Last week was so busy that I skipped writing a weekly update here. I figured it’d be better if I wrote an ad-hoc update1.
I’m writing this in a hotel room on Long Island, New York. It’s 5:00 AM. This is my first time experiencing jet lag. I can see why people are not fans of it.
Yesterday was the first time I’d spent more than 4 hours on a plane. But it was much better than I anticipated. I finished Zamyatin’s book We and watched two movies: Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day (2026) and Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch (2011). It was a good opportunity to watch these; I wouldn’t have picked these movies to watch if I hadn’t been stuck on a plane with 10 hours to kill. The first hour of Disclosure Day was so captivating; unfortunately, after that it became kinda boring. Sucker Punch, on the other hand, was really fun to watch, if heartbreaking.
Anyway, after we landed and went through customs to enter the USA, we took an Uber to Long Island and checked into our hotel. We didn’t plan too much to do that day. We grabbed some quick food from a food truck and then went to Midtown Manhattan.
On the subway to Manhattan, the experience took a bizarre turn. Everything and everyone around us started to seem familiar. I don’t mean familiar in a disenchanted way. This familiarity was the enchantment itself. After visiting the Public Library and starting to stroll around 5th Avenue, this feeling was heightened: I felt like I already knew these places, like I had even lived here before!
Maybe this is a normal thing to feel about NYC. I’ve seen this city on screen a bazillion times. In movies and TV shows, I’ve walked around these streets before.
Footnotes
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I’m thinking of dropping the weekly update concept for good. It might be better to write multiple atomic, even small, posts to share life updates. However, the best function of weekly updates is that they keep you in the game even when you don’t feel like playing. ↩