Monster Blog But not really

$7.25 x 40 hour full time work week: $290

$290 x 4 weeks per month: $1,160

That weekly check comes to, according to you, 290. Most places DO NOT pay for your half hour lunch that is required by law. So your beginning number was wrong. $7.25 x 7.5 hours a day x 5 days a week only gets you $271.88.  Most people in America get paid bi-weekly, so let’s double it to get the budget. $543.75. That’s GROSS, not NET. Out of that comes anywhere between 10% and 15% taxes depending on state so we’ll low ball it at 10%. Automatically down to $489.38 a pay check. Now health insurance. Usually anywhere from 70-100 a pay check for the cheapest plans. Again, we’ll low ball and go $70. So now we have $419.39 a paycheck. x 2  = $839. 

Eight hundred thirty nine dollars. A MONTH.

But again, you seem to think that’s fair. So let’s proceed. You say rent is $500? Okay. This person now has $339 left to buy groceries for the whole month, pay utilities, car payment, car insurance, and gas money to get to work. 

Those are the bare needs. You have to eat. You have to pay for heat, water, garbage removal, gas and or electricity because apartments do not always include things and rarely all of the above. Most cities in America do not have public transportation. Mine doesn’t despite the fact that our population is over 15,000 people, not counting a taxi. If you have a car, you have to pay that. If you have a car, legally you have to have car insurance. You have to pay that. You have to have gas in that car to get to work to make that money.

Now if you can tell me you can get all of that out of $339 you’re lying.

You are so focused on rent that you aren’t thinking about everything else people have to pay for. Rent was an example. This is a breakdown of the budget you gave me and it’s not possible to live off that in 2017 America. 

And BECAUSE this person makes over $800 a month, they probably won’t qualify for financial aid or food stamps. $800 is the line in my state where they won’t help you. No food stamps, financial aid, or government housing if you make more than $800 a month. 

Hey Anon! I’m so sorry that you’re struggling right now.

You’re definitely not alone; I’ve gotten a lot of asks from people who want help dealing with intrusive/obsessive thoughts about climate change. I’m gonna try to address them all here, but I’ll also be adding some links to a masterpost on mental health resources to the header of this blog in the near future! 

So just a disclaimer before I start: If your thoughts are beyond your ability to cope or you feel suicidal the #1 priority is to seek professional help and support from family and friends.

Most people will experience intrusive thoughts at some point in their life, but frequent, highly distressing intrusive thoughts for a long period of time can be a sign of some more serious issues so if you think you need help, please get professional help!

That said, I’ve personally struggled with anxiety and bouts of intrusive thoughts and here are some tips that have helped me: 

1. Recognize that your thoughts and emotions are not reality. Just because you’re thinking about the end of the world doesn’t mean it is rationally likely to happen anytime in the near future. Sometimes the human brain just fixates on things we are afraid of and generates random thoughts to do with those fears; that doesn’t mean those fears are actually grounded in reality.

2. Often the harder we try to suppress intrusive thoughts the louder they get. Like if someone tells you “don’t think about a pink dolphin”, a pink dolphin will be all you can think about. A better strategy is to accept the thought, tell yourself that it isn’t useful or important right now, and move on with your day.

3. I have a deal with myself that I’m not allowed to dwell on problems that I can’t do anything about in that specific moment. Sometimes I will even have a document on my phone of “things to worry about later” where I record these worries; even though 99% of the time I will never go back to them sometimes it soothes my brain to know that I could if I wanted to and helps me let go of them. Also, some worries seem less intimidating when you write them down! 

4. I know it sounds cheesy, but mindfulness and grounding exercises can really help with this kind of thing because they get you focused on the moment and out of your own head.

5. Recognize how your habits and environment may impact your mental health. Exercise, eating better, drinking more water, and especially better sleep habits (both enough sleep and a regular sleep schedule) can have a surprisingly large impact on mental health. For example, my anxiety gets way worse if I have caffeine later in the day or don’t get enough sleep, so I try to avoid that.

6. Cut out sources of negativity (especially negative environmental/climate change news) in your life. If this means avoiding current events, so be it. You should not feel guilty about protecting your mental health by avoiding anxiety-inducing material. Try to find positive, hopeful sources of information and entertainment instead.

I hope that helps! If you need more support, there are lots of online mental health chats and support groups where you can talk through your feelings, as well as plenty of online resources for dealing with intrusive thoughts specifically (while most intrusive thoughts resources aren’t for thoughts about climate change specifically, the basic principles are the same).

Honeybees are invasive in the United States. Raising honeybee colonies is detrimental to native bee populations that actually provide true ecosystem benefits. Keeping honeybees to save the bees is like keeping chickens to help the native bird population, (only worse, because honeybees are horrible for native bee populations like local bumblebees, which are the pollinators among others we should be trying to save more specifically) . Honeybees were imported and domesticated long ago, but their populations are aggressive and more adaptive due to being invasive – honeybee populations have risen by 4.5% while localized native species’ populations are declining, and honeybees displace/destroy native bee populations. Honeybees in the USA thrive in larger numbers than bumbles, have longer living hives, and aggressively swarm around water/food sources, preventing bumblebees/other native pollinators like hummingbirds from doing their job. Honeybees have also been studied for the devastating effects of transfering disease and fungus to bumblebees populations, even in remote areas far from where farmers established honeybee populations. Many farmers and monocultures are definitely a major part of the problem. They import non native bees, soak single species fields in pesticides, exacerbating the problem (eliminating suitable habitat for native bees and introducing massive competition on top of that).

“From a typical bumblebee colony of a few hundred, only the young queens survive the winter, hibernating until they can start their own colonies in spring. Farmers usually buy new colonies from breeders each year. Honey bees, in contrast, live in colonies of up to 60,000 bees, and these colonies can persist indefinitely.” – From, ‘How The Bees You Know Are Killing The Bees You Don’t’ , Inside Science.org

If you want to help local bee populations, research and plant native flowers in your area, and attempt to find which flowers in particular they seem to prefer. Beekeeping honeybees, and planting non-native flowers (honeybees can pollinate and prefer non native flowers in many cases, they draw them in – always plant native plants if you can) is the opposite of helping. I cannot stress how important it is to NOT import non-native bees.

“The research team – three scientists from the University of Vermont and one from the University of Florida – explored 19 sites across Vermont. They discovered that two well-know RNA viruses found in honeybees – deformed wing virus and black queen cell virus – were higher in bumblebees collected less than 300 meters from commercial beehives. The scientists also discovered that active infections of the deformed wing virus were higher near these commercial apiaries but no deformed wing virus was found in the bumblebees they collected where foraging honeybees and apiaries were absent.Most impressive, the team detected viruses on 19% of the flowers they sampled from sites near apiaries. “I thought this was going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. What are the chances that you’re going to pick a flower and find a bee virus on it?” says Alger. “Finding this many was surprising.” In contrast, the scientists didn’t detect any bee viruses on flowers sampled more than one kilometer from commercial beehives.”

what also scared me was “ Alger – an expert beekeeper and researcher in UVM’s Department of Plant & Soil Science and Gund Institute for Environment – is deeply concerned about the long-distance transport of large numbers of honeybees for commercial pollination. “Big operators put hives on flatbed trucks and move them to California to pollinate almonds and then onto Texas for another crop,” she says – carrying their diseases wherever they go. And between bouts of work on monoculture farm fields, commercial bees are often taken to more pristine natural habitats “to rest and recover, where there is diverse, better forage,” says Alger.”

University of Vermont. “Honeybees infect wild bumblebees through shared flowers: Domestic beehives linked to spike in viral infections in nearby bumblebee populations.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 26 June 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190626160339.htm>.

Samantha A. Alger, P. Alexander Burnham, Humberto F. Boncristiani, Alison K. Brody. RNA virus spillover from managed honeybees (Apis mellifera) to wild bumblebees (Bombus spp.). PLOS ONE, 2019; 14 (6): e0217822 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217822

other articles supporting new research Micha is talking about -

Are Honey Bees Bad for Wild Bees? on JSTOR

This article is about specific species affected by honeybees. The only area they don’t seem to hurt native bees too much is in their own native habitat in Europe. Everywhere else, they can become a problem based on the science.

https://daily.jstor.org/are-honey-bees-bad-for-wild-bees/

From the Sierra Club

“How the Honeybee Buzz Hurts Wild Bees“

“But honeybees are at no risk of dying off. While disease, parasites, and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen by 45 percent over the last half century.“Honeybees are not going to go extinct,” says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society. “We have more honeybee hives than we’ve ever had and that’s simply because we manage honeybees. Conserving honeybees to save pollinators is like conserving chickens to save the birds.””

“Contrary to public perception, die-offs in honeybee colonies are an agricultural problem, not a conservation issue. First domesticated about 9,000 years ago, honeybees are not all that different from livestock. They are also not native to the United States; they were imported from Europe to help pollinate crops around 1622.Meanwhile, native bees—of which there are over 20,000 species varying in size, shape, and color—are experiencing incredible losses. Of the nearly 4,000 native bee species in the United States alone, four native bumblebee species have declined 96 percent in the last 20 years, and three others are believed to have gone extinct. In the last 100 years, 50 percent of Midwestern native bee species disappeared from their historic ranges.”

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-honeybee-buzz-hurts-wild-bees

“ Honeybees Help Farmers, But They Don’t Help the Environment “ on National Geographic

This Nat Geo page has info on how to build a native bee house.

https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2018/01/29/honeybees-help-farmers-but-they-dont-help-the-environment/

“ Those honeybees you’re so worried about? They’re killing off wild bee species. “

https://grist.org/article/those-honeybees-youre-so-worried-about-theyre-killing-off-wild-bee-species/

“ Native bees are better pollinators, more plentiful than honeybees, finds entomologist “

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/10/native-bees-are-better-pollinators-honeybees

I have to correct my original post! I had previously written “honeybee populations have risen by 4.5% while localized native species’ populations are declining,” and that is incorrect. I had totally misread the number which was underlined in the article, the underline looked like a decimal point to me. I’m sorry about that!

I changed it to “managed honeybee populations worldwide have risen by 45%, while localized native bee species’ populations are declining.”

Source for that info: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-bees-you-know-are-killing-bees-you-don%E2%80%99t

I also corrected: “and honeybees displace/destroy native bee populations.”

Book seller

Crystal seller

He sells flowers

She will sell you a pumpkin this fall

Would you like to purchase.. bean?

They are regulars. They buy mushrooms for soup

She has more options

Don’t be scared, he’s just been doing this for years and is passionate about garlic

Can I interest you in...melon?

Witch’s familiar needs coins to buy ingredients from toad next door

Scotland’s Spirit Island

JIGGLYYYYYY