How cool would it be to put together the 3,803 pieces of the massive Lego Death Star while living onboard an actual space station of your own?! (…albeit one that’s slightly less deadly than Darth Vader’s masterpiece counterpart…)
    • I could also totally test out the affects of zero-gravity on pizza while we’re at it … hungry astronaut gamer’s gotta eat…
  • Sleeping In, Space Style – Now you all know that I tend to be a bit lazy, but I heard a quote from Chris Hadfield where he said that he hadn’t even “sat down in months” – now that’s a dedication to the art! So I figured, why not continue with the man’s research by being that astronaut who takes things a little slower as we revolve around the Earth?! Considering that the space station orbits our planet every 90 minutes today, I’m sure that it takes some time to get used to the seemingly constant sunrises and sunsets, but know as a seasoned veteran of missing both in the same day here on Earth, this lazy space cadet is most certainly up to the challenge!
  • One thing you’d definitely have to be careful of, though, is keeping track of all those pieces, as all it would take is a single stray 1×1 to get sucked into a ventilation duct or something and take down the entire ship! I suppose that’s kind of the space equivalent of stepping on a lone brick in the middle of the night back in the land of gravity – both would be pretty rough!

And that’s not even taking into account all of the humor column opportunities to be found during my tenure drifting through space – pet mishaps, cleaning fiascos, maybe a slight miscommunication between me and the astronaut from Poland about him eating all of my space peanut butter without asking … again?! I could even follow in Chris’ footsteps and do live comedy podcasts from space, I’d be more than happy to tweet pictures of my space food every day as I rehydrate it, and I think one that’s gotta be a given – the weekly Mystery Science Theater 3000 marathons where me and the other astronauts give our own special brand of narration for the classics of yesterday and tomorrow!

I’m sold! I think sending a humor columnist up into space is just about the second most awesome thing that NASA could do … that is, behind just sending Chris up for another term, of course! But I’m sure that he’s busy, and he’s got autographs to sign and grocery shopping to do after being away from home for six months, so maybe we just leave this next expedition to the professionals … the humor professionals, that is…

So what do we have to do to make this happen then? Is there an application that I just need to fill out online or something? Maybe I stop by Cape Canaveral sometime next week for a quick interview, just to break the ice? I’m basically already packed and ready to go, so it should be just whatever formalities we have to get out of the way first.

You don’t think that there’s going to be a physical or anything, though … do you?

I only ask because here on Earth, I’m actually very, very lazy…