mercury

anyone who has ever had a job should have the right to kill their current/former boss at any moment

i have been looking for this picture for YEARS and it’s finally back on my dash….wow

thinking about how one time i went to the pool with a friend, and there happened to be a white and brown pigeon wearing a leg band. i proceeded to spend the entirety of the next 3 hours trying to lure it close enough with crumbs to read the band and reunite them with their owner. to make a long story short i was unsuccessful, and that was the last time i was invited to the pool. i spent the next several years continuously concocting schemes to break in to finally find out this pigeon’s identity and bring them home, although my friend’s pool was exclusive to the neighborhood he lived in and was 40 minutes away from my house. the real miracle of this story is that this was classified as mildly weird child behavior and not a Diagnosis

the real long game was the hope that the pigeon’s owner, who i would contact via the registry of racing pigeon leg bands, would NOT want the pigeon back, and then i would just get to have a pigeon. i was on to something

people fail to understand that you can name your child what you want but you cannot make people call them that name. like, you can name your daughter Tragedeigh but you cannot stop her from being called Dee by her classmates. I would get parents being mad if they had named their child a name from their language/culture and their kid’s lazy Anglophone peers refused to learn how to pronounce it but it is always people who named their kid something like Abcde screaming and crying and throwing up about how no one calls their kid by the right name. it is even funnier when the kid is of an age where they can choose what they want to be called and they have CHOSEN the nickname and the parent is still mad. sometimes, I feel like terrible names are a way for these parents to assert control and permanently ruin their kid’s life and it makes them mad when it doesn’t work.

it’s crazy to me that every seed in existence is a little chemical computer taking readings of temperature and moisture and minerals and all that to see if it’s able to grow yet and they’re doing crazy stuff like going into full dormancy and waiting for species-specific conditions etc etc and some seeds will do this in the size of a dust particle (see: orobanche) and some will pack in extra starch and food and do it in the size of a coconut or something… just dissected this flower seed at work that was a woody two-compartment capsule with one embryo per compartment, the whole seed a little smaller than a dime, and I swear to god it had a full soybean’s worth of embryo and food packed in there. it’s just unfathomable to me

sometimes a seed strikes me as being like a little spaceship with on-board life support and stuff. all that’s inherently certain about a seed’s existence is that its parents survived nearby, presumably, so if all goes well it’ll be set up for some kind of success falling where it falls, but ideally the seed won’t see those exact conditions, because being too close could also hurt the seed’s chances of survival… as could being too far away, like if it ends up in a different habitat or ecosystem and the right conditions never happen. The whole food-on-board strategy was a huge buff when they patched it in after ferns and other spore-bearing plants, but it’s still basically outer space, right? Just deploying a hundred ships to different planets in the same star system, hoping it’s not so different down there that it’s unsurvivable? like every seed is a chance and different plants are putting different amounts of food, effort, and strategy into those chances. so you get a million different seeds from a million different species and they all look and act different from the ground up. you know what I mean, man. you know what I’m sayin

It’s a shame that the internet’s takeaway from the Epstein thing is “Pizzagate was right and we should all start thinking like qanoners” instead of “The MeToo movement was right and should have involved more guillotines.”