You drop a small piece of food on the floor, and decide to kick it under the oven/couch/whatever because you can’t be bothered to pick it up. As you’re walking away, you hear a very quiet “Thank you!” from under it.
“No problem,” I say, the words passing out of my mouth on autopilot, before my brain engages and I freeze.
I turn, and look at the fridge. It seems to be the same fridge that was here when I moved in.
I mean, I’m also kind of embarrassed. I never do that, I know that’s how you get roaches, but my back hurts so bad that getting up and down is next to impossible, much less bending over. “Um, you holding up okay down there?” I ask.
There was silence.
“I know that we’re probably the only apartment in the building that doesn’t have a bug problem. That’s, well, that’s you, right?”
Again, silence. But I know I heard it.
“Listen, I can’t really bend over right now, but if you’re down there and hungry, like, there’s half a rotisserie chicken in there that’s about to go bad. I was going to throw it away, but if you could use it-”
there aren’t enough posts going around about the swedish cryptid known as the skvader which is a rabbit with pheasant wings and also a very good boy.
like this one dude just made a fake taxidermy and spread it around as a hoax for a good ass while and it lead to this really cool fantasy creature and i am genuinely dissapointed that it never gets used in anything
THE BOY
Rabbirds, by the amazing @tkingfisher/Ursula Vernon (source).
The lack of skvaders is particularly frustrating when you realize it forms the third point of a wonderful cryptid trifecta.
You got the jackalopes, which are rabbits with antlers.
And you got the wolpertingers, which are rabbits with antlers and wings.
And then… what? Do you escalate? That’s unbalanced, those two rabbit cryptids don’t have the same number of extra things, the wolpertinger is clearly the jackalope But More.
BUT with the skvader on the other side, balance is restored. Antler rabbit, winged rabbit, winged antler rabbit. It’s a classic Venn diagram of imaginary lapine beasts, and it’s only complete if you acknowledge the fucking skvader.
Good thing Ursula’s got our back, at least.
This is a really excellent point and I applaud your advancements in Cryptid Theory.
There are little romance subplots all around me irl and I don’t have the time to turn any of them into novels
Today I went to my favorite Italian restaurant and was seated at the table nearest the kitchen. We noticed a change to the menu. The list of pastas had been replaced by just “pasta of the day.” We asked what the pasta of the day was. The waiter told us it was a mystery. So we ordered it, and when it came it was pasta with eggs and bacon, and I was so surprised and delighted by this unexpected whimsy that I started to clap. And then I noticed the chef watching me from the doorway and smiling. He had clearly come out wanting to see what people’s reactions would be.
I’m not saying I love the chef or that the chef loves me. I am saying that is a seed with which to grow a romance that I don’t have time to write.
Romance seedling of the day:
Tonight I went to a party and a woman asked me my name.
“Anna,” I said.
“This confirms my theory,” she said loudly, to the entire room. People stopped to listen. “ALL Anna’s are drop dead gorgeous!”
I felt v flattered. I asked for her name.
She flashed me a grin. “Anna.”
Irl, do I love her and does she love me? No. But this is the seed of another romance book I don’t have the time to write.
I was miserable. At a parade! All of my friends were drunk and misbehaving and smelled of rancid tequila. I felt alone and about a million years old. The sun was glaring daggers into my eyeballs.
And then! At this parade! A very large beautiful man I didn’t know! Saw me squinting! Said, “I’m can block the sun for you” and stepped in front of me. My sun-blindness cleared into a vision of his gentle smile.
He was a mathematics professor! Very sober, soft-spoken, kind. Did not insult my drunk friends but also stood carefully apart from them. The perfect balance.
Do I love him? No. But he’s a romantic hero in a book somewhere in the multiverse.
“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”
Notice: not only do your friends actually like you, they secretly like you twice as much as they let on
An experience that made me feel much more assured in my friendships was at college, a friend and myself were talking about a third friend of ours and how cool and knowledgeable and smart she is and how we feel like we could never be that cool. The next day I was working with a professor on some paper presentations we were about to have and when I came out of the staff room I was informed that these two aforementioned friends were having the same discussion about me. And it turns out we spent a lot of time thinking about our friends who aren’t currently in the room and gushing over how cool and smart and talented they are without being able to say all of it to their face.
Your friends secretly love you a lot more than they already express, just like you love them so intensely that saying it all to their faces would sound clumsy to your own ears. It’s true though
I’ve had more than one friend say “no, listen to me for one second: you are literally and actually one of my favorite people, I enjoy your presence in my life” and if that won’t rock a foundation …
It’s so good to be loved.
“Loved” is something I take for granted, but “one of my favorite people” is like. Oh surely not. I mean there are so many other people? And I’m just. Me
Reblogging things I like feels a lot more goblinesque than upvoting ever did. The upvotes felt like “hmm yes, I approve *golf claps*” while reblogging feels like furtively staring at something before shoving it in your mouth and scurrying back underneath the nearest piece of furniture.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t like it. But I definitely find myself going “maybe I shouldn’t reblog this because I’ve already reblogged a bunch of things today and I don’t want to look like I don’t have a life,” I say as I close the app and reopen it like one of those little automatic box toys with the switches.
ALT
ALT
