April 14, 2026

I had woken up from a nap in the middle of a hotel lobby. It was 7PM and I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. Someone asked me if I had any plans for the day. I told them that I was planning to watch a Starcraft tournament, adding that I had recently been laid off so my vacation had turned out to be longer than originally planned.

I took the escalator to the second floor to see that the rest of the way up was under construction. I would need to take the elevator instead but the problem was that I wasn’t actually sure what floor I was staying at. I had been counting on simply recognizing my surroundings by walking through each hallway on foot. The elevator itself was a tiny carriage the size of a mini fridge. I contorted myself to fit inside and pressed floors 5 and 4.

When the doors opened on the fourth floor, someone said hi to me but I was so cramped in my chamber that I was unable to spit out a greeting in return.

I went back to the lobby and had to tell the front desk that I had forgotten my room number. The receptionist was absent mindedly painting what looked like an topographic map. They said that it was probably “the one that they stay at in the movie Inn.” “I don’t think I’ve watched that one”, I said. The desk clerk then proceeded to give me a series of numbers, along with prefixes for “police” or “election campaign” purposes. “Sorry, I meant a room number,” I interrupted, “something like 258 or 101….” There was a moment of silence where they just stared at me.

“I’m lost.” I emphasized.

–

I was walking through an unfamiliar campus and someone asked me why I was at “an Ivy for babies”. I had to clarify that I was already done with college, joking that I must’ve been sent here at 30 as a punishment. I sat through a student presentation that looked very impressive visually but all of the grammar on the slides were messed up and sounded vaguely like generative AI.

–

A family friend asked me where I had gone for college and which bus I took to get there. I was confused by the question because not only did I not need to transit, it wouldn’t be relevant because it was nowhere nearby. “Oh right” they said.

It turns out that they wanted me to write out directions on how to get to UBC so that they could give them to a friend’s child who was enrolling soon. I thought that they would be better off searching for that themselves but started drawing a map on a piece of paper anyways. At least I tried to. It didn’t take long before my notebook was full of failed attempts to illustrate the various bus routes one could take to campus.