We were watching a dance routine and was laughing at the fact that none of the clapping was audible. Someone told me that they had taught my brother the lyrics.

It was a Tuesday of the new semester and I was still having trouble trying to figure out my class schedule. There were overlapping time blocks and subsections of classes all written down on the note card that I usually make for myself at the beginning of the semester. A friend informed me that over the past two days, he had only gone to one class. I panicked at the possibility that I had also missed class.

We were in a hotel room and my father was watching SFM YouTube videos on the television. I announced that I was going to head to the shower but by the time I had gotten my clothes, we had switched to some kind of anime that heavy utilized 3D CGI. I decided to sit and watch until we got to the halfway mark.

I had woken up to see that my flight was going to be arriving 4 hours ahead of schedule. However, I realized that it was set to land in Henan instead of Taipei. When I asked the person to the right of me what was going on, they said that I had slept for an extra 12 hours.

We were watching another “formulaic superhero movie” on the laptop. The heroes would have an encounter with the villain, spot a certain symbol associated with the villain during the battle, and after a defeat analyze and research said symbol in the library. Using this information, the heroes would attain new equipment in order to defeat the villain.

I was looking at the entries of the photography contest and I saw a piece titled “Left and my mountain”. It was a photo of a rock climber approaching the top of the cliff in front of the sun. I looked to the right to see another photo of a rock climber titled “Right and my mountain”.

They were looking for a good place to drill a hole through the wall. “Are you trying to escape?” I asked. Apparently, they were planning to dig through the wall somewhere and install a fake wall in its place to create a hiding spot. “Can I join?” I asked, to which they accepted. Unfortunately for us, we were surrounded by 3 walls of concrete and a pane of glass facing a large garden. I told them that there wasn’t any chance that we were going to be inconspicuous.

There were multiple elevators that operated for the same building. However, I wasn’t aware that each of the elevators were only available on one third of the floors and accidentally destroyed the one that went to the middle floors. Our main objective was to bring someone down but I also wanted to explore the tower as I walked up the many flights of stairs. I found myself skipping over a lot of the lower floors, not stopping to look around before continuing upwards. Sometimes when I stopped at a floor, I would be greeted by a menu of streaming anime episodes.

We were standing in the cramped unlit kitchen and I had just scooped out a bowl of oatmeal and quinoa from a jar for dinner. We were then supposed to let it breathe by not closing the lid again like a batch of sour dough.

We had walked into a boss fight with what looked like one of those crocodiles from Donkey Kong. He attacked mostly in the form of lunging and rolling to the side. After defeating him, he started talking about the patches he had sewn onto a jacket. He declared himself to be “anti weeb, anti communist” which according to him was the reason that he didn’t like the backpacking patch. His mom had patched that one, he said and someone else called him out on it.