HORT 105 - Weed Lab

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I'm taking HORT 105 this semester just for fun--and I love it! This class has the funnest labs ever! In the previous post, I talked about our pepper lab where we basically just tried out different peppers. In this lab, since we had just learned about weeds, we did a lab on...weeds.

Sorry if the title is misleading (it was meant to be), but this lab has nothing to do with cannabis. What kind of University would allow that in their classrooms?!

Much like the last lab, we were just trying different plants and veggies.

Make Your Own Tea

Dandelion Root - 2 tsp
Chickory - 1 tsp
Terragon - 1 tsp
Stevia - 1 tsp

So we had at least two dozen different kinds of ¿weeds? and stuff to choose from and I just added whatever looked pretty. Honestly, it was pretty good until I added Stevia, a natural sweetener. That stuff is gross! So gross!! So gross!! Stevia...no good!

Eat Arugala Salad

The arugala was picked fresh from U of I's greenhouses! It even had little bugs still crawling on it. Are they called aphids? Harmless. So I ate 'em.


Eat Veggie Straws w/ Cream Cheese Made with Kudzu Root & Lemongrass

Kudzu Root - Supposedly this could be used to treat hangovers. You can either make a tea out of this and drink it when you have a hangover. Or you can drink the tea prior to drinking and it'll curb how much you drink. Who knows if this is true. I did get a baggie of this Kudzu Root from my TA, so maybe I can test it out sometime.

Valirian Root
I don't have a picture of this, but I think this is the most interesting weed. It's a sleeping aid and you can actually get this in pill form at various stores and stuff. However, it is known to sometimes have strange side effects. Though it's known to be quite successful at putting the individual to sleep, it may also elicit crazy dreams. My TA found this out firsthand. He had a period of insomnia and so he tried this in pill-form to help him sleep. The first time he took it, as the pill promises, he knocked out. That night, he had a dream where he was playing catch with his dad in an open field. It started really nice and friendly. They were both all smiles and having a lot of fun. One throw went too far and so my TA went over to fetch it. He picked it up and when he turned around to toss it back to his dad, his dad was pointing a gun right at his forehead. GULP. Anyways, I got a baggie of this from my TA too. I'll try it sometime with my roomies...or whoever dares. :Þ

Lipstick

/looks at picture
Wow... red isn't really my shade, is it? It looks a little weird toward the edges. Maybe I should've found a way to make the borders of my lips more defined. What if I tried purple instead? Or a darker red?

Whatever, it doesn't really matter. This was just a fun, social experiment I did for a SOC 100 assignment. The assignment was to challenge a social norm, expected behaviors or cues within society. Some examples of challenging a social norm given in class included facing the back wall in an elevator instead of the door, sitting next to people when you're on an empty bus, or dressing too formally/informally for the setting. While those ideas sound super fun, I have a deeper interest in challenging gender-social norms, so I came up with the idea to wear lipstick. To isolate this male-deviant behavior, I wore it with my regular male-appropriate clothing...just to clarify that I wasn't trying to observe the effects of changing my gender orientation or anything.

Thank you to Teresa for letting me borrow the lipstick, who tried so hard to find me the right shade. Also, thanks to Vivian for helping me apply the lipstick. I tried several times on my own, but I just got clown-ier and clown-ier with each attempt.

Various Reactions

• "What's going on? That's not your shade."
• (politely) "Why are your lips so red?" "Lipstick." (still politely) "....Why?"
• "What's wrong with your lips?"
• *friends keep trying to take a picture of me*
• "What the fuck?"
• (noticing my lips while walking away to class) "OMG!? LIPSTICK!?"
• "Henry, I love you." --told me to by my friend named Henry. Henrys get each other. 
• *many friends keep trying to take a picture of me*
• One of my friends didn't say a thing but while we're in the office together for an hour, I catch her keep staring at me secretly <----my favorite reaction.   

Petting A Squirrel

 "I can't believe it, but I got to pet a squirrel today!!!" I say that in the highest, squealiest voice I can possible produce. And you know I can go pretty high and squealy. 

It was sooo cute! After NL, Normie (who I thank for the camerawork) and I ran into this cutie patootie squirrel, who was stealing cake from a lady's grocery bag. Adorable! I took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try to hand-feed this squirrel. After picking up the scraps the squirrel dropped, the rest was history....