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We break the shells of invasive species in coral reefs with hammers, shoot invasive fish with guns and feed them to sharks, pick up cigarette butts off the ground, plant native plants where they never would have flourished naturally, create captive breeding programs for release in zoos, hunt deer and other game where there are no natural predators, make laws banning whale fishing, and a billion other small and large attempts to garden nature into a more hospitable place

You cannot optimise your way out of being human

You can take every supplement, superfood, and nootropic going, and you'll still have days when you're ill, when you're tired, when you make stupid mistakes for no good goddamn reason.

You can read every book on non-violent communication, or gentle parenting, you can go to therapy, and be ever so mindful about the people you fill your time with, and you're still going to experience conflict, and misunderstandings, and grief.

You can plan your schedule 24/7 in carefully calculated 3 minute increments to ensure maximum productivity, but that train will still be late, that project will still run over, you'll somehow still never get around to learning that language, or that instrument, or that sport.

You can do your cardio, and track your macros, you can carb-load, or keto, or whatever the fuck dumbass extreme diet is this week's fountain of youth. You can do crosswords, and sudoku, and keep up a 12-step nightly beauty routine, but you're still going to age. You're still going to live through the gradual dissolution of the self, both physical and mental - and that's if you're lucky.

There is no one right way to live your life. Everyone you look at who is somehow managing to live the life you imagine is perfect for you has sacrificed something important to you, or has resources you don't.

I get it. I do! This mortal coil is wrapped so tight around you that you can't breathe if you stop a moment and let yourself be aware of it. There is a book on the shelf in your local library right now that would change you as a person if you read it, but you never will, because it's one of a million and there just isn't enough time.

You are an animal, just electricity in meat. The product of millions of generations of 'just good enough'. Let yourself be that. Learn to be just good enough. Let yourself lie in a sunbeam like a cat. Let yourself search for small pieces of joy like a magpie. Feel every transcendent and wretched inch of your humanity and howl at the moon like a wolf when there's too much of you to fit inside your skin.

At the time, we didn't really understand that the pattern-matching abilities of the human mind can easily find any abnormalities. If you've got a cat, for instance, you can probably sense when that little shit is trying to steal Twinkies off the counter (I told you no, Bilby.) Work as a mini golf supervisor, you can make a pretty educated guess about which group of teens is going to throw your clubs in the water feature. And if you drive a total shitbox like me, you can tell right away when something isn't right, even if you don't know what it is.

Let me provide an example. Last month, I was heading down the highway, doing my periodic flooring-it exercises to pass everyone that was going slower than Mach 8. This kind of strain challenges every mechanical item in the car, which is why I subject it to the intense maintenance regimen described as "don't." Suddenly, I could sense that the car was down on power, that it was unhappy with some shenanigan or even shenanigans that I had been commanding it to perform in recent memory. Rather than push it, I trusted my gut and pulled off to the nearest rest stop to take a look and see what went wrong.

This is Podocnemis expansa, the Arrau river turtle. After laying her eggs as part of a group, she will patiently wait for them to hatch. When the time comes, and the babies start to hatch, she will call to them. All of the mothers will. They call their babies to the water so that they can find their way safely, and then join them in their riverine migration.

tits out tuesday

wobbly chest wednesday

(Thursday is the day of titless people, boobs have been temporarily removed as an act of solidarity)

f-cup friday

strain your back saturday

I shitted myself

No I didn’t

if we take "I shitted myself" to be the lie, that means that "Yes I did" is also a lie. this goes against the very foundation of "Two truths and a Lie."