Emily. In my 20s. Punk mentality. Wide vocabulary, prefers profanities. Recovering self esteem. Hufflepuff and proud. Love my ink. Like my art. Immersed in my crafts. Trust is earned. Non-religious. Random as a hormonal conure. Haters gonna hate. When life gives you lemons, sell em, cause they're expensive. Wish I could fly.
it really is next to impossible to write realistic sibling dialogue, I just passed my brother on the stairs and instead of greeting each other like human beings I said ‘born survivor’ and he said ‘youtube rewind. let’s set it to rewind.’ like you ain’t gonna find that shit in a novel
aw man writing siblings is so wild because sometimes you just can’t portray it
me and my little brother don’t even greet each other - if we pass each other on the stairs or in the corridor, we jump into ridiculous fight stances then feign karate chopping and slapping each other (stopping just before we make contact) whilst making “HIIIYA” and “POW” noises for a solid 30 seconds, then silently walk off and continue what we were doing
and then sometimes he’ll either just do the Had To Do It To ‘Em pose when I enter the room or dab as a greeting
exactly! I have three younger brothers and the original post was just about the oldest, the middle one and me usually do some kind of elaborate dab also, and a lot of the time when I see the youngest I just yell his name like a wrestling commentator…siblings have a different language
my twin brother and I just point at each other like that spider-man meme if we see each other at school
My brother was diagnosed with depression years before I was, and because of that he started therapy years before I did.
I still remember when I was a young teen and he was playing a Nirvana song and he stopped it at this one line: “I miss the comfort of being sad”
He told me that when you start to get better, there’s a part of you that misses being sad and that if you start feeling that way you have to be extra extra aware and careful because if you indulge the feeling you’ll go down a self-destructive spiral
And even though that was years and years ago, I think about it all the time. Especially when I’m reading discourse on the idea of getting so attached to mental illness as an identity that you don’t want to improve things because you feel safe in it and don’t know who you are without it
I always think of that line “I miss the comfort of being sad” and my brother’s warning
Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.
So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.
You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.
Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.
Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.
Don’t be fooled. Wool is a sustainable material, one we should make more and better use of.
This reminds me of the Peppa Pig episode about friendly spiders that was banned in Australia because their response was basically, “um, oh, no, you can’t, uh, you can’t tell our kids that. spiders here will kill them.”
‘Okay, so, today at work I asked a question that made my boss recoil, but apparently, once asked, he has to tell me the full story or ‘bad things will happen’. Which, as it would, immediately piqued my interest.
I did the mash up last night, so I know that I left potatoes in the bin. I was last one out, and first one in this morning, and the potatoes are gone from that bin. Bit of a ‘huh?’ moment.
And my boss … he starts telling me about how they always used to put out roses outside the restaurant when they opened.
“What? Isn’t that expensive?”
“I mean, yeah, but it’s just what you do when you open a restaurant”
What the fuck kind of answer …?
Anyways, the roses always used to disappear, so they had to replace them everyday, (This skinflint spending that much cash?!). One outside the front door, in that little metal thing that I had forgotten exists. It’s above to the right of the front door, a small circle made by 8 vertical bands of metal, each in an ) shape. So, like, the cross-section is a )(. Apparently that’s a flower holder.
And then outside of the back door, apparently the old wooden post there never held up anything, it was just a post with a vase on it. That he drove into the asphalt there.
In the alleyway.
“What? Why would you do something so pointless?”
“Anyways,”, he brushed me off, “like I was saying, we used to put out the roses every night [[emphasis mine]] and they would always be gone by morning. City kids, right?”
“Why did you keep doing this?!”
“We had really good luck opening, I didn’t want to screw it up”
At this point I feel I should stress that my boss is a straight-laced no nonsense, no superstition, don’t-do-needless-things, pennypincher without an ounce of spirituality in him. But throughout all of this he’s defending putting out roses at nighttime, like it’s the most obvious thing n the world.
Just when I think he’s playing the longest, weirdest joke on me, he brings out the iPad, and he starts showing me security footage. It’s indistinct, it’s too dark, he’s trying to point out that the rose never changes from the beginning of the night to the end, but when it gets bright again, the flower is just gone, while the stem remains.
It’s about this point that I realize: This is a faerie sacrifice. This is how you sacrifice things to goblins and faeries.
These are rose faeries. Now you might not know, even if you live here, but Newfoundland has a tradition of rose faeries. We basically took all the stuff british colonists knew about faeries and said, ‘yeah, well, it’s all about wild roses now’. Hike up to Signal Hill from behind the geo centre and you’ll pass a faerie ring of rose bushes that someone planted because of that. (It’s not obvious at first). Later in Newfoundland history, we star replacing all of the rose faerie tales with tales about Mother Mary, (As in, Christianity), whose flower is the rose. Ask around the old folk, they’ll tell you tales about people getting sick or getting well really suddenly, followed by a strong smell of rose. About people working on church roofs, falling down into rose bushes, and not getting hurt. About statues of Mother Mary crying rose oil, indicating that an infant will be left in front of the statue soon. Those are all stories that are actually about rose faeries, but they changed the topic. I guess they still pay respect to them, they just think they’re paying respect to god with rose petals and rosehip tea.
“But what’s this got to do with potatoes?”
Well, he said, he kept this up for about 5 or 6 months, and then the winter started. And back then, the florists in town didn’t stock as much in green houses, there wasn’t enough call for it. So he wasn’t able to get roses.
The restaurant had really bad luck for a while, but then one day, all of the potatoes in the restaurant went missing. Of all the things, not the tenderloin steak, not the fresh salmon, not the halibut, not the cherries, not the fresh baked bread, the potatoes.
And the luck came back.
And he hasn’t questioned it since.
“So, about how many potatoes go missing every week?”
“About 25lbs in little bits”
We turned rose faeries into gluttonous potato faeries.
How does that even happen?!
Was a faerie just screaming “Where are the GODDAMN ROSES?!” while breaking into the restaurant?!
And what the hell happened when it found the potatoes?!
Like, *monocle pop*, “What the fucking WOT?!:, while holding up a potato and looking at it in reverence?
What do they even DO with potatoes?
I mean, the obvious guess is ‘eat them’, but like, did they eat roses?
Are there faeries somewhere swimming in potato water, blessing our restaurant for the earthy smells we have bestowed upon them?!
Just … potato faeries. We have fucking potato faeries in the restaurant where I work.
Potato.
Faeries.
(wondering idly how many people have tagged @seananmcguire on this one.)
Have I ever told the story of how my mom almost died because a giant Gene Simmons burned down her apartment building?
I wanna hear! (I mean I’m really glad your mom is okay, but this sounds like an incredible story amd I can’t miss out.)
Okay, so when my mom was 19 and living in San Francisco, she broke off her engagement to this really sweet Belgian boy because was like “holy shit, I love girls” and moved into a shitty apartment in the student corner of town because rent was cheap and the people on the block were her kind of folks.
One morning, she gets home from work and it has just been the shittiest day ever because it was laundry day so she had to wear the clothes she hated most, the shift leader was talking about layoffs, and her car had literally exploded on the Golden Gate Bridge on the way home. She is exhausted and thinks to herself “well, at least this day can’t get worse”.
My mother later told me that uttering this sentence is like standing in front of god with your arms flung out screaming “whatca FUCKING GOT???”
She collapses in bed still in her most hated outfit and passes the fuck out.
On the bottom floor are a pair of art students who I could never quite confirm mom was quietly banging in her spare time, who were building a giant Gene Simmons statue out of scrapped denim jeans for their final project. Something about meta-symbolism. They had left a can of open turpentine by the statue and also an electrical outlet.
While no one was paying attention, the outlet sparked, the turpentine caught, and the 20foot tall Jean Simmons lit up like a goddamn fireworks show.
Mom wakes up to screaming and the sound of someone banging with all their might on every wall and door they pass in the hallway to alert the apartment dwellers of their impending fiery death. She is very tired. She hasn’t eaten in like two days. She can barely think. So she just kinda stumbles to the door. As she’s reaching it, she notices smoke coming out of her electrical outlet. Mom originally went to school for physics and mathematics before she dropped out, so she stops for a second and thinks to herself “wow, the smoke is exiting the outlet at a complete horizontal for a solid 6 inches before it starts to rise, there must be a lot of pressure buildup for that to……HOLY FUCK I NEED TO RUN” and just fucking books it out of the building.
She stands there on the ground with other students watching everything they own go up in smoke while Jean Simmons’ terrifying two story face laughs at them from behind the building. Mom says that she never got the smell of smoke and burning tar out of her most hated work outfit and eventually embraced that fact and burned them.
This is also the story of how my mother ended up homeless and standing naked in a stranger’s bedroom with an absolutely petrified 22 year old cop holding a gun to her head while she cried and laughed like she had gone round the fucking bend, but mostly this is the story of why my mother once slapped me across the face so hard I saw birds because 3 year old me tried to comfort her one day by saying “at least it can’t get worse!”
Okay now I need to hear about the cop thing please? Very interested ^.^
So Jeans Simmons burned down everything mom had ever owned right? The emergency responders brought these little kits with toothpaste and a hairbrush and deodorant and such. But the shift leader who’d been talking about layoffs was in fact correct and she was fired the next day, so now she’s homeless, has no money, no clothes, no possessions, hasn’t spoken to her family in three years, and her car is still a smoking wreck on the side of the bridge waiting for a tow. All she’s got is the little emergency kit, her least favorite work clothes that smell like fire (incidentally she didn’t smoke another cigarette for 15 years after that day), and her vinyl records that have been melted into slag.
And as she’s standing on a street corner that evening, waiting for a bus, smelling of smoke and wondering why the fuck she’s still holding her melted records, it starts raining cats and dogs. Mom takes one look at herself in a shop window and realizes she’s not going to make it like this. But luckily she’s just hooked up with the local queer circuit, and there’s a dungeon Mistress who’s going out of town and needs someone to watch her cat. She says mom can stay there until she gets back and then she’ll help mom figure out something more permanent.
So mom picks up a key and comes by the next day. She only has to spend a few minutes in a house that doesn’t smell like soot and tar to realize how bad she must smell and decides then and there to burn her clothes. She wasn’t exactly thinking through what to do after that, and suddenly she’s staring at ashes in the fireplace and realizes she has nothing to wear anymore. At this point, mom just stops thinking, turns around, and goes to bed naked because why the hell not.
Problem is, Dungeon Mistress didn’t tell the neighbors she had a house guest. So all they know is that an incredibly be-draggled young woman who smelled terrible wandered into the apartment after Dungeon Mistress left town and started a fire in the fireplace.
So they called the cops.
Now mom hasn’t slept since the fire, in part because hello trauma and in part because sleeping on the street in SF isn’t the best choice as a 19 year old homeless girl. So she’s fuckin dead to the world. Until next thing she knows, the bedroom door of the apartment flies open and there’s this baby faced cop standing in the doorway yelling orders at her. She’s panicking and falls out of bed and is still super naked and way too tired and hungry to think properly, so as soon as she registers “gun aimed at my face” she just starts fucking LAUGHING. Like, howling, cackling, rib-cracking laughter, tears just pouring down her face the whole time.
And this cop is just fucking terrified because ~what~ the heck?? He keeps trying to yell at her and she just keeps laughing, and at some point she just sits down on the floor, still laughing, and the cop just sort of nervously drops a sheet over her and is like “I still have to ask you to leave” and mom was like “I’m fucking cat sitting?” And of course the cat chooses then to just come over and headbutt her because it’s hungry.
So mom ends up giving him Dungeon Mistress’s phone number who confirms what she’s doing there and is frankly ~fucking pissed~ that mom’s being put through this. The cop is like “maybe try not being homeless and looking like a wreck next time?” And mom looks like she might deck him so he just fuckin scoots.
Mom spent a few months couch surfing with Dungeon Crews and shelters like that before she finally managed to gather some clothes of her own and get a new job. But that experience pretty well solidified mom’s opinion of “fuuuuuuuuck cops” and set her on the path of being a political agitator.
And the moral of the story is that if you’re having a bad day, try to make responsible decisions like not burning your only set of clothes or not daring god to personally ruin your month.
when the name changed to Jean Simmons the first time I didn’t notice the pun and I was like, they changed the name to a more androginous one? was it a genderbended Gene Simmons? A lesbian Gene Simmons?
Now I deeply wish that they had been building a lesbian Gene Simmons, but sadly he was merely made of denim.
so i learned yesterday that theres a tiny plot at the corn research/breeding nursery i work at thats full of what the breeders call “zoo corn”??? its like. corn that got mutated by accident when they were breeding and they just kept the lines as separate varieties bc its interesting to see and might come in handy some day (it doesn’t get bred into other stuff or developed, just kept in the zoo plot for display). zoo corn includes:
-”bloody butcher corn”: corn that has red streaks all over the ears
-”rainbow corn”: corn plants that are covered in red streaks
-”glass corn”: the breeders say this exists but they dont have it at our facilities??? its corn thats normal corn but the yellow pigment in the kernels got mutated, so the kernels are literally just translucent
-”lazy corn”: corn plants with the protein that helps keep them upright mutated so they grow straight and then when they reach adulthood, they bend all the way over in graceful arcs. like they’re perfectly fine they’re just having a good time on the ground
-”hosta corn”: its corn but its short and bushy and has square stems instead of round stems
i love my mutated corn babs they are beautiful and good
okay so a lot of people have been asking me for pics of the beautiful mutated corn children!!
first of all, hosta corn:
its about 2 feet tall, idk if you can tell from that pic. its also hard to articulate how square the stems are but i did my best:
then, some rainbow corn. turns out that its more than red streaks (before hunting out the plot itself for these pics i had only heard verbal descriptions of these plants!!!)
i have no idea what this is but he got pretty yellow streaks???
finally, lazy corn. turns out these are not the graceful creatures i was imagining and are actually hilarious
thats. thats what a row of lazy corn looks like??? like they’re actually not dying (except the one on the far left that flopped into the alley and got walked on a little)????? they’re just??? perfectly happy plants just having a great time on the ground???????????????????????????? guys i cant do this
