I was with my parents in a dimly lit supermarket. Among the things we put in our cart was a pack of small oysters for frying. We waited at the counter as the cashier struggled to count the number of items we were buying. He would get through to “1,2,3…5,6,8…” before noticing that something was off and had to start over.

The bathroom I wanted to use not only had multiple doors but it even spanned two floors. I ran up and down the stairs making sure that each door was locked before I could use the toilet. I walked down the stairs after I finished and there were a few people sitting around a table in the near empty tavern - it was early in the morning, after all. They were apparently waiting for the owner to show up when one of them looked up and asked me “Are you the husband?” I told them “No”, before quickly turning around and walking the other way. I spotted an old classmate sitting on the other side of the street through the window.

I was following along with a tutorial for video editing that was teaching a key combination for quickly masking out subjects. “[Ctrl+BOOYAH]” got the job done as promised but it also happened to recolor the hair of people in the frame to the uploader’s signature grayscale gradient. This feature seemed to be a slight prank on the part of the creator.

We were out for a photo shoot on a walkway that passed by a back alley. The sun was setting and we were quickly losing our moment for a good photo. I tried to look for a good angle for a shot of the stained glass windows across from us.

My friend was pushing a wheelchair down the road to pick my dad up. We were getting ready to head to lunch.

We were taking a break in between shots for a short film we were making. We were already dressed in magical girl costumes when someone in a Kyubey mask popped their head out from the top of the overhang to inform us about the next shoot. My mom called me to ask if I knew the password to one of her many safes. I told her that I had no idea and suggested that she use one that had phone app verification.

My high school was now equipped with huge aquariums that went from the floor to the ceiling in a laboratory the size of a gymnasium. “This is a school…”, I thought to myself in disbelief. Apparently they were studying thalassophobia, or the fear of oceans. I walked outside with a friend to find ourselves at a dock during a rainstorm. We talked about different kinds of “scary” water and we stepped onto a boat that was heavily rocking with the waves.

I was watching someone play as a Russian minor in EU4. He said felt that the early game was boring and seemed to form Russia rather trivially. The game was now a giant wok of stir fry and I threw in a large slab of marinated beef along with a random assortment of condiments. He got up from his chair angrily as I kept making a mess of the place. I told him that the country tags were probably mixed up and therefore the save file was likely also corrupted - making him lose hours of progress. This absolutely infuriated him as I ran to the front door of the flat and down the stairwell.

We were sitting around a dining table on the second floor. It was still light out and earlier we had lifted someone in through the window. I riffed through one of the poetry zines that was on the table until I spotted a page that seemed familiar. It was titled “Cut Stones” but the author’s name wasn’t on the page. I flipped to the inside cover and scanned through the list of contributors until I spotted a friend’s name with an extra diacritic. I looked at the front cover which credited the compilation to someone with the last name Zinvado. My aunt started talking about how their parking spot wasn’t big enough for a “Zinvado” car. There was a sinking hollow feeling in my chest.

We were checking out the new campus which for some reason had an archeological dig site. The partly exposed artifacts had stickers with QR codes that led to old websites.