Eyebrow piercings don't hurt -- Ninety Eighth Post

The fun continues as I pay people money to poke holes in my skin.

This picture adequately sums up my feelings on people who think body mods are a sin.

Anyway, I'd just like to report that eyebrow piercings hurt way less than any other piercing I've had with the possible exception of my very first ear lobe piercings when I was 13 that I don't really remember anymore. Since I don't remember them hurting, I assume they didn't hurt. To sum up, it hurt less than a nose (nostril) piercing, ear cartilage piercing, that one time I pierced my earlobes by myself because it took me forever to get the damn needle through, and way less than dermals. Dermals hurt like a bitch. I thought that eyebrows would hurt similarly bad because the needle is going through so much flesh and I have sensitive eyebrows, but it was a very brief hot pain and then we were good, with just one tiny tear sitting in the corner of my eye. My eyes water whenever I pluck my eyebrows, so one tiny tear is saying a lot about how much it didn't hurt. 

Anyway, I got my left eyebrow pierced with a slightly curved barbell that just has two normal-boring balls on the ends. Nothing fancy, just the standard stainless steel piercing jewelry. I hear that eyebrows will swell up quite a bit (something about poking a hole under the skin right against a bone and then sticking a piece of metal in it), so starting off with the normal-boring is highly recommended because you don't want your inflamed skin getting all stuck in fancy barbell decorations. Besides, how normal-boring can it be? It's an eyebrow piercing for fuck's sake. Another recommended option is getting a captive ball ring, like you often see on lips and ear cartilage, because it's pretty much impossible for the wounds to grow over the ends of a ring as has been known to happen with barbells that are too short. 

Now my only worry is that I'll keep bumping into it. I've actually almost forgotten that it's there because it stopped hurting so quickly, and so far I've accidentally rubbed my eyebrow, leaned my head against my fist and essentially punched myself in the piercing, and straight up scratched around the piercing because I thought something, like a piece of paper or a feather from my duvet, was stuck to my eyebrow. Something is stuck to my eyebrow, it's just that it's supposed to be there. 

But seriously. So far, probably the easiest piercing I've done. 

Next on the list: tragus, conch (also known as orbital, on the ear), and/or labret (in the center under the bottom lip). I'm really on the fence about the lip piercing. It looks super cute on other people, but I'm not sure I have the right face and the ability not to play with it constantly and ruin my teeth. My teeth are bad enough, they don't need help getting worse. And then, sometime, and sometime after I get a car because saving for that is a huge pain, there will be a tattoo. 

Hilling Potatoes and Transplanting Tomatoes -- Ninety Seventh Post

One of my weirdly distinct memories from grade school is not knowing how to spell "potato" and/or "tomato" because I couldn't remember which one had an "e" on the end. Turns out, neither one does, except in the plural.
My darling plants are at some crucial stages: the beets really need to go into their forever pots but it's too cold at night, my remaining tomato seedling is about three inches tall and starting to mysteriously lose leaves, I just planted my carrot seeds, and my potatoes have finally sprouted. The peas are doing the best, having all sprouted happily and transitioned easily from their indoor life to their forever pot. I'm going to split credit between their natural hardiness and my clever plan to start them in decomposable pots, thus eliminating stress to their roots during transplanting.
My root and leaf vegetables are all a little iffy. The celery seems to be making a comeback from whatever it was that ailed it, but my kale never sprouted. The bok choy seem to be doing well, but they're still all crowded into a tiny terra cotta pot and I don't think they would appreciate transplant at this point even if I had a good place for them. My surviving beets are all pretty vigorous, but they're growing indoors in temporary pots with no real plan for where to settle them and tend to break at the soil line when exposed to wind. The radishes, in with the celery, are leggy and the parsnips only just sprouted. It could be worse!
Anyway, on to the real reason I started to write this post: potatoes and tomatoes.
Both tomatoes and potatoes have the nifty ability to root from their stems, making it highly lucrative (if your currency is potatoes) to bury the stems or "hill" the potatoes as they grow. For tomatoes, you can increase their health and likelihood of outdoor survival if you bury the stems when you transplant them because it wildly improves and enlarges their root systems. A critical step in cultivating both plants is actually carrying out the burying of stems.
In the case of tomatoes, which those of us in cool climates have to start indoors or buy half-grown, there comes a time when they will be planted in a forever site, be it indoor pot, outdoor pot, or the ground.

Image from http://www.cyber-north.com/gardening/tomato.html

At this point, you will dig a hole big enough that your tomato can sit in it up to its lowest set of leaves. If it's a particularly tall plant and you have a lot of space or it's just really compact and has leaves all the way down to the ground, you can pinch off a few sets of leaves close to the ground. Another nifty trick if you have the space is the trench method, wherein you dig a little trench and plant your tomato sideways, gently training the top at a right angle to the ground so that it grows upright. I really like the idea of this method, but I almost certainly won't have space. For those who start tomatoes from seed, you should repot them at least once before they reach their forever home and bury the stem each time. It's really important for those of us with a little bit of a brown thumb or less than ideal growing conditions, because those extra roots will really give your plant a leg up on its circumstances in addition to renewing the dirt. If you're a hydroponic/aquaponic/non-dirt gardener, I have no idea what to tell you. I have a hard enough time with normal growing, and your way is kind of expensive.
For potatoes, stem-burying comes in the form of hilling. Like the name implies, you build up dirt around the stems, nearly to the tops of the leaves.

Image from https://www.quickcrop.co.uk/product/3-pack-potato-patio-planter

A brief google search indicates that 6-8 inches of stem is the best amount of time to let your potato vines grow before hilling. Since they don't put roots down, but rather out, potatoes are actually fantastic container plants. Just plant your seed potatoes on a few inches of soil in the bottom of a deep container with decent drainage, add another few inches of soil, and wait. Water well. When you've got 6-8 inches of vine, bury all but the top few inches of the plants and wait for the next 6-8 inches of vine to grow. Again, water well, because the buried vines are going to put off a lot of little potato babies and those babies need water to develop. After another 6-8 inches of vines have grown, bury all but the top few inches in dirt, straw, or mulch of some kind (I've seen arguments for everything, so do your own research and see which ought to work best in your particular garden) and (wait for it) water well. Wait for the vines to flower and then die back, then dump your container onto a tarp/plastic tablecloth (or someplace where extra dirt and potato bits are acceptable) and pick through it for your buried treasure. If you plant them in the ground, you'll be able to hill dirt around the stems from nearby, but you'll also have to do actual digging come harvest, which can result in damaged potatoes.

A Hard Place, or, The Future Scares Me -- Ninety Sixth Post

I'm going to assume that anyone who's found my blog is internet-savvy enough to have stumbled across the brilliant work of Allie Brosh at hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com and has also read her pieces on depression. I'm not going to lie, they hit me right in the feels. My family has had struggles with depression and anxiety and panic attacks and all the things that a lot of people seem to think aren't "real" illnesses, and an odd phenomenon I've run across is the coolness of suicidal thoughts and self-harm and all that horrible, painful stuff that so often tags along with mental illnesses.

I will admit right here and now to having been a dumb emo teenager with poetic aspirations who wrote really stupid poetry romanticizing people who kill themselves. And I'm sorry.

As a former emo, I can quantitatively say that this is true.

However, my idiotic poetry (which trailed off around age 18 when I got a part-time job and didn't spend 8 hours of every day around other high schoolers), while stupid and indicative of a dangerous trend among youth (darn kids *shakes fist*), doesn't invalidate the fact that I have experienced some horrible feelings and been in hard places. 

I don't have a documented mental illness. I did see a therapist when I was 13 or 14 for some suicidal feelings, but it's been pretty smooth sailing on the mental health front since my therapist taught me coping mechanisms. For people without mental illnesses, overcoming a depressed emotional state can really be as easy as talking through our feelings and learning how to cope with an excess of sad emotions. Sometimes, talk therapy works for people with mental illnesses as well, but sometimes it doesn't. Brains are weird things, and it can take a lot of persuasion to get them to work with you again once they've decided to work against you. 

I've seen my dad, who had always been the strong person in my life, curled up in bed because of panic attacks. You can't just "have a positive outlook" when the dark corners of your brain have you in their grip and getting out of bed is literally impossible. I know a person who would get home from class, turn on all the lights, and hide under a blanket in the middle of the room until her roommates got home because the chemical imbalance in her brain made being alone in the dark the worst possible thing. There was nothing that a "positive thinking" website could have told her that would make it better, no hopeful thoughts that could penetrate the horrors that her mind cooked up to hold her captive. Mental illnesses are a bitch, to put it mildly, and it seems like a lot of "society at large" views them as simply a lack of willpower. That makes me angry, on behalf of everyone who's ever been afraid to share that they're scared of their own mind and everyone who's ever been told to just try harder and think positive and just get out of bed. 

I've cried myself to sleep because the future is long and scary. I'm 23 now, and if I live to be 80, as all my grandparents have done, I'll have almost 60 more years of living. What the hell am I going to do with 57 more years? I ask you. I've got a pretty good idea about the next 5 or 6 (be in grad school), but that's about as far ahead as I can really look without getting a headache. It's a long time to live, and it scares me. 

I view death as a kind of sleep, where you finally get to rest after all the shit life puts you through. I'm not saying people should hurry along to death, because there's wonderful things in life that you don't want to miss out on, but it's like going to sleep after a very long week. Good things and bad things happen, and life has a way of wearing you out. 

If this is how I feel when I'm at the beginning of my adult life, how bad is it going to get when I actually have a daily grind that will extend on for another thirty years or so? Oh my god thirty years is a long time.
How do other people deal with the yawning abyss that is our futures? If we're shooting for the moon and landing among the stars, I feel like I'm passing dangerously close to a black hole.

That whole analogy is ridiculous, of course, since missing the moon doesn't really get you any closer to the stars. Those are very far away. 

This was a terrible post to edit right before bed.
Anyway, to end this on a less distressingly negative note, the future isn't hopeless. I know this. I spend most of my time relatively content and occasionally even excited about whatever's coming next, it's just that the midnight existential crises are more memorable and terrifying. If you're scared of the future, reach out to someone. If you think you might have a mental illness of some kind, find yourself a licensed professional to talk to. Don't count on friends and family for talk therapy, because they'll probably be shocked and fall back on the "just try to be happy" line (unless you happen to have a licensed therapist in your friends and family, but talking to people you don't know is still often better). If you're in a good place with your friends and family you should definitely reach out the them, but know that sometimes paying a stranger to help you in your struggle with your brain is the best option.
I don't have a very lively comment community like some of the cooler blogs, but you can always contact me through the comments if you're scared and alone. I'll read your message and feel some of your pain because I'm stupidly empathetic and try to write you something thoughtful and helpful and non-judgemental. It'll probably take me a couple of days to get back to you because I'll spend a lot of my time agonizing over what I'm writing. My point is, there are a lot of people who've felt feelings like the ones that make you feel alone and scared, and you're not really alone in all this. Maybe it's cold comfort, having someone who sees her future like a black hole tell you that she'll be there for you, but it's always helped me to learn that I'm not alone.

You are not alone.