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53 comments

  • Caring for others is good for you. Even if you look at it selfishly, it is still true.

    Having “chores” associated with those people or things you care for is also good for you.

    Think of the memes and the stories of tech workers turning into goose farmers. It’s not a beautiful-feeling idea because goose farms have better air conditioning and more expensive chairs, lol.

    Coincidentally, I plan to head off to my engineering job like usual tomorrow morning, but I am also sitting here with frozen fingertips because I was outside cleaning the filters in my koi pond for the first time this spring. In general, it seems like the more animals we get (we have a lot, in small suburban home) the messier my physical surroundings are but the clearer my brain is.

    Edit to add: an unsung benefit of such hobbies and obligations is the ability to go deep into learning about things that interest you, without having to worry about taking a test about it. It can be very satisfying and enriching for the ADHD brain. In my case, from high school science onwards I was way into physics & electricity and turned hard away from chemistry and biology. But now I could talk all day about everything behind that “cycled tank” line in the OP. Likewise, my high school chemistry teacher told us horror stories about organic chemistry, but now it genuinely interests me because I care about oxidation of organics in my water.

  • Shrimp, shrimp. Good for the heart. The more you eat them, the more you fart.

    No, but, yeah, but no, but raising freshwater shrimp is surprisingly easy. It's very relaxing and entertaining to watch them go about their shrimpy lives. The truly freshwater species can complete their entire lifecycle in freshwater, which simplifies the whole set-up compared to many tropical saltwater and brackish varieties, and which also means you can have perpetual shrimp once you reach a critical mass.

    Granted, there are some finicky varieties of freshwater shrimp that might be stressful to raise because if you so much as sneeze in their general direction, they'll die. Or if you don't tightly control the population via culling and/or separate out different color varieties, you can end up with a population that no longer produces bright colors. Also, there are various species of shrimp that are passed off as "freshwater" but which actually require salt and/or brackish water environments to reliably breed them in cultivation or which may be impossible to actually breed. So you definitely should do some research before you dive in.

  • TL;DR: OOP got some shrimp, had a psychotic episode and now thinks the shrimp are girls that like him.

53 comments