You’ve heard about the astronaut who stalked and kidnapped a rival for the affections of a man in mission control. Lisa Nowak got a bit nuts, donned a diaper, and drove from Houston to Florida making her the second looniest woman that I know of to ever drive a long distance to Florida with a tender innocent victim in her car. But this begs certain questions about the female makeup be asked.

Astronauts go through intensive training and testing. To make it to space as Nowak did you have to be the best, to have “the right stuff.” The women who make it are the most psychologically vetted women in our country. This means this woman should be one of the most balanced and stable women America has to offer. She’s a career woman with every reason to feel self worth and not engage in the dramas of the less successful, occupied, and talented.

And yet she stalks.

In a diaper.

And she plots murder.

I’m guessing still in the diaper since stopping to change at that point wouldn’t make sense once you passed up on numerous rest stop opportunities.

So despite all the testing, despite the career path most would envy, when it came down to dealing with seperating from her hubby and her slide off relationship in jeopardy, she couldn’t deal with it. Even on the NASA level people are plotting their exit strategies and consumed by ancient DNA operating on the mammalian and primal parts of the brain it seems. They are making sure they have a fall back option, and telling themselves it’s all perfectly justified. This goes for most men too. The whole slide off thing. Slide off is what a coworker of mine once called it. I thought it crude. But it’s what almost everyone does. But I wanted to believe a woman with a real sense of identity as a space shuttle astronaut should have, would be above this need and be able to function without her man to ground and control her.

So in this case with the loss of her husband and her slide off more into controlling missions and maybe the kidnapped woman, Nowak became unhinged. The prospect of having no man to moor her for a little while, no nest to drop her eggs in, got her primal, completely obscured a successful career, and she got all chimpanzee about things with her perceived rival.

This is some scary shit.

Of course the plus side on all this is that if women who have been to space and thusly seem out our league (I’ve never beeeen), are nutty and not worth the effort I guess those of us who have to deal with less successful ones can either gather hope that if the good and bad come in all shapes, sizes, and spectrums of society we could still get lucky. That or we shouldn’t blame ourselves for not being able to get women with greater identities and success because they’re all just nuts anyway and we never had a chance.