Despite hubski being about the most well-meaning community on the internet, I've come to know which topics from my life that will elicit unwanted advice or commentary from the peanut gallery.
That said, this flower (whatever the fuck it is (sunflower?)) is incredibly important to me right now, symbolically (since I'm a pointy headed art boy) and as a flower. Make of that what you will, but I've not had an easy two weeks or so.
Play art historian and assign whatever you want to it. Analyze the composition, color choice, my Freudian psychological profile. Go nuts. See if you can think of something more ridiculous than what I had to learn to get my stupid degree.
(Superfluous parenthesis.)
Houseplants are important psychologically. They demand nothing from us other than water and light, yet they are a living thing whose existence depends on us. By requiring our care they allow us to shift our focus from ourselves to something else, but at a much lower concentration than pets or humans. They're useful for staving off depression. The hard part is when the depression wins. Mine started about ten. I'd had a couple houseplants and an aquarium in my room in 5th grade; when we moved in sixth I took the opportunity to plan a large skylight (which I never got - my parents put them in two other rooms but) and hang up a couple 4' grow lamps. By the time I was sixteen I had maybe 25 pots of various foliage, two aquariums and a hand-me-down cage full of finches. By the time I was seventeen my sister was stealing my shit to sell to her friends, my parents weren't interacting with me unless it was to give me shit, I was a full-blown exercise bulimic and I was trapped. And I let it all die. At one point I went away for four or five days and my parents broke into my room because they suspected there were things to be fed in there. They apologized when they realized everything was long since dead. But they never wondered what the fuck happened, and they never did anything about it. I like green, growing things. My own little Silent Running in the middle of the fucking New Mexico desert was my escape capsule. And the fact that I couldn't keep it alive still messes me up. The fact that my parents never gave a fuck made me angry for a very, very long time.
My advice is find a species of Haworthia. They have a few advantages: 1) they're forgiving of overwatering. This is what kills succulents. 2) They flower once or twice a year. their flowers are unremarkable but they send out stalks over the course of weeks that then burst into modest little white blooms. 3) They aren't from the goddamn desert Southwest, which fucking sucks, and made me hate cacti and succulents to the bottom of my goddamn soul because oh my fucking god anything even vaguely related to a mutherfucking prickly pear needs to be incinerated with salt rubbed into its gene pool so that nothing grows again FUCK American cacti.
I can say from experience that growing Cannabis is quite fun. even though I never made it to the point of having something to smoke due to life circumstances, it was fun watching it grow. every week it was noticeably bigger. despite how many issues I kept having, I never completely killed a plant by accident.
I once had three mice. I named them Theodore, Buttercup, and The Holy Spirit. They were feeder mice meant to be fed to snakes. I had them for about 6 months and they helped with my depression. Mice are particularly hard to pet, and they started to hiss and bite at me whenever I went to feed them in the cage. This went on for awhile and on one particularly bad day I decided to kill them off. I rationalized that they were feeder mice that were going to die anyway. I took a half empty jar of peanut butter and put then waited awhile before I put the lid on it. I woke up the next day feeling the absolute worst, and I was worried that my family would come in and notice that my mice were missing. I bought three more mice and pretended that everything was fine, but in the back of my mind I felt that there was an aura of fear left behind by the previous trio and these new mice knew that I was a mouse killer. I kept them until I left to find myself across the US and I couldn't find anyone to take care of them and I didn't have any friends with snakes so I decided to kill them in the same way, in a peanut butter jar. I don't trust myself to take care of pets or plants right now. If you buy a succulent I'll buy a succulent.
Imma buy a cactus tomorrow. We can be cactus (and poetry) buddies. I also know a guy prone to abuse parenthetical comments. There's also an AA joke/advice (it can be hard to tell the difference) about when you're capable of handling certain responsibilities and it usually begins with not killing a house plant for a year.
I accidentally said cactus at first but meant succulent but if you get a cactus fuck it lets get cactus's. Let's see if I can not overwater a cactus for a year.
I didn't know there was a difference honestly. All cactuses are succulents but not all succulents are cactus is my best estimate. I'm gonna see how much the one kleinbl00 mentioned costs and how hard they are to find. I might just go to Home Depot and find something that looks succulent.
Take a picture when you do, haha. I'm terrible at remembering plant names. Also, here's a poem that reminds me of this thread.
Sup cactus bro! I'm a lot of things. Alcoholic, succulent amateur botanist for about an hour, cat cohabitator. Ambulatory canine exercise technician and detritus disposal manager. Pretentious windbag. Artist. Of the visual flavor. I once wanted to be a graphic designer and studied it and still enjoy it but don't know exactly how to rank my skill. Never noticed the designer part on your profile.
Garbage man and veterinarian? That sounds better than being able to design stuff to justify how pretentious you are. Design is a lot of fun to look and think about though, right? I fell into clients after working as a poster maker for my university, ranking skill is impossible, it's easier to just know what you don't know. It's actually kind of depressing to me right now, I've been looking for a different job to get my mind off design work. I'll get a cactus tomorrow and send a picture as soon as I do!
I learned pretense in art school. It's impossible not to. I deploy it carefully but I studied sculpture so we were the kids who wore boots and drank PBR. We can be very blue collar. I tend to downplay my design skills. I'm not a slouch and can talk shop. Type set is strangely relaxing for me. I have very firm and obnoxious opinions about typefaces. One thing I know about cactus is that since they require little water you can put an ice cube in their bowl from time to time to water them. I don't want to tag Kleinbl00 for this he may come back around with actual advice