heat exhaustion

I had heat exhaustion.

That is all.


Also happy birthday to Steve!

plants

When I was in college, I was not good with plants. At first, I named them, but then I stopped because they kept dying.

This is because I had two modes. In one mode, I cared a lot about the plant and was terrified that it would die.

In the other mode, I decided not to care about the plant, out of fear that I would kill it.

When I left college, I moved into an apartment with terrible lighting. Despite many panicked attempts to prevent plant death, I accidentally killed my boyfriend's beloved and long-lived pet cactus. This, along with all of my previous attempts at growing plants, earned me the reputation of being a plant killer.

So, I took a break from growing plants for a while. Green things around the world rejoiced.

Then, on a trip to Hawaii, I got a plumeria cutting as a souvenir. This is basically a withered stick of a plumeria, cleared for transportation back to the mainland, and sold in basically every souvenir store and Wal-Mart in Hawaii. Since it seemed really unlikely that these dry sticks would ever return to being living things, my boyfriend and I decided to have a contest to see whose plumeria stick would 1) become a living thing again and 2) grow the tallest.

Deciding I did not want a dead stick in my house, I defaulted to a sunnier spot in a window at work. Many people there had desk plants, and one in particular was very good at growing things. I asked him how to plant my plumeria stick. Here are the instructions he gave me.

- Plant it in soil
- Make sure the drainage is good (put some rocks in the bottom of the pot)
- Keep it in a sunny spot
- Add water whenever the soil looks dry

Although I had thought this was what I was doing with previous plants, I rarely had done all of them at the same time.

So I tried to do everything properly with the plumeria. It helped that I honestly wasn't sure that it would grow at all.

Now, the plumeria has many leaves! It's so exciting. I have even tried growing other plants! I have sprouted an avocado and even re-grown my boyfriend's rare cactus from seeds I bought from an Australian guy on e-bay. So, in conclusion, having a "green thumb" is actually pretty simple. Also, I am naming my plants again.

Also also-- I won the contest.

loud noises

I have recently realized that I don't like noise. This is possibly because, when you add sound to anything that does not require sound, it immediately becomes more annoying.

Clearly, unnecessary sound is very grating. Unnecessary volume doesn't help things, either.

Once you notice that loud noises are annoying, you start into a downward spiral of anger and bad moods. You attempt to reduce the amount of noise around you, but that only makes annoying noises seem louder when you go outside.

There are not very many good solutions to this problem. Ignoring it is hard. Moving to a more quiet place is expensive and inconvenient.

You could try to blot out the sound using ear coverings, but that is a little conspicuous. Here are some suggestions for protecting your hearing, incognito.

No matter what you do, you will be existing in a happy bubble of noise reduction. You can once again be happy in the presence of noisy objects.

Of course, reducing your hearing can be dangerous. It can expose you to obvious dangers, such as not being able to hear a car coming when you cross the street. Plus, there are other dangers. If you are employing all three methods at once, you will certainly be living in a bubble of silence. You may think no one is talking about you, but that's only because you can't hear them.

Ignorance is bliss, people!

injuries

Injuries happen. If you are me, injuries will occur regardless of whether I am doing anything dangerous or not.

For this reason, I feel like it is important to play a sport. Because, I don't like explaining how I get injured, but I also don't like to lie directly.

If I play a sport, I can just make statements about my life, and allow people to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes, though, playing sports is difficult. In this case, I think it is important to acquire a potentially dangerous job or hobby that actually contains no danger at all.

That way, injuries created for no reason at all suddenly have meaning. Hooray!

migraine headache

Yesterday, I had the worst migraine headache I'd ever had.

I basically only get migraines when this happens:

So after I have finally finished my exam, or written that paper, or whatever else I was worried about, I want to be doing this:

But instead, my brain has me doing this:

The funny thing about my migraines is that they happen so infrequently that I don't notice the symptoms. It usually goes like this:

This has happened to me several times, and yet I still never see it coming. When it comes to migraines, I react the way I imagine a medieval peasant reacted to eclipses.

Watch out for migraines, people! Recognize the signs with this handy acronym!