*walks into a psychology lecture wearing a tshirt with freud’s face on it that says “THIS GUY IS A FUCKING IDIOT” in sparkly bold type*
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:
Today’s gay disaster:
So two firefighters came into my store this morning. Now, we get firefighters in the store once in a while, probably because our complex is perpetually setting off the fire alarm, and every time they show up my whole team fawns over them like they’re walking sex gods and I don’t really Get It.
But y’all. Two firefighters came into my store this morning, and I Get It. Because that woman was so goddamn attractive, with her dark eyes and her muscles and her strong hands and her charming smile and her casual confidence just lounging around like she owned the place and a;dlfghadfghdfg I have never looked at ANYONE and immediately stopped breathing but y’all it HAPPENED. This woman was so stunningly handsome that I literally cannot tell you what the other female firefighter in the room looked like beyond “I think she was blonde.”
But you know what, I’m BoH so I didn’t have to talk to the stunningly handsome firefighter, and that was fine. I minded my business and tried (and failed) not to look at her. Until the next guests came in, and I said “Hi, welcome in!” reflexively like I’m supposed to.
And this firefighter. She looked at me with this cheeky little smirk, and she said, “Hey now. You didn’t welcome me in.”
And instead of saying something coy, or charming, or clever, the words that actually came out of my mouth were: “Well, you’re very attractive, and it threw me off.”
Y’all she chuckled and she WINKED AT ME. And I’m pretty sure I died on the spot.
She was so charming that I didn’t realize until an hour later that she wasn’t wearing a mask and I’d forgotten to be annoyed about it.
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 was worried my cat is dehydrated because i never see him drink water so i’ve started leaving a cup of water that’s “mine” (aka he sees me drink out of it once before he does) in my room so he thinks he is being a rebellious naughty by drinking out of it but rlly he is just following my plan & being hydrated .
tbh we really need to have a conversation about digital poverty cos assuming all students have both their own laptop and a reliable wifi connection stinks of classism
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present.
Not sure how this works. I'll figure things out as I go. But for now, I hope what I have isn't difficult to navigate.
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