The house is bloodthirsty. The housekeeper is noisy. All the girl wants is a garden.
hey. listen. when you use too much detergent in your laundry you aren't making your clothes cleaner, you are making them degrade faster. the machine isn't able to rinse out the entire cup of soap you put in, so some of it is left in the fibers of your clothes. when they dry this makes the fabric stiffer and more brittle, so the fibers are more likely to erode and break. over time this makes your clothes wear out much faster than if they were properly rinsed with minimal soap. you are wasting money by overusing detergent, not just on the detergent itself but the clothes you are shortening the lifespan of.
one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.
DO THINGS HALFWAY. NOW YOU’RE 100% BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE BEFORE.
Well fucks? Get to it!
Yup.
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Hey while you're loving elephants: Denver Zoo has two teenage boy elephants and one Old Man Elephant named Groucho, and lately they've had the lads housed with him so he can teach them Proper Elephant Manners like how bulls raise teenage boy elephants in the wild. Bull elephants are apparently very into being parents but due to the matriarichal nature of most herds, they really only get to raise calves after they've hit puberty. My point is, one of the boys was being annoying and chasing rabbits so Groucho came up and jabbed him in the ass with a tusk, the lad ran around the enclosure crying then came back and did a lot of "I'm sorry I'll be good now dad" fawning and it was adorable.
OH MAN SEE SEE SEE i wish we knew so much more about how bull elephants interact with herds and families - we've documented bull elephants traveling to matriarchal herds and fake wrestling with male calves, and we've documented bulls protecting orphaned calves, but in god's name i want every in and out about it. everything we know about elephant social interaction is not enough. it's a Thing that introducing old bulls to a population lowers the amount of younger bulls in musth, also known as the state in which bull elephants desire nothing but murder and possibly sex, but - i want to know the precise mechanisms. old bull elephants teaching younger bulls manners renders me VERKLEMPT. i just wanna know every secret elephants have.
this is incredible though. peak teenage boy. groucho has his hands full and i fucking love him for that. get their asses, groucho.
I am on my way to being the best auntie ever or the worst sister-in-law that ever lived. Possibly both.
I am making my 2-year-old niece a plushy for her birthday. She is very hands-on baby and wants to help with everything and be involved in the center of attention. A few weeks after her birthday everyone is going dipnetting. She is two and can not help with dip netting or do anything but watch.
So I am making her a toy salmon. And I am making it so she can filet it. It has guts. It has bones. It is all one piece and child friendly, and I am debating using embedded magnets or velcro to hold the filets on.
She has a kitchen set with a little wooden knife at her grandparents house, who have already heard about this and think its a great idea. We are gonna teach this kid to clean and process fish. She already knows where meat comes from and she will want to get in and do what everyone else is doing which she can not do because the fish are only slightly smaller than she is.
So, salmon plushy
bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”