A Collection of Wholesome Posts from the Past Month

Cats can be the funniest, craziest creatures. Sometimes they are aloof and haughty, refusing to have anything to do with you; other times, they absolutely need all of your attention right now (this frequently happens when you need them not to be underfoot or are working on a computer).

You know, this guy is wondering what stupid scientific names we would give to dinosaurs if we were discovering them today, assuming that they’d get a lot of meme and Internet speak names. But to be fair, proper, serious scientists have been giving animals pop culture-inspired scientific names for a long time.

Bad with Dates

Couples Who Slay Together, Stay Together

 Letting Yourself Enjoy This

Hounds in Hats

One of the hardest things in the world is to hear criticism without getting defensive. Seriously, even when you’re trying to be a decent human being, even when you have every intention of using this criticism as a way to make yourself a better person, it’s so hard to tamp down on the initial knee-jerk reaction of anger and defensiveness.

This photo has everything that I love: cute projects that can bring a community together, ways to brighten a stranger’s day, and most of all, art projects that are so easy that even a terrible artist like me can participate.

Outside of movies and short books, we don’t often get to see the whole story all at once: the problem and then the solution, the beginning and then the end. Usually we have to wait a long time to see the outcome, good or bad, and sometimes we never get the resolution we were looking for at all.

OK, if I’m honest, the thought of sharing my bed with a dog is actually not that appealing; not only am I allergic, but I don’t really sleep well if I can hear other living things moving or breathing. I think I would not sleep well with some big smelly critter next to me.

Isn’t it funny how some of the things that we learn as a kid stick with us forever? I forget the names of people that I met five minutes ago, but I can still sing all the states in the USA in alphabetical order because I learned a song about it in elementary school.

OK, everything about this next post is the best thing: first, there’s the fact that someone bothered to teach a raccoon to paint. Then there’s the adorable little tiny easel, followed by the lovely paintings; he’s got a great sense of color!

Have you ever seen a well-trained sheepdog herding sheep? It is genuinely extraordinary. These dogs are crazy intelligent; they understand commands from their humans, they understand what they need to do with the sheep, and they quickly think on their feet to figure out where they need to go in order to convince the sheep to go where they need to go.

Not everyone gets support from the people around them—the people who should have loved them unconditionally and been there for them—for a variety of reasons. It is always sad when someone feels they are not getting the support and love that they need.

Movies and books can give us a skewed view of what love is really like; they can lead us to think that it’s all about that initial attraction. And even those that show a more nuanced view of romance tend to go up until the big dramatic moment where the couple announces their love for each other; on rare occasions, we might see a wedding.

People often have a special connection with their pets, but in particular, the connection between a child and a beloved pet can be especially deep and lasting. I’ve known grown adults who are still sad about the loss of childhood pets.

This next post makes my heart happy. It seems that with every year that passes, people are less and less tolerant of a lot of things; like religion or people who are different from them. And for a long time in the US, Muslims have had a particularly bad time of it.

Okay, so admittedly, it’s really easy to come up with situations where this post doesn’t work at all: for instance, if you’re learning to speak a foreign language, you can’t plan to look up every single thing that you say once you finally get to visit Italy. Or if you’re going to become a massage therapist, you can’t stop the massage every 15 seconds to pull out your textbook and remind yourself what you should do next.

This next post is the cutest idea I have ever seen, plus a great way to use my Photoshop skills for good, not evil. OK, so I have never used Photoshop for evil, but I’ve definitely used it for boring things, like preparing pictures for PowerPoint presentations about intersection design.

Something that can be really hard for people to understand if they’ve never lived this experience is the difficulty of figuring out how to balance keeping yourself safe and being nice to others. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re either a guy or a really lucky girl. Women have to worry about being the victims of violence (from strangers but also from people we know) pretty much constantly.

This next post is something that I personally really needed to hear. I was one of those kids whose entire personality in school was being smart. That’s what I was good at and what set me apart from my classmates. But what that meant is that I spent a long time really struggling to admit when I didn’t know something or I needed help.

I think I speak for most of us when I say that making conversation with strangers in line at a store is scary and stressful, and we would rather just pretend to read the magazine covers at the checkout stand than talk to people.

I’ll admit, sometimes I roll my eyes a little bit when I see people in matching outfits. Whether it’s a dating couple or best friends, I just tend to find that a little cheesy. I will, however, make an exception for adorable children dressed in matching outfits. Because that’s just cute.

Your birthday is a time for you to celebrate the things you love and the things that make you, you. And if what you love is Pokémon, then the dearest wish of my heart is that you get the Pokémon cake that you want and deserve.

Do you ever wonder how much animals actually understand about grief and loss? Researchers are pretty certain that elephants grieve their dead, because they keep returning to the bodies of their dead loved ones long after they are nothing but bones. And dolphins and orcas have been known to keep the bodies of their dead calves with them for days or even weeks.

They say that if you really want to know the measure of a person, look at how he or she treats people who are considered beneath them. Many people are dismissive of or even unkind to waiters, secretaries, customer service people, and janitors, all out of the sense that this person is somehow less worthy.

Alright, before we get to the next picture, I want to warn you to prepare yourself. What you’re about to see is so adorable that your heart might get overloaded by cuteness and warm fuzzies, and you might actually die of it. OK, are you ready?

As I said in the introduction, it’s easy to get caught up in focusing on some of the bad stuff that has come from the Internet, like the spread of misinformation, stupid TikTok trends that end up getting teenagers killed, and cyberbullying.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: if you had to evacuate your house because of a fire and you had the time to grab exactly one thing, what would you grab? What’s the thing that you would most want to save from a fire? The answer to that question will tell you a lot about what you prioritize.

I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I get really frustrated when I go to the doctor and I have to wait 40 minutes to be seen, and then they charge me $600 to tell me there’s nothing they can do about my broken foot. In case you’re thinking that’s awfully specific, yes, that’s based on a real experience.

So many cultures have become so wasteful in recent years. Maybe it’s the rise in overall prosperity, maybe it’s the technological advances that have made it so easy for us to get manufactured goods in our hands, but these days, we throw things out the second they start to look less than pristine and we go buy something new.

Women’s sports are certainly fighting an uphill battle to try to get mainstream acceptance. It can be so hard to get people to watch them, as many people insist that they just don’t find them very interesting or exciting and won’t even give them a try.

The secret to happiness, I have learned over time, is to learn not to wait for big, dramatic things to happen before you feel happy. Events like that are relatively rare, so if you wait for them, you might be waiting a really long time before you let yourself feel good.

So we had to include this because it cracks me up, but I do want to take a moment to point out how unfair the whole “Karen” thing is to people who are actually named Karen; how hurtful must it be to hear your name constantly used as an insult and a curse word? (Sorry if I sounded like a Karen, but it had to be said).

It’s always a heartwarming feeling to know that the people around you love and support you and have your back, no matter what. And this poster got an expression of love and support from a rather unexpected source: his cleaning lady.