#idk man this is stream of consciousness and it’s midnight lol

[just-your-average-cryptid]

most of us have heard of the red car game. you’re on a road trip, you’re bored, you start looking for red cars to do something.

and then they’re everywhere. you notice them nearly every few minutes.

there aren’t suddenly more red cars now, of course. you were seeing them already, but you weren’t noticing. you weren’t looking.

I am noticing things.

there is a plant I notice everywhere now, a small bushy plant in suburbs, along streets, by shops on the highways. dwarf umbrella bush is what the internet tells me when I look for it’s name. I did this because I wanted to know why,

every time I ever saw it, every place,

it was always dying. always the leaves turning yellow, the branches small and scraggly. inside out - nitrogen deficiency. their soil drained.

I am noticing how many of these landscaping plants are yellowing, how small and sickly they look in just a few years. I am noticing how often the grass outside the house is replaced when it once again turns brown and dry, how the type never changes and the cycle starts again. I am noticing how the unmowed, unkempt spaces on lakesides and roadsides look more alive than this. how the preserve I grew up next to was miles of “messy” unmanicured nature and the ground was covered in leaves instead of grass and there was life.

I am noticing the birds that come by the lake. there was a flash of blue wings and red chest - eastern bluebird, male, relatively common. I had never seen one before. there is a family of ducks that appear every spring; i cannot say if it’s successive generations or different ducks, but I can always look forward to ducklings. there are little brown birds with white heads whose names I do not know - are they some kind of piper? why don’t I already know?

why is it so hard to learn about my native plants (accurately, that is)? why are so many gardening sites littered with people who think a plants value is based on how pretty or useful it is to them, who think a tree shedding leaves is “messy”?

why is knowing about the world we live in so… odd? why is it a hobby and not vital knowledge? I learned about polar equations. I taught myself about mycorrhizal networks and species of insects.

(did you know there are shiny green bees? a special species of wasp pollinating figs? that white flowers bloom at night for moths? do you know? have you looked?)

I cannot look at a lawn and see life anymore. it is a wasteland, devoid of life, dying slowly itself. everywhere is grass, grass, doused in water that runs over into storm drains, soaked in fertilizer and pesticides and a hundred other poisons and sending one clear message:

this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.

I do not think I could live in a city. too loud, yes, too busy, yes, too many people, yes, but the plants would bother me. a tree allotted only a convenient square, surrounded by dead stone and metal.

a forest cleared for this, for burning asphalt streets and racing cars and shops whose bathrooms are “for paying customers only”.

this is a place of death. life is not welcome here.

and now I am noticing.

#it speaks #idk man this is stream of consciousness and it’s midnight lol #I’m having thoughts about plants and people and how much I hate lawns #anti lawn #firmly believe that nature knowledge should be taught in school #yeah there’s biology but biology won’t teach you what plants are edible or deadly #or what birds live/migrate in your area and what they depend on #they teach civics bc even if you’re not politically active you should know how the government works #if you live in a world you should know how it works #bc even if it feels like it doesn’t matter. it does. it will. and if you notice it now you can do something about it

[firewoodfigs]

a smorgasbord of unbidden thoughts / highlights (long post ahead!): 

we’re slowly creeping out of the lockdown, and we’re allowed to go out for meals now! I got to meet a friend for dinner on Monday and he treated me to some amazing Italian fare as a belated birthday gift :’) I was really craving Italian after watching Luca and I haven’t had good pasta in a long while, so that was really nice. I also met a friend for dinner today after work, and we’re just glad to have made it to Friday tbh lmao. it was nice catching up again after so long and talking about everything under the sun (in this case, under the moon). I love spending time alone and having time myself, but I can’t deny that I’ve also missed interacting with other sentient life forms lmao. 

I managed to re-schedule my vaccine slots, and I'm getting my first shot tomorrow! fingers crossed it won’t be too bad (I still wanna be able to type through the soreness 😩). I'm a little nervous tbh because I absolutely detest needles, but I feel like at this point I just don’t care anymore LMAO. it also helps that my bf and I got the same vaccination slot, so I guess I'll just make a ruckus and be a nuisance if things go south. jk 

next week’s my last full week of work before my two-month break begins! I'm really excited to finally get a breather from work (although to be fair I've only been working for like... 6 months lmao rip) before things get real hectic in September haha. I'm definitely not looking forward to the added responsibilities, and i’m honestly not sure how to feel about getting called to the bar because everyday is just a flurry of shit, am I really cut out for this and help, work is dulling my * sparkle * and yo, you think I can just move somewhere west and be a country singer? but oh well. too late I guess. I'm too deep in debt to get out now LMAO. jk 

on the bright side, though, I received news today that I’ve been designated to my preferred area of practice for my next seat :) and i'm pretty excited about that! I've honestly been feeling pretty desiccated about the law ever since starting practice because it’s so different from whatever I've studied and something that college couldn’t have possibly prepared me for lmao (many thoughts but I don’t want to turn this into an essay so I will simply project my feelings onto my favourite war criminals)

it’s been a struggle to create lately, for various reasons. these days it feels like anything I make is woefully inadequate and subpar and mediocre, and i’m just. constantly torn between striking everything out altogether and desperately wanting to be better, to feel better. I felt a little burnt out after royai week because  I was rushing to complete so many projects and ideas on time (I do tend to get a little overambitious and overzealous that way, haha), and so I tried to take a break, but I couldn’t properly rest, either, because these days I only feel alive when I'm... creating. LOL. it's like an unresolvable paradox where I slog to feel alive and then feel like death, and then feel like I'm wasting away and wasting time when I'm being unproductive and fruitless. idk, man. it’s probably the productivity guilt acting up or something. it doesn’t help that my mind is an unholy mix of anxiety and imposter syndrome and perfectionism, either, or that inspiration only strikes me at the ungodliest of hours. I find that it’s easier to write when I've cleared everything else on my plate, but sometimes it’ll be midnight by the time I've done that because there’s just so much to do. I end up writing at two in the morning and/or recording snippets of a putative song while half-asleep (the result is usually pretty dang awful, because I have no idea what I was saying when I listen to it the next day lmao).

I also find it to difficult to alternate between so many forms of writing. my job mostly consists of reading and writing (mostly boring and terribly dreary stuff, because lawyers have apparently never heard of punctuation or one-liners, and I am 100% proving this right now with my streams of consciousness), and my hobbies primarily include that, too. I've also been struggling to switch between writing prose/fic and poems and songs because i tend to focus on different things. (I also have the attention span of a goldfish. or a confused rat.) like, I focus a lot more on how things flow for the first, how things look for the second, and how things sound for the third, if that makes sense? but I also literally cannot focus on one thing at a time so everything is just a half-written mess and a smattering of my illegible scrawls tbh 😞 I'm hoping that I'll have more time to sit down and properly sort these out one at a time during my break hahaha. 

that being said, I read something this week about the four stages of learning a new skill LOL iirc it goes (1) unconscious incompetence (2) conscious incompetence (3) conscious competence (4) unconscious incompetence? I find that I'm stuck at (2) atm for a lot of things, which is probably why it’s so hard to go forth and do the damn thing without descending into a spiral of self-doubt haha. the truth is I rely on external reassurances and validation a great deal to tide me through, because my mind is just so used to criticising myself for everything and being my own harshest critic that it’s become a challenge to objectively assess my own work. it’s probably a defence mechanism to feeling like failure is not an option and/or my upbringing or something, and it’s how I’ve coped with a lot of things, but I'm also coming to realise that it’s not always the healthiest way to live haha. 

BUT, you know. at the end of the day it’s a hobby and it’s supposed to be fun and joy-inducing and. it’s so easy to ruin all of that in the process of pursuing perfection so. I think i’ll just work on attempting the damn thing and worrying about it afterwards 🤠 (and also being less exacting on myself haha) 

ending things on a lighter and brighter note - I received a lovely surprise from a friend this week!! I ordered some earrings from her (the stuff she makes is the stuff of DREAMS) and she tossed in a necklace for me and it’s just. it’s beautiful. it’s handmade. it’s astounding. I'm weeping. 

#personal #not fma #sorry this turned out to be such a long ramble lmao... I've just been keeping these thoughts to the back of my mind #and it's Friday night so I'm unleashing them from the vault LMAO #anyway I'm off to bed!!! <3 I hope y'all have a lovely weekend mwahmwahMWAH