Welcome to Gaia! ::

She thought that being the first person in her family to go to college was her ticket out but she was wrong. A scholarship student with a lot of ideals but not a lot of ideas about how to actually do anything with those ideals, she burnt herself out before finishing her degree and dropped out. This is pattern in her life, burning out that is, and she doesn't know how to break it; she wants to do good things, but she rarely gets things done.


She didn't really know what she was doing while she was in college but she certainly doesn't know what she's doing now that she's dropped out. No more scholarship, no more free housing and food, and certainly no more professors taking pity on her and inviting her over when she looked especially lost. She kept her part-time job at the coffee shop, the mentoring gig at the local high school, and now, surprise surprise, has more time to put into tutoring her former peers in economics and math (she dropped out, but she was never a bad student), so she's just about making ends meet even if meals need to be skipped and she doesn't get luxuries. Rider-Waite was kind enough not to take away all the stuff they had paid for her to get (the dorm supplies, the laptop, the calculator, everything), but there's going to be nothing new for a long time or until she figures out what she's doing with her life.

She doesn't want to live this life forever, but she doesn't know how to get out of this situation. She also doesn't know how to tell her parents what has happened, so she's currently letting them live under the impression that she's doing well at school. They tell her how proud of her they are and she feels like the worst person in the world because that praise is built on the lies that she's been feeding them. If she were still working on her degree, she would be graduating in about two years so she's got a deadline for her very major deception coming to head. It's also her personal deadline for figuring out how she's going to not be a barista for the rest of her life.

All these lies about her life and what's she's doing makes her really uncomfortable in her relationship with her parents so she avoids communicating with them now, telling them that she really needs to concentrate on studying. She wants to make them proud (for real) but she feels like an utter disappointment.

Unfortunately, a permanent solution to her problem doesn't seem forthcoming. Even if she tells her parents the truth or finds a job or goes back to college, the central problem still remains: for all her good intentions, she never knows were to direct them so she just goes somewhere, anywhere that seems like it's even remotely related to her goals thinking that if she just moves things will fall into place around her, but it turns out that it just leaves her tired and unfulfilled. She knows this, but it's a habit, an instinctive reflex when it comes to dealing with this, that she's yet to be able to break.


Maybe she's just got it down to a science and it's really nothing at all, but she's always able to get the temperature of steamed milk just right. Just hot enough to make you feel cozy and revived, but not so hot that you burn your tongue.


Her mother is a Iu Mien immigrant from Laos and her father is of a multiracial background. A little bit of everything, Ariana doesn't really know what to say whenever people come up to her, give her a long look, and start asking her a string of "Are you Chinese/Japanese/African American/etc.?" questions. She shows a little bit of all her backgrounds. Dark skinned and freckled, people always focus on her eyes and hair. As a kid, she experienced her fair share of other kids coming up to her at the playground pulling their eyes back and adults touching her hair, telling her how nice it was that she wore her hair natural and "Oh how does she take care of it?"