The heat is sometimes a risk to the blossoms that eventually become fruit, but heat won’t kill the plant or hurt the fruit once it’s growing. You should be good with the plants you’ve chosen, because they all like heat. There are some more delicate tomato varieties that could wither after fruiting, so if that’s an…

Resist the urge to mess with it too much! Orchids have a reputation for being difficult but I think most people just try to over-care for them. They grow fine by themselves in the forest, so just mist your guy once or twice a week and give it its space and be patient. They are slow to do anything, but I think it’s…

Depending on the fern, you can transplant them, move them, bring them indoors, or divide them. Just get the whole root ball when you dig them up—it’s not an insane root system that goes all over. Boston ferns and maidenhair ferns should do really well. All most of them really want is shade and plenty of moisture, so…

That’s what orchids do. It takes a lot of energy to make flowers, and they have others matters to tend to! But it sounds like you have a variety that blooms for a super long time, which is great. Getting it to bloom again may be another story, but again it sounds like you’ve got it in an environment it likes.

I’m obsessed with growing peppers! I’m just germinating my poblano seeds now (late but we have a long summer), and last night I found a great youtube series that answered a ton of questions I never even knew to ask. It’s in 9 parts, but this segment might be a good place to start:

You’ve not explained your argument at all, nor addressed the fact that suicidal behavior is contagious. You’ve just invoked an unrelated code concerning morality, which is not at issue.

Good for him. Truly. But perspective is not an assignment you are done with at any point. None of the rest of us ever get to be done.

1. Fine, Chris.

She is on the spectrum of mail order brides because they clearly don’t love each other, but she was always super ambitious and was not powerless in the usual way. She was already here (by dubious path), and was just looking for a husband that seemed important enough. It was a business contract.

I got to know a lot of these couples during my own process with a foreign partner, and the dynamic was insanely consistent: macho guy with a house and no prospects, desperate woman with no other chance for escape from a poor country.

Quite right. And although I’m not sure I would change the fiance visa process (because people deserve to be with people they love if they really love them), that process is misused ALL THE TIME with impunity. While people who have been contributing to this country for years are treated like dogs.

Can you clarify the point of your last sentence, be more direct? And I am critical, but I don’t think it’s outsized or uninformed in any way. I call you defensive because you repeatedly defended your situation, unprovoked, and missed the point in a self-serving way, and I noticed it.

Suicide is notoriously contagious, so it’s not at all a stretch to call for sensitivity to romanticization. And that’s all that’s being done. Just a call for awareness.

Shown in schools? WTF. It shows you how to be a martyr and how to make minor struggles a justification for suicide and how to blame others for your mental illness. There can’t be a worse thing to show confused teens who already take their temporary pain too seriously.

It was gutsy *and* we all stand on the shoulders of others, consciously or not. There’s erasure in your suggestion that Gibb didn’t make Switzer more feasible on some level; of course she did. That’s the texture of evolution and it doesn’t diminish the credit due Switzer.

“More white people have been on death row, although it’s a slim margin...”

I was just framing the general theme of everybody being obsessed about you in one way or another if you kill yourself. Sorry, defensive, worried, wondering, searching endlessly for where they went wrong—it’s the fantasy that adolescents have when they feel isolated and want notice.

THANK YOU. There has not been one single teenager in the history of the universe that wouldn’t listen to the whole thing in one sitting.

It may have been tough, but you managed it. You toiled and found a way to accept having a nice house. People who get rich manage to adapt everything to reflect that wealth, but when it comes to mental acknowledgment of all that power, people become helpless and defensive.

Oh, I don’t. Very clever humor requires a subtle mind, and I think it’s an unearned, inappropriate favor to him to suggest he’s just too dim to understand basic shit.