whatever man

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.

at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly

at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.

at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.

At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.

carl sagan said in contact that one measure of a relationship's intimacy is in how many of each person's sub-personas can see and commune with each other. and that hit. do you wanna see if our inner children want to play together 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

image description: a comically dismayed weeping emoji /end description

jellyfish have to be kept in a round tank because if they're in a tank with corners they'll get stuck in them. I think that's beautiful. god's stupidest little plastic bags (affectionate)

Also when being bred in captivity(this is done at my work and my job is to teach people about it) to get them to reproduce from the polyp stage of life, we have to intentionally cause them enough stress to reproduce but not enough to harm them. Lately we’ve done that by cleaning their habitat extra well, makes them think the word is ending

remember that time I made no sense whatsoever to a very dear friend of mine because I was trying to explain the concept of passive misogyny and I couldn’t make any headway because it kept circling back to “he doesn’t mean to” and “he doesn’t understand” and “it’s not on purpose” and “he’s better than his dad and brothers” and “what do you mean being a perpetually clueless helpless piece of shit helps him escape accountability”

Day 180 since Craig moved in. he clearly thinks he’s dating one of us but we can’t figure out who. it’s possible one of us is lying about it for some reason but so far our efforts at inquisition has led nowhere. we would kick him out but he’s been doing the dishes for us. we’ve decided that for the sanity of the polycule we’ll keep up the charade. if all of us continue to be flirty with him, he’ll project his attraction onto whoever the hell he thinks is into him. this house of cards is delicate but necessary

It got funnier

This is how cats domesticated themselves

knight experiencing the ultimate “oh god what did i do last night” while waking up to find that the dragon they were supposed to kill is both very much alive and acting quite intimately affectionate with them

ancient roman women whose husband keeps looking at the neighbour's boy quintus and he never looks at her that way and she can't even chainsmoke in the kitchen because they don't have marlboro blues in ancient times. and she can't even go to the club because they haven't discovered drum and bass music yet. her friend clodia's having visions of a woman named doechii but neither of them knows what that means

when i was a kid i was so mad all the time bc i thought someday i'd have to be somebody's wife i didn't know it was optional. is everybody reminding the young girls in their lives that it's optional.

scariest thing is when you're a kid in a huge family run by women and then you go over to a house that's deeply patriarchal & misogynistic. i remember when i was 8 years old and i got invited over to my friend's house for a big birthday party with her entire extended family. after the enormous lunch that served over 30 people, i got called into the kitchen to do literally hundreds of dishes, alongside all the other little girls and women. not only were the boys our age all excused from the meal to go play, but all the grown men went to the living room to watch sports together and drink. i couldn't believe it. i asked why some of the grownups were watching TV but the girls had to clean up and all the women just laughed and laughed at me.

as a teenager when i learned the word "sexist" and used it the older women balked at it and tried to convince me this arrangement was a good thing actually because women need space from men, and cleaning in the kitchen after parties is a sacred domain of safety. and i was like actually i think needing private safety from your own husbands, sons, and brothers sounds even worse. like do you understand you somehow made this even more troubling than it already was

like i think it's fine if a bunch of sister-in-laws/wives want time together without their husbands & brothers to talk together in camaraderie. i'm not judging that. obviously. but dare i ask why the women's meetup could only take place while doing manual labor for a nearby room full of men

it's also interesting how this ingrained rigid social structures in children bc i was mostly friends with boys at that age and in fact was at the birthday party of a friend who was a boy so i remember complaining to him at school that it was weird all the girls had to help clean up because i didn't know any of the other little girls so i felt really left out that i didn't get to hang out with my own friends for a chunk of the party and he and the other little boys were like "that's just the rules."

everyone tells me that ADHD isn't an excuse for being lazy and that there are people with ADHD who have overcome their symptoms and are successful but every day I drag around an invisible dopplegänger of myself who is horrible and listless and always complains. and he is so heavy. I'm ambitious and I'm passionate but he isn't and the problem is that to get anywhere in life I have to grab him by the leg and pull him along the whole way, kicking and screaming, and sometimes it gets exhausting. sometimes he pulls me down with him. and it gets a bit difficult to explain to people why I'm lying down on the floor in pain when they can't see him.