I love how many people there are in the world people who pick acres and acres of fruit people who tame wild horses people who bring babies into the world people who scale mountainsides w only their hands people who build engines people who can identify a bird by the sound of its call alone people who dye fabric with dirt and flowers and vegetables people who drive across the country to deliver everyday necessities the rest of us never think about people we don’t even know are out there
I feel like if humans swallowed rocks like birds do to help grind up food we’d have so much fun with it.
Can just imagine all the girlies on tiktok going “I know this is a bit controversial but I honestly love using limestone as a gastrolith. Not only can you readily forage it but they are just so pretty when smoothed out after regurgitating them”
and then all the comments would be like “ girl 😭 😭 calcite dissolves in stomach acid!! Just use quartz if you want a pretty gastrolith like 💀”
my fav thing about having ocs is having a basic line of lore for them but as soon as someone asks me about them I completely bullshit everything I tell them. Yeah this wasn’t true like 5 minutes ago but now it is
“Plant blindness” was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.
The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of “grass” surfaces, “weeds,” “flowers” and “bushes” and “trees”
I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it’s hard to even imagine how I lived differently.
The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain’s capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.
The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.
And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn’t even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!
And it’s normal, that’s the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn’t even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn’t troubled by it.
Reasons knowing the plants is important:
Baby trees pop up everywhere but they get sadly mowed down by people who can’t see them.
Likewise, if only you could recognize the plants you were mauling with that weed-whacker—STOP don’t destroy the milkweed, black-eyed susan, purple coneflower, and goldenrod! Every place has biodiversity but our management tactics are to ignorantly raze everything.
Wild fruits and other foods!
There could be a rare plant in your back yard and you wouldn’t even know it! (This happens more than you think…)
If only we were knowledgeable to see and take care of what is in the world around us already, instead of going to the Home Depot to buy plants, the world could be a flourishing place…
you will in fact continue to have acne past the age of twenty
you will eventually hit a point where you start to feel icky inside if you go too long without eating some sort of vegetables
depending on your current level of athleticism/physical activity as well as the kind of activities you did as a kid/teenager, your joints may start acting whack in your twenties, despite what everyone says about that not happening until middle age
eventually you will reach a point where you wonder how you were able to stay up until 3am nearly every night and be perfectly fine the next day (and this moment will come much younger than you expect)
it is much harder to meet new people after you’re done with school than sitcoms would have you believe
don’t let society tell you shit: it is perfectly acceptable to live with your parents after you graduate, there’s no need to be broke and miserable just so you can have some misguided attempt at independence straight out of school
aging in general will catch up to you much sooner than you think. you’ll notice your first grey hairs ~25. crows feet appear when you smile ~30. aging is a slow and gradual process that’s happening throughout your life, including your 20’s. it’s not like an Old switch flips when you turn 40, any more than a Puberty switch flipped when you turned 13.
same thing with not being Cool anymore. you’ll be vibing one day and suddenly media is saying your favorite style of jeans or hairstyle “date” you. (on the up side, you probably won’t care about that kind of thing anymore.)
taking care of your body and your home is Relentless. nobody will make you do chores or eat your veggies. it can wear at you if you let it. setting and keeping good habits lessens the strain.
measuring success is harder as an adult. in school you get graded most days, sports are measured in points. feedback at work regarding performance will be largely arbitrary. nobody can tell you if you’re on the right track to raise children into well-adjusted adults (though there’s plenty of conflicting advise out there). are you happy? how happy?
outside of some obscene luck, you probably won’t build the life you want at the speed you want. that’s normal.
you don’t have to stop liking “kid” stuff when you grow up. if you can still like ice cream or sports, you can also still like disney or nerf guns.
you’re gonna have a favorite burner on your stove.
you forgot having a favorite cleaning hack or product. itll happen to you someday. whether you realize it or not. it might be something you were raised to use, or something your friend recommended, or even something from one of those ridiculous TV ads. but it WILL happen
anyway my favorites those silly little scrub daddy sponges. i HATE touching steel wool i hate it so much its so gross and uncomfy to hold and smells weird, and these goofy smiley sponges do exactly the same job without making me cry from sheer sensory hell. i love them
