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 Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I'm a little concerned about the name of this site (Popsugar), but the article was relevant enough to my interests to save it. Shouldn't that be "Sleep Unsupportive Family Trauma?" Like, who has trauma from a family who doesn't sleep-shame? I was today years old when I learned I don't come from a "sleep supportive family." Okay, that opening is Strike 2. The construction "I was today years old when..." was trendy and precious ten years ago when I first heard it; now, it's just tiresome. (The site name was Strike 1.) As Dana Joy Seigelstein describes it in her now viral TikTok video, a sleep supportive family is when the loved ones in your life encourage sleep. Aaaaaaaand strike 3: referencing a DikDok video and calling it viral. So why am I still here? Because my anger at people who sleep-shame exceeds my frustration at social media trends. If I so much as closed my eyes on the couch or spent a few extra minutes in my bedroom alone, I would have to endure passive-aggressive comments from my sisters for the rest of the day like, "Good morning, princess" or "Oh, are you done being lazy?" My parents would also decide that if I had enough time in the day to take a nap, I would have enough time to complete a new chore when I woke up. Bet I know where the sisters got it from. Naps weren't the only issue in my household, though: sleeping in was also not recommended. (Again, never a rule said out loud, but always implied. I'm sensing a theme here.) If I slept in too late, I'd wake up to different people taking turns poking their head into my room to see what I was doing — not in a loving, "Hey, I'm checking in on you way" but in a "Why are you still sleeping?" way. That would get real old real fast. And when it's time for future me to have children and be a mom, I plan on breaking the cycle. If you really wanted to break the cycle, you would remain childfree. For those out there who are not, though: I wonder how much of the prenatal "I'm going to do my parenting thing this way" goes right out the window when faced with the reality of a larval human? The real issue (apart from the trendy nonsense, which I can kind of excuse given the author's apparent age) is that there are people who like to impose their own sleep schedules and preferences on others, and I really wish that would stop. Not everyone's a morning person. Some of us are biphasic, relying on two shorter sleep cycles instead of one longer one. Like when they say "Good morning" when you wake up from an afternoon snooze. Or "Look who decided to join us" when you're the last one waking up. All of these things are major contributors to me wanting to live alone. Not that I currently live alone; apart from the cats, I have a housemate. But I've trained the cats out of waking me up (mostly), and the housemate is on an even weirder sleep schedule than I am, and we don't generally get in each others' face about sleep. Or much of anything, really; it's a pretty good arrangement, at least in my view. Because nothing, and I mean nothing, feels better than getting enough sleep. And my definition of happiness is going to bed knowing that there's not a particular time when I have to wake up. |
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