the US is unreal like girls cant wear shorts to school, you can literally lose your job for being gay, and unarmed black children are brutally murdered on the regular but old white ppl r still like “what a beautiful country. i can freely carry a gun for no reason and some of our mountains look like presidents. god bless”
here’s the thing about manipulative people: they will continue to manipulate you long after you’ve cut them from your life.
they’ll manipulate your words, your actions, your personality when they retell the story to themselves, to mutual friends, to people you don’t even know. and they will retell it, because in the retelling, they get to be the victim, and they can use it to manipulate even more people into feeding the need for attention and sympathy that rules their lives.
it can be maddening after the fact, to think about the control they still hold over the narrative, but you have to remember that you are not that narrative. they manipulate what you left in your wake because they no longer have you to manipulate. and you’ve come out the winner either way, because all they have to cling to is that narrative and its details, but you? you’re free of them for good and you are so much better for it.
So um, let me guess it straight - it is absolutely fine for white people to dress up as Native Americans, Egyptians, Geishas or do Black face for Halloween, but Santa can’t be Black? No, this is not how it works. “But Real Santa is white!” Santa Claus is a fictional character, he DOESN’T even exist! Now do me a favor and sit cho asses down, that grandpa is as adorable as one can be.
living with anxiety is basically this vine on an infinite loop
[Singing the line from Santa Claus is Coming To Town, getting louder and higher pitched each time: “You better watch out…. you better watch out, you better watch out, you better watch out, you better wa–”]
here is an idea: normalise the idea that adopting kids is a valid option even for parents who could conceive a child themselves, and not just an inferior backup option for parents who can’t
Just coming from an adopted kid, the benefits of adoption: -When your kid asks where they come from you can literally say you pre-ordered them and waited for them to come in. My dad always equated picking me up from the hospital to ordering a sofa at k-mart and it always made me laugh. No need to explain pregnancy till they’re older. -Your child will always know it was wanted and on purpose. My parents waited 5 years for me. They waited. For me to be born. I was wanted, from the moment I came into this world, by the people who raised me. -You don’t have to pay for pregnancy or birth. Just adoption fees. No thirty thousand dollar hospital bill. -You don’t have to give birth, or be pregnant, both of which objectively suck. -The biological parents of that baby will be so happy that there is someone in the world who is willing to watch over their child. The relief that comes with that is overwhelming. -You’re saving a child’s life that would otherwise potentially be stuck in the adoption and foster system for their entire childhood.
I’ve always heard arguments about wanting the baby to be ‘yours’ but really. My parents are my parents. Just because I don’t share their DNA doesn’t mean I’m not theirs. When it comes right down to it, blood of the bond is thicker than water of the womb.
As another adopted kid, I second every point made here. When I’m asked if it’s weird having been adopted, the simple answer I always give is, “No, because I know for damned sure my parents love me and I love them to death too.”
Let a child into your life who needs a good life of their own. Consider adoption.
Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.
Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.
You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.
Frankentrees.
As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.
On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.
But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:
I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be
I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.
I need to be more like tree
I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.
what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?
Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).
As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “
including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”
It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.
Shit’s tight yo.
Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.
Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.
