Ariane Cyusa

Me: eating at Japanese café. quiet atmosphere. soft jazz, peaceful. then waiter approaches my table cautiously. Waiter: Sir… are you available tomorrow night. immediately suspicious. Me: For what. Waiter: Our chef wishes to challenge you. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN. apparently last week I casually said curry was “pretty good.” chef overheard it. interpreted this as declaration of culinary war. next evening I return out of pure curiosity. chef standing there arms crossed like anime rival. Chef: I have prepared seven curries. SEVEN??? for two hours this man psychologically attacked me with spices. one curry tasted normal for three seconds then became personal betrayal. another made me remember childhood memories I didn’t know I had. final curry completely white, terrifying. Chef: This one has no mercy. I saw colors not recognized by science. afterward chef bows respectfully. Chef: You survived. our waiter quietly whispers: Last customer cried.

One thing nobody tells you about adulthood is how fun it is to become your own person. One day you randomly start liking jazz, olive green, expensive dark chocolate, documentaries about volcanoes, weird lamps, sparkling water, books about loneliness in Tokyo, silver jewelry and quiet cafés. Your personality keeps unfolding forever if you let it.

Her name was Josie. She was a 17-year-old blind lioness in South Africa. Her two daughters hunted for her every day. They also used her to hunt. Prey would freeze and stare at the blind lioness while Dawn and Duffy snuck around and attacked from behind. She lived in Addo Elephant National Park. She was put down this past October. She was older than almost any wild lioness on record. The oldest ever was a lioness called Mathata. She made it to 19. Most wild lionesses only make it to 15 or 16. Josie spent her last five years nearly blind, and she still got there. Her right eye went first. Then her left started to fade. She would stumble sometimes as she walked. She'd call out softly so she could follow Dawn and Duffy by their voices. Lions usually don't look after their sick or injured. Wild animals rarely do. In May 2019, Josie had three grown sons. All three were sedated for a move to another reserve. One brother took longer than the other two to come out of it. He was groggy. He wobbled when he tried to stand up. His two brothers killed him right there on the spot. Her daughters did the opposite, and the reason has a name. Biologists call it kin selection. A biologist named Bill Hamilton wrote it up in 1964. You share a lot of your genes with your kids, your siblings, your parents. So if you help those people survive, you're helping some of your own genes survive. Evolution rewards that. Female lions stay in the pride they're born into for life. Males leave. So a daughter grows up next to her mother. She shares her mother's genes. Helping her mother stay alive helps keep those genes going. A son doesn't get that same payoff. He'll be forced out of the pride eventually. A brother who can't walk straight won't help him survive what comes after. Josie lived past the age any wild lion has any right to reach, nearly blind, in the company of the two animals who had the most reason in the world to keep her alive.

every fantasy series now is indeed called The Ballad of Blood & Bone & every back cover blurb is like Lenora Sparrowlove was the first of her clan to be born without magick. Or so she thought, until her Seventeenth Name Day arrived.

I said, “I’m just a girl” to an Italian man and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, “you’re a powerful woman” and now I’ll never use that phrase again

These little moments are what tweets are for. Micrononfiction.

every day i come across stories of women enduring harsh emotional circumstances at the hands of loved ones and i’m reminded yet again of just how important it is to be an insanely strict, overreacting diva if you want any semblance of peace and respect as a woman

i loooove dropping a "but that's neither here nor there" in casual conversation because it's like where tf is it then omg

my manager: "what can we improve on" my paycheck big papa

this is real latino representation

The half time show showed the importance of walkable mixed use neighbourhoods. House, bodega, nail salon, Ricky Martin… all in walkable distance.

Me at work today:

“The cure for anything is salt water. Sweat, tears or the ocean.” —  Isak Dinesen // Karen Blixen

when he says “ily”, but Achilles once said “i would recognize you in total darkness, were you mute and i deaf. i would recognize you in another lifetime entirely, in different bodies, different times. and i would love you in all of this, until the very last star in the sky burnt out into oblivion.”

before twitter had bookmarks I used to screenshot every tweet that made me laugh and I still have them all lmao

:(