Mental Crop Rotation

“Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them…or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.”

Holy SHIT

Title

Pearl

Photographer: Kirsi Mutshipule

Finland

ND Awards 2019

I love people.

I always hire my guests to help me with ‘chores’ (if they’re willing!), the kind of task that’s fun at first but less fun when you have to keep going for hours (burning all the broom bushes in the pasture, picking many kg of berries to make syrup, carrying a mountain of logs into the wood shed and building stable log piles so they don’t come cascading down later…) And every time I’m amazed by the way humans can make the most tedious tasks genuinely fun through… group dynamics? just the way people start interacting and bonding with each other when everyone is focused on the same repetitive physical activity. It’s hard to find examples because it’s always so specific to each situation; but I mean things like

people spontaneously specialising and developing a feeling of expertise and pride in their subtrade, no matter how silly (putting away firewood involved one Log Selecter outside going back and forth delivering logs to two Pile Builders who piled them up in the shed, and each rapidly created their own well-oiled System and became convinced it would be hard to replace them now that they had mastered their craft)

new vocabulary being coined and immediately adopted (the Pile Builders came up with nicknames for logs of different lengths and shapes so they could ‘order’ them from the Log Selecter more efficiently—”I’ve got a One-Armed Bandit here, I need another one to fit next to it, but with an ‘arm’ on the other side” “Here” “The arm is on the same side!” “Just turn it around and the arm will be on the other side”)

songs emerging almost by themselves (a song about fishing mussels was repurposed into a song about picking plums; a whole new song was invented to encourage weirdly-shaped logs to fit in with the others as we tried to fill all the gaps)

stories being told. Weaving a trivial task into a complex imaginary plot and context to make it more entertaining and meaningful

the extremely human compulsion to write down our knowledge to share it with future generations (I was told to take note of the best & quickest knot to tie up foliage when making tree hay, for the benefit of whoever does it next summer)

beliefs as to the Right Way To Do Things quickly solidifying into myths or superstitions, as we forget what drove us to do things this way in the first place, but trust that we had good reasons so now it’s the Way It’s Done

I always tell people to help only if they feel like it and we can stop anytime and I’ll finish later by myself, but what usually happens instead is that they want to come back at the same time next year to do this exact chore again because of how they’ve made it theirs in just a few days (or in one afternoon!) Give a group of humans a banal task and while they’re at it they will come up with a whole new inside slang, a few work songs and a handful of founding texts and myths, until it feels special and important. I love seeing the way these miniature folklores just emanate from people doing things together.

I have a friend who has one biological and one adopted son and I found out he likes to tell people “my firstborn is six and my other child is eleven” which is hilarious.

You order a package off Amazon. When the Amazon delivery guy shows up to your door, instead of giving you the package you bought, he beats the shit out of you. Then, when he sees that you are not dead yet, he calls all of the Amazon delivery people in the area and they all proceed to beat the shit out of you. Miraculously, you survive. Another miracle: a friend in your neighborhood caught the assault on video. After a month of recovery and extensive hospital bills that you have no idea what to do with, the video has gone viral. You read the comments below. “This is what happens to people who fuck with Amazon!!!” Someone says. “I’ve never been beaten up by Amazon employees, and I’ve been using them all my life!” Someone else comments. Later, you start to see articles popping up about your story. They all mention that when you were 17, your license was revoked for reckless driving. In a Facebook post on your mom’s feed, someone is going on a rant about how not all Amazon delivery guys are bad, and that if you look really close, the “bad” ones are just stressed out. Your name is trending on Twitter. Jeff Bezos films a response to your attack, denouncing the video of you getting beaten to within an inch of your life by his employees as becoming “a symbol of hate towards Amazon.” The people who attacked you still deliver packages around your neighborhood. You saw one of them just yesterday as you were watering your plants. You still can’t pay your hospital bills. Your phone dings- Twitter again. “Maybe if you didn’t order from Amazon,” someone pipes up, “this wouldn’t have happened!”

im only saying this once

the only acceptable jobs for spider-man

broke high schooler

broke college student

freelance photographer

high school teacher

unpaid intern

pizza delivery guy

research assistant for doomed scientific project

guy who stands on street and spins sign for quiznos

being spider-man

and thats IT i dont want any of this “hes a genius tech ceo making millions” SHIT. Spider-man is BROKE and he missed rent this month and he has a tiny apartment and thats how its MEANT TO BE. he doesnt make money because he is our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-man and not fucking Tony Stark.

.

The majority of the Earth’s rodents: How do you survive environments with practically zero oxygen, feel no pain, and live for decades when none of the rest of us can???

Naked mole-rats: