A family friend was getting married and one of their honeymoon options was Harbin. I was sitting in the back of the car to pick up someone from the supermarket. We found her standing in the parking lot and people were harassing her for not being able to speak Mandarin.

I had applied to take a Japanese proficiency test and they had required me to send in some materials to the testing center in Seattle before the actual examination. I had to provide 6 contacts that I recently had conversations with in Japanese as well as list the words that I used most frequently in my speech. In additional, I also had to submit an essay that required the use of many technical terms describing the government and internal politics of Tibet. I wasn’t able to do any of these.

Our destination was a large mattress that laid in the middle of an open field. Toxic fumes were being released as time was running out. I jumped from the edge of the building, gliding towards our target.

We were sitting in the back of the car going through the city in the middle of the night. Illuminated signs were displayed on top of the single story stores that we passed by. Each sign was a screen shot of different scenes from various anime. “Hey, you’ve watched Tatami, right?” he asked, referring to one of the signs that whizzed by.

We were sitting in a conference room in anticipation for an announcement. The person sitting next to me was very emotional about a rumor of a merchant Pokemon named “Kent” being introduced. This Pokemon had no battle capabilities and was instead carried around for mere utility purposes like special offers when buying equipment or inventory management. “Is there going to be a mold mechanic?” he asked eagerly.

A family friend was showing me his new home. His name was hung up on the door of his apartment. After opening the front door, we had to crawl through (another) elevated square hole to get into the house.* I felt periodic bouts of claustrophobia as I walked through the living room and kitchen.

A Twitch streamer had uploaded a picture of the directory sign in his apartment building onto his Instagram with the caption: “Thank you manager for installing fiber”. It wasn’t long before he realized that he had just revealed his home address to the public by doing so and quickly took down the picture. He lived on “Coconut Rd.”

The wooden boards in my bedroom were cracked and my father had called for someone to fix them. He wasn’t very trusting of the worker however and wanted me to devise a way to monitor his activities while we were gone. I suggested that I could simply set up my phone to record my room and place it on the window while it faced my bookshelf. After I had plugged it in, you could see the red light that signaled the camera was rolling.

We were in the library and picked up a copy of a bunch of magazines a student had printed to resemble those of National Geographic. Someone asked me if it looked authentic and I thought that the yellow they used was a little off. Someone else complained that when they received the original draft of the magazine, the person who sent it in didn’t feel it necessary to use any spaces and instead used dots and periods. I suggested that perhaps they opened the file as the wrong format. I picked up a thesis from the shelf and the first thing I noticed was a ton of punctuation and formatting errors.

A childhood friend had uploaded a video of us on what seemed to be a roller coaster ride. When my mother saw the video that I was tagged in, she asked me if “[I was] trying to upload a video or dying”. The video failed to load past a certain point and was full of video artifacts and distortion.