“What? No, it’s my giant Cheeto.”

“How many toys are there? Let’s see… oneeee, twooo, six!”

“NO! One two three!”

“What? Are you sure? Let me try again. One, two… six?”

I was trying to do an elaborate floral pattern on my eggs, but the stencil kept slipping. I got reeeeally distraught. More distraught than I had any right to be. But no matter how much I concentrated, I couldn’t get the stencil to stay in the right place.

Me:*looks at america preparing for ww3*

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