You are wildly underestimating my ability to go fucking feral about fresh produce. I don’t think I even brought snap peas into the house last year. Just ate them right off the vine.
Though I did end up freezing the strawberries/blue berries as they ripened, but even those were consumed within the week.
The only tough one was the potatoes, but that was resolved by just foisting potatoes on everyone I knew. Much more welcome than Zucchinis.
Oh this is why every gardening person I know keeps trying to give me the food they grow
That, and we love you. Homegrown produce is a love language.
Unless it’s zucchini. Then it’s a cry for help.
Tomato (June) - I think highly of you; treasured friend
Tomato (September) - you are a warm body that is nearby
Fresh new asparagus - romantic love
Artichoke - fondness
New rhubarb with leaves removed - flirtatious potential
Rhubarb with leaves left on - the bloom is gone
Swiss chard - I have made mistakes
Perpetual spinach - declaration of animosity between our houses
White-fleshed potato - you are a neighbor
Blue or red fleshed potato - as above, but with overtones of camaraderie/affection
Kale - you are a person who was nearby when I had kale
Raspberries - you are a person I admire
Strawberries - you are a treasure
Onion - I am confused
Young French beans or young peas - I thought of you especially
Runner beans - mild criticism; familial ties; gift from parent to child
Pumpkins - overt romantic, sexual or childhood-bestie interest; highest declaration of loyalty
Prettily coloured popping corn, I.e. glass gem - let this seal the breach between our houses
Zucchini/courgette - cry for help, resignation
Novelty pumpkins - marriage proposal
(chortle)
Me: huh. Why is this getting a rash of notes all of a sudden?
*discovers paper bag full of zucchini on doorstep*
as a kid i had one of those “there’s a monster under my bed” moments except real.
every night i would cry about a ghost or something trying to scare me by knocking on my bedroom windows and walls. like, really loudly, every hour or so, every night. only at night. so my dad was like “heh okay kiddo let’s check it out :) ah see? there’s nothing here :)” and left.
until years later he admitted to me that he did in fact hear the unexplainable knocking when he slept in that room one night, and it kept him awake with fear. and suddenly felt awful for not believing little kid me.
imagine your kid being like “daddy there’s a demon in my closet” and you being like ok son lemme just check that for you :). and you open the door and there’s a demon in the closet
my perfect crime? I memorize the entirety of the macy’s store inventory. I then go on aliexpress.com and find exact replicas of every single purse in the store. I break in at 3am, and replace every purse with a cheaper version of the purse. I take my real purses home and open up an online store on the darknet featuring fake purses. I then sell these real purses as fake purses, making it so that when the feds catch on to my antics, they spend countless years trying to figure out who can replicate purses this well, and who is selling them. Soon an entire division of the FBI is dedicated to finding me and figuring out how my “fake” purses appear to be real. 45 years later they finally trace my ip address and break into my villa in texas and shoot me right in the leg when i attempt to flee. While this would normally not be a fatal wound, due to my constant devotion to my online fake real purse storefront i have suffered an iron deficiency for 35 years. My blood can’t clot and I start to bleed out. Turns out the woman who shot me was a girl who i made out with once in college, and she holds my dying body in her arms and asks me how my fake purses were so real. I spend the last moments of my fleeting life telling her about how every five years i break into a different Macy’s and replace all the purses, and that the purses I have been selling online for a severely discounted price were actually all real, and I have been doing this purely for the gag of it all. When my former college girlfriend gets home from work after rightfully murdering me for my crimes, she goes into her walk in closet, looks at the 13 gucci purses she owns, and realizes that they’re all fakes.
migrating from app to app is such a sad social phenomenom to me just the fact alone that people put their energy into keeping up with so many changes and so many new services in the first place just to have the presence of complete strangers in their life is so crazy to me.. im not talking abt the ones who pump out these apps anymore the userbase is actually even more insane
literally like if tumblr shut down I’d just read Wikipedia
“Oh [other profession] wants better working conditions? WELL [MY profession] is HARDER I work TWENTY HOUR DAYS and I am NOT ALLOWED BREAKS and I’m PAID FOR SHIT and I have NO INSURANCE and I NEVER SEE MY CHILDREN so WHY are YOU COMPLAINING LOL”
have you considered that maybe YOUR job ALSO should not suck that much
Story time. This is not so much for OP but for anyone else who might not have union experience: Bear in mind that there is a strong propaganda effort to get people to this viewpoint. They’re not being willfully obtuse.
I spoke to a neighbour the other day. She’d just taken voluntary a lay-off from her factory job because she had an ongoing injury and they wouldn’t let her adjust her hours in a sensible way. She’d been struggling to make it work anyway but her back was getting really bad. So when they put the word out that they were looking for volunteers to take lay-offs, she put up her hand. Still, she was proud to tell me that she was considered one of their best and fastest workers, even with the injury. She was frustrated that one of the newer workers seemed to have gotten various accommodations, even though that worker was nowhere near as good.
I could tell that she’d been having similar conversations with her coworkers on the factory floor for years. Who got extras they didn’t “deserve.” Who was a shoddy worker and made life harder for everyone. Who came in to work even though their parent had just died to make sure that nobody had to pick up their slack. And all of that pervaded with propaganda about “greedy unions” who slim down your already-skinny paycheque just because they’re all lazy slackers who don’t want to pull their weight and don’t appreciate the nice boss for hiring them. (This is the same across all types of jobs. Next story time I’ll talk about two university profs who grew to fame and fortune via unions and the social safety net and yet both engaged in union busting.)
My neighbour’s injury, incidentally, was a result of her work at the factory, but she didn’t want to try for compensation or anything else. She’d “never taken a single sick day in 20 years” and wasn’t “the kind of person who made waves” so she was just going the regular unemployment route but finding the systems obscure and challenging. She was hurt and shocked that her old employer would treat one of their best workers this way and leave them to deal with the fall-out by themselves.
Meanwhile, Canadian (federal) government workers were striking in Ottawa. And she expressed frustration that they felt “entitled to strike” when the (provincial) services she was accessing were so shoddy and difficult to navigate. Why did they “get to” strike if their work was apparently so poor? She had no sympathy for them.
I pushed back gently. Her factory floor job wasn’t union, but the admin staff was union. They seemed to get a better deal. We spoke about strength in numbers, and how hard it is to try and get your due from your employer without anyone to help you. And how they make all these forms complicated on purpose so it’s easier to deny you money or other support. And how it would be great to have someone to go to meetings with you, who knew all the legal stuff, and who could help you with the forms, and get you the money for the medical services you needed.
She wasn’t pro-union by the time I left, but we’d agreed on a few things, and I’d framed a few of her concerns in a way that made her more ambivalent about strikes (rather than outright hostile). Still, as we were saying our goodbyes, she said, “let’s hope they hurry up and get back to work eh!”
Because imagine what it would cost her to turn around and agree that unions are good, and strikes are good, and you should fight your employer for your fair compensation and your rights. Twenty years of taking no sick leave, working herself to the bone on not enough money, laid off and struggling with the system for basic support. She’s proud of her suffering, all the times she didn’t complain, all the times she pushed on even as the going got harder and harder.
Because if she can’t be proud of it… then what? She’s dumb for taking a non-union job? She should’ve organised and could’ve had better pay and a severance package and free physiotherapy for life? If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.
So. Don’t put up with union busting and do talk to the people in your life about solidarity, but do realise that being anti-union isn’t just folks being aggressively wrong for the sake of it. They’ve been lied to. And they possibly have a lot of complex grief and identity and other experiences tied up in this.
“If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.”
This.
And this applies to a lot of other things you might want people to change their minds about.
