Or as slang for a tab of LSD

Your stomach microbiome is plants

Which is why I spend a solid 3 hours a day facing the sun with my mouth held wide open. Gotta let my tummy plants photosynthesize somehow.

Thank you. I have a kid I work with that looooves space. To him, dwarf planets and regular planets are equally interesting. When we watch space videos that point out Pluto in some way, he’s just confused. Like a video about the 8 planets ending in a frowning Pluto.

The kid: “Why is Pluto sad?”

Me: “Well, bud, some grown ups are silly. They grew up thinking of Pluto as a planet and they don’t like that its status changed.”

But to him, Pluto has no reason to be “sad.” It’s got Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris to be friends with! But nobody makes a big deal over them (if they even are aware of their existence at all. This boy has single-handedly educated many of my coworkers about them.)

Point is, grown ups - let it go! Scientific reclassification doesn’t mean Pluto was ejected from the solar system or something. It’s still there and it’s still loved. It just plays with different friends now.

I was just talking to a coworker yesterday about this. We have some very creative kids where I work, and my coworker was working with a five year old who loves drawing Spiderman. The coworker said something about not being able to draw. I pointed out the kid and mentioned that he’s only been drawing for, what, 3-4 years max? He practices the skill and naturally isn’t perfect, but it all starts with picking up a pencil (or marker, or crayon) and making that first effort.

It may be crude at first, but as the kid shows, it’s not the quality that matters - it’s the desire to create. If you feel that whim, all you have to do is follow it.

When I was very young, before I was able to read, I would see images in my mind associated with spoken words. Sometimes they were the literal thing that was being said, but other times the images were more abstract.

With Snickers, I pictured “sneakers.” But it was for more than the sound being similar - I thought the pattern on the bottom of the candy bar resembled the pattern on the bottom of shoes. So it all made sense in little-me’s brain.

Another reason not to use TikTok. I don’t use it, but I’ve seen clips from it. I’m not sure what the point is of the subtitles when they zip by, a few words at a time, before you can read them (and I’m a pretty fast reader, so that’s saying something.)

I worked in a nursing home during Covid, including when the vaccine came out and it became mandatory for employees. Despite going through school to become nurses or aides, as well as witnessing all the horrors of Covid with their own eyes, some people chose to quit instead of get the vaccine.

I had no words, and I still have no words.

There’s one of these in a shopping center around me. I flip it off every time I see it.

I mean, I deliberately drive near it, stop, roll down my window, put my arm out, and flip it off very intentionally.

I don’t care if it knows me. I’ve made no secret of my hatred for authoritarianism throughout my life. I’ve gone to more protests than I can count. Besides, if authorities really wanted to do something to me, they’d readily make things up anyway. They don’t need an excuse, so I might as well express myself.

This shit is dystopian as fuck and every time I see it or it blasts out its message about us being watched, it boils my blood.

Fuck it all. This is not okay.