Some helpful phrases that I’ve learned to help me refrain from oversharing and/or turning it into a rant:
-“without getting into it.” Ex. ‘Without getting into it, I left the flower shop due to management problems’
- “the short version.” Ex. 'The short version: they really screwed over my manager and I didnt want to be the next in line for it.’
- “my feelings about this are strong” ex. 'My feelings about workers rights are strong and deserving of their own time.’
- “I dont want to dominate the conversation.” Ex. 'I could talk for hours about the illegal shit the flower shop pulled while I was there, but I dont want to dominate the conversation’
And you can make the rubric for this question whatever you want. My personal one was that young me would be horrified to know she became current me, but that’s because I imagine it’d be quite horrible to a child learning and growing to no longer get to wonder who you’ll be when you grow up, and I think if she and I just like met somehow, she’d think I was a cool adult. Like one of those teachers you get to banter with a little.
Can’t let British people have air conditioning because first they’d call it something twee like “the climate fixer” and then in 20 years they’ll call it “the climb” or “the climmy”
French kids would call it “le climot”, frustrating language officials who would prefer they call it “machine pour le contrôle du climat froide à l'interieure de l'édifice”
See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn’t seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.
But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I’d ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It’s just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.
I didn’t get any parsnips, not that year, because I’d weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my ‘ugh no that’s grass’ twitchy horticulture finger.
The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn’t weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I’ve grown lots of parsnips since. They’re kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don’t harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it’s worth it.
Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who’s gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.
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