Drowningworms - Drowning Worms

Sometimes it feels like everyone around me is speaking in a secret language and I'm the only one who doesn't know it.

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.”

Rabbits manage their predators

We've all seen the graph of lynx and snowshoe hares where the rabbit populations increase and lynx increase with larger litters and increased survival to adulthood in response to the abundance of food. Eventually the lynx outpace the rabbits and eat all the available rabbits and starve themselves to death back down to numbers that can survive on the number of available rabbits at which point the hares, being R strategists can reproduce faster than K strategist lynx and the whole cycle starts over again.

It's used as a classic example in ecology courses of predators preventing prey populations from overwhelming a landscape. And we see it as a cautionary tale about the need for good stewardship of resources and need for population control to prevent the suffering of boom and bust cycles.

That story is not quite accurate. The people who came up with that interpretation where all children of privilege and identified with the predators. It wasn't until more scientists from indigenous and lower-class groups began to make up the ranks that we questioned that story.

The hares are actively starving out their predators through solidarity.

When stress levels build up in hares from constantly being hunted and close escapes, this changes their reproductive system to have much smaller litters. Even when stressed individuals mate with outside hares, they have small litters and males somehow induce their unstressed mate to produce smaller litters even if she would otherwise have produced a large litter.

The entire population of hares effectively withholds their bodies from the predators by not reproducing beyond just enough to keep the species alive while laying low for long enough to starve the majority of their predators to death and force them to have smaller litters in response.

It seems to me there is a lesson in there for us in the midst of Capitalism. Stop having kids and starve the system of labor.

Then let the invisible hand of supply and demand do its magic to raise wages and reduce housing prices.

You can't afford to strike. They might fire you if you slow down too much (I still think a national slowdown is a safe bet). But they can't do jack to you for not breeding (yet).

So focus on your career and having fun and living a life of service to make a better future.

Email to my first year students about the career assessment the university forced on them:

A little over half of you have not taken the assessment yet and you are making the presenter on Monday nervous. Please finish your SII Assessment before the Monday class so you can have it to look at during the class.

To help you find it: on 1/10/24 the link to the Strong Interest Inventory was emailed to all [redacted] students with the subject "SII Assessment,”  sent by [redacted].

A note on the results you will get:

These results tell you about yourself now. You are not carved in stone and you will not be the same person (at least in several important ways) as you are today. The career you choose, the work you do, and the life you live will all change you and you will change and adapt to live and thrive in those places as best you can. In some places, your personality will still be stressed no matter how much you adapt. There are parts of you that won't change. The person I became in the past few years to do life in the way I do today is not the same person I was when I was happily chasing mosquitoes around and helping run our restaurant back in early 2000's. Or the person I had to be to thrive in a research lab a few years ago.

The main point is that this assessment tells you about yourself now, but not who you will become or what kind of job you must work to be happy and fulfilled. 

You will adapt, improvise, and overcome. Use the assessment to learn about yourself. Maybe you do want some career ideas. Maybe you just want to see which directions you want to grow in based on what you already know you want to do. You realize you don't spring forth from your mother's womb ready to be a nurse, doctor, or research scientist. Or father, mother, spouse, or whatever. You suck at those things in the beginning and learn to do them better. And your personality grows and changes to meet your new challenge.

Our ability to adapt and find unexpected solutions are the keys to human success. (along with being highly social and always having community/help)

If you have dreams and desires that don't line up with what the assessment says, or life goes sideways on you and you end up driving a taxi, understand that for most situations you will change and adapt and learn to become amazing and happy in that new situation. Even if it has a rough beginning.

So take it all with a grain of salt and treat it as a tool, not an oracle.

Peace,

Yours Truly

I think one big reason why we don't consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.

For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I'm lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don't get that at all with modern light pollution.

When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.

We are not our possessions,

but we are our gardens.

Within and without,

our story is told

through what we nurture.

Also rabbits are brutally effective at managing their predators.

Tumblr

Rabbits manage their predators

We've all seen the graph of lynx and snowshoe hares where the rabbit populations increase and lynx increase with larger litters and increase

On of the less intuitive things about love, I've found, of any kind, is the importance of needing things.

I didn't realize it until recently, but I've always seen love as something requiring sacrifice, selflessness, patience, and generosity- to ask for nothing is to be the best person I can be, small and quiet and never in the way, always happy and helpful, self-sufficient and present when desired.

It's only as an adult, now, that I'm beginning to see the selfishness of wanting nothing.

I cut my friend's hair in my kitchen the other day. They wanted a trim and I had the skills, so I offered, and was genuinely excited when they stopped hesitating over "bothering me" and took me up on it. It was a peaceful afternoon, and we had tea and chatted for an hour or more.

My brother and I shared popcorn at the movies a while ago. When I came time to pay, I pulled my card out like a wild western sheriff and slapped it on the machine before he could fight me for it first. The satisfaction was delightful.

Someone called me crying on the phone the other day. Kept apologizing for disturbing me at work, talking about how they were bothering me on my lunch break. I was telling the truth when I told them that really, I was flattered and honored and relieved, knowing that if they were hurting I would know, that I didn't have to worry in silence. It felt good to hear them slowly come down, and to know that they knew it would be better soon, and to hear them laugh wetly on the other end. We're getting together for a visit next week.

It's hard to need things, if you've trained yourself not to. It's hard to want things, when you don't know how to want anymore. Trusting people is difficult, and so is relying on them, but I don't know where I'd be without the people who rely on me.

I've heard a lot of people say, "Nobody will love you unless you love yourself". I've had a lot of thoughts about it. It's not right, but it's not wrong, either, I think.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... I've always taken that to mean, "You will not be lovable until you develop a positive view of yourself as a person".

Now, I think it's sort of inside-out.

"Nobody will love you unless you love yourself"... because nobody can show their love to you in a way that you can accept until you treat yourself kindly, and learn what you need, and what you want, and how to ask for it, and then give that vulnerability away.

Love, for me, is someone I ask for a ride to the airport. Whether they end up doing this or not is irrelevant.

It's not needy, or selfish, or taking up energy. It's giving the gift of being wanted, and needed, and thought of. It's giving someone the security of being part of someone's life.

Going through older videos I found this from years ago and thought it may interest you.

This was taken at a tide pool at Bar Beach on the east coast of Australia.

I spotted something in here that didn’t quite look like a rock and it turned out to be this little octopus.

The animal was very curious and interactive and would reach out for my finger so I could pull it through the water.

It felt like it was playing a game with me and this process of holding my finger and getting pulled through the water then darting back repeated for quite some time and it was more me who ended the interaction as couldn’t stick around at the beach much longer.

At no point in the interaction did I hold its tentacle myself so it being pulled by me was entirely of its own decision as if it wanted to it could let go at any time.

I still think about it now and wonder if it tried playing this game with others who got close enough.

This was my first hands on interaction with an octopus and what surprised me was just how gentle and precise it was with its tentacle arm when it reached for and held my finger.

I feel so lucky to have been in just the right place at the right time to have gotten to experience this and I definitely understand how people who have these experiences with octopus say it’s like a bond you can’t quite describe forms between you and it.

————————————

This is incredible and I love this octopus so much

Inevitable Climate Change Response in America (and rest of the "civilized" world)

In the end we will have to accept the global warming will happen and is a fact.

Of course we won't change anything whatsoever. Except that there will be massive "mismanaged" government program to subsidize the relocation of rich homeowners away from the coast while making bank for bankers. And you can guarantee they will be leaving the renters and poor to basically defend for themselves with a single COVID check or some such bullshit.