Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
I should also add- I ran into my rabbi and explained the situation. I then asked, earnestly, if there was a remedy. A mikveh of sorts, or a beit din, or something.
He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"
So Theodora's a free agent according to rabbinic opinion. I guess I'll permit her to be Roman Catholic.
As someone who struggled with and ultimately had to give up on my own prayer plant, it is actually very impressive how healthy it looks. Maybe tending to the plantâs spiritual needs is the trick after all.
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Unexplainable ick: I hate hate hate hate when reading a manga/manhua/manhwa/webnovel/etc and a main characterâs name is something like. Mark. Or Chris. Sara.
I 1000% prefer something unhinged like Echineacea.
I used to be kinda sad that I had so few followers but now itâs lowkey a badge of pride. 16 years on this hellsite and my blog never amounted to anything. Purely here for the hell of it, as we all should be!
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Weird fic idea I ended up ruminating on during my commute to work this morning. A Twilight canon-divergence (and no I donât know where it came from, I never read Twilight fic and havenât watched the movies lately lol).
¡ Starts off from the second book, after Edward decided he should leave Bella for her own good and she becomes depressed and then reckless in order to see hallucinations of Edward.
¡ Her recklessness extends to flirting with random guys because the Edward hallucination gets jealous when she does this.
¡ Bella ends up having a one night stand that results in her pregnant with Renesmee early, (with Renesmee being fully human.)
¡ Her dad wants to send her back to Arizona to live with her mother, but she refuses. She and Jacob grow closer and he becomes her biggest support through the pregnancy. She begins to see him as more than a friend.
¡ Bellaâs unborn baby being tied to Jacob prevents Alice from being able to see what happened, so the Cullens remain uninvolved.
¡ The events of the third book still play out, but the wolves take care of the vampires themselves.
¡ Renesmee is born and Jacob imprints on her immediately, but he hesitates to tell Bella because her mental state is still very fragile.
¡ Years go by. Bella basically relies on Jacob like a spouse would, but despite being very supportive of her, he never initiates anything romantic anymore. She thinks itâs because heâs being overly cautious of her + self-deprecating thoughts as the teen mom and town loser who barely graduated hs. He canât bring himself to tell her that he only thinks of her as a friend now that Renesmee has been born.
¡ Bella still lives with Charlie and works part-time at the local diner. She never applied to any colleges, but Charlie starts encouraging her to take online courses or do something more for herself.
¡ Eventually the truth comes out about Jacob imprinting on Renesmee and Bella doesnât take it well.
¡ Charlie is the one who helps her get back on her feet again + taking care of Renesmee forces her to think outside herself.
¡ Towards the end, Edward reappears again. Bella is 27 but Edward still looks 17. Seeing him again isnât the gutpunch it would have been years ago and she realizes how naĂŻve she was when she thought he was her whole world. Now every decision she makes is based on what would be best for Renesmee.
¡ Ends on a hopeful note, implying she could now attempt the relationship with him where she doesnât insist on being changed into a vampire to stay forever young with him. He says her scent has changed, but in a good way like how a fine wine ages. But now he wants to savor it rather than devour it. Something something soulmates beyond physical attraction.
¡ Overall, somewhat serious but hopeful story about always standing back up after life knocks you down.
i love this post so much. all the replies are like
"i'm so basic.....i just like a lot of butter or jam :(" (as though those are not god's best and most beloved condiments and his greatest gifts to mankind)
"FUCK health guidelines FUCK my cholesterol and most importantly FUCK diet culture i'll put a dumpster full of butter on my toast and not even GOD will stop me" (no notes. god would encourage this)
doxxing one's self by mention of polarizing regional delicacies (i am so curious about vegemite i must admit)
"does a grilled cheese count as toast?" (not for the purposes of this post)
"i don't like toast please don't kill me" (i appreciate the honesty but i fear this post is not for you)
people who put full ass meals on toast (based)
people who do not but eat toast as a full meal (based)
melty peanut butter (absolutely based)
"it's a guilty pleasure but...nutella đł" (relieve yourself of fear and enjoy your dessert toast)
special shoutout to the pots-havers adding extra salt. also the one person who mentioned kaya. i see you and am in agreement
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sometimes people will make you feel stupid for being kind. this makes it hard to stay kind. it is important that you do anyway. if you have become unkind, it is important to remember that you can become kind again. it's a skill, not an inherent trait.
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But Iâm a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So Iâm posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet â it just poured straight out of my fingers â so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but youâll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. Itâs often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you donât know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film â when you hear a word you donât know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things youâve already learned. Thatâs why itâs best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go âHey! I recognize that!â This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think itâs not that important⌠because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just donât worry if you donât understand everything thatâs going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you canât 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of whatâs going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but youâre not actively studying when youâre doing passive exposure. Remember the two things youâre trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff youâve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You canât learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesnât need to be the âActive Learningâ kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the âPassive Exposureâ kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you donât enjoy, because you wonât benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you donât understand at the beginning. But A) thatâs good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but Iâm not sure if itâs still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess whatâs going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (Iâve written a whole post about the latter here.) You donât need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a âYMMVâ piece of advice, but: if youâre having trouble memorizing stuff, just donât. Donât bother trying to remember anything. Remember that âpassive exposureâ bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again â but youâd be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so thereâs nothing wrong with it. But I notice that itâs often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once youâve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge youâve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone whoâs a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Donât underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether itâs narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess thatâs not technically âtalking to yourselfâ), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, itâs actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And thatâs about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
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