Stop telling yourself that the grass is greener on the other side, because it’s not. It is greener where you water it. So take control of your life and start watering your own pastures and grow your own greener grasses.
Stop both envying your neighbor’s green grass AND watering your own. We’re in a fucking drought. You can’t sustain that shit. Think beyond the lawn that society told you to want. Put in some native plants that will thrive and bloom with very little water. They might be a little more spiny than what you first planned, but there is great beauty and variety in these hardy survivors. Your yard will be way more interesting and friendly to wildlife than that of the people who took the easy route and poured on water at the expense of other people and organisms. (This has been a California-themed post hijacking.)
No but like along with being literal good advice (GRASS AND LAWNS ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA WE SHOULD REVERSE THIS CULTURAL EXPECTATION NOW) this is also metaphorically good advice (as I’m sure you knew when you posted it).
There are sometimes things that you take for granted that you are just Expected To Want or Do or Be that you don’t actually have to. You’re so used to it you don’t even think about it, but the moment you do a less resource-heavy alternative appears.
On an environmentally friendly level this is a terrible example, but a couple years ago I was talking with my therapist about problems I was having being a functioning human being, and I went on a rant about the dishes and how they stress me out and I feel like I never get them done and then I hate myself and after listening to this whole rant I expected my therapist to give me the normal pep talks about being kind to yourself and taking it on a little bit at a time but instead he just had the most exasperated look on his face and he said,
“Buy some paper plates.”
He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world and I was completely speechlessly thunderstruck.
He said, “As an environmentalist, I am giving you permission for your own health to buy some paper plates. Problem solved.”
I don’t always use paper plates now. My mental health does allow me to keep up with the dishes better than I was (though these days my physical health has started interfering). But when I feel that slipping? I skip the cultural expectation that I should just be doing the dishes all the time. I conserve my (metaphorical, the opposite of literal in this case, sadly) water, and I buy some paper plates.
There a thing that’s ruining your mental health? Your life? It feels like a simple thing that other people can just DO, but you can’t? Often there’s a simpler solution. If you are tired of taking care of your hair, cut it into a pixie cut to save yourself the hassle. Hell, shave it off. You don’t need hair! Google hangout is a great alternative to going out when you want to talk to a friend but aren’t sure you can get yourself out of your house. If food stresses you out, buy shit you can just grab and eat without even having to microwave (I fucking love cottage cheese and vegetables for this exact reason).
You do not have to cook. You don’t have to date or get married. You don’t have to be monogamous if you do want to date or get married. You don’t have to be straight. You don’t have to be a boy or a girl. You don’t have to look a certain way or talk a certain way or eat certain things. You don’t have to go to college. You don’t have to be in that major. You don’t have to own a house. You don’t have to want or have kids. You don’t have to wait for the perfect partner to have kids if you do want them.
It’s such a normal thing to have a lawn that many people don’t even consider the time, money, and water it would save to just get rid of it and replace it with an alternative that takes into account the native environment of where it’s growing. How much easier their life would be without maintaining something that just went there because it was expected with no regard for whether it naturally fit, and instead put in plants that serve the same function but actually thrive and take root with no real effort.
Instead of fighting to maintain expectations, throw away your lawn and plant natively instead. Both literally and metaphorically.
Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
Plants have been on this planet for longer than any animal or insect species. how in the name of holy fuck do you think they survived this long?
there are millions of plants that choke out other plants, kudzu/mint/raspberries being only a few examples.
Epiphytes are plants that grow on top of other plants and smother them that way.
There are dozens of species(and I’m lowballing here bc I’m drunk and don’t wanna exaggerate) of plants that are straight-up parasites to other plants.
hell, plants have evolved to be straight-up deadly to any animal idiot enough to try to chomp on em. sometimes you don’t even have to eat em.
like, the kingdom Plantae is an intricately balanced system in which everybody’s got a gun aimed at everyone else’s heads. Plants are way more experienced at war than we (or any animals) are. they’re just trickier and more subtle about it than we will ever be
Plant warfare is what keeps our warfare up at night, historically
How has no one mentioned rhubarb? It will Outlast the cockroaches and I once saw a patch try to kill shed. Would have done it if we hadn’t defended the shed.
@breadgunner You may be thinking of Eucalyptus? It literally took over Australia by being able to both survive and promote fire. The trees are known to explode, but they also tend to leak/drop a lot of gum (sap), which is also flammable. As are the leaves, of course.
Let me repeat that: The trees are known to explode.
Our survival trainer told us this right before we bedded down for the night in a Eucalyptus grove.
so like, the new spongebob meme is just a gamzee quirk
So lIkE, tHe nEw sPoNgEbOb mEmE Is jUsT A GaMzEe qUiRk
i literally set myself up for this and i didnt even see it coming because i didnt think someone would gather the strength to do a homestuck edit in the year 2017
yall I fucking bled for this peice of trash pls like it
oh. I thought it was a photo.
Damn it took me 5 minutes to figure out why you wanted people to like a picture of soap. You did such a good job people think you are just posting random pics of soap.
this isn’t the fist time this has happened, I painted lube and everyone was confused that I posted a picture of lube
I’ve seen several posts going around about obvious furry porn getting put up in high-class art museums, where the general thrust is all “ha ha, those ivory tower snobs don’t even realise they’re putting furry porn in their art galleries, because they’re not Internet Savvy like we are!”
Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether this is a reasonable conclusion to draw, and assume for the sake of argument that art museums are, indeed, being bamboozled into putting weird fetish porn on their walls due to lack of cultural context on the part of their curators.
Now, take a step back and consider: what are the odds that this is the first period in history where these sorts of shenanigans have occurred?
Indeed, what confidence do we have that it hasn’t been happening constantly throughout the history of Western art?
How many of the respected works of eras past that we genuflect over every day are, in fact, weird fetish porn that we ourselves lack the cultural context to correctly identify as such?
just moving along like everyone else 