close quarters

it’s been a while since i last watched alice in wonderland, yet i’m wondering now, sitting at this desk, which is basically on my bed, with my laptop pushed back against the shower glass, if this hotel is going to claim some kind of disney-fantastic inspiration for its tetrisized bed-shower-toilet configuration or if this is just a claustrophobic charm that is completely wasted on me.

alas, this room has nothing to do with alice in wonderland.  at least not according to its website, which has also failed to mention that you could very well walk the length of an entire new york city block between the time you leave the elevator and find your room at the end of a long, dark, narrow hallway.  for all the chartreuse-colored splendor that the lobby advertises online, there is nothing of the lincoln log-colored wooden walls that seem to be closing in on me as i type by bathroom light (there are only arms-distance wall sockets for my blackberry charger and laptop, which means that the light-by-lamp strategy has been temporarily disabled).

i don’t know why i’m shocked.  i’ve been here before.  i’ve seen the rooms.  i should have known better.  then again, i’m the same guy who occasionally walks into starbucks and convinces himself that the sandwiches are decent.  even though i know that they taste like cold, hard, giant pieces of bread with some b-minus-quality filling.  even though i know that after the second cold, starchy bite my tongue will ache and my mouth will feel like it’s filled with sawdust and that i’m going to give up on the bread and just finish the sandwich meat in the three bites it takes to consume a toddler’s serving of cold cut.

i know this, but sometimes i forget.  sometimes fact gets fuzzy when it’s a smallish blur in a rear view mirror you barely use because you prefer to actually turn around before switching lanes.  but still, such a memory, even faint and fuzzy, doesn’t eliminate my right to complain about the sandwich nor it does it mean that it’s not entirely ridiculous that i have been essentially, expensively stuffed inside a hotel room designed by neither form nor function, while six floors below me it still costs me twenty-dollars to drink a vodka soda on an assortment of chairs and/or benches and/or trees.  yes, trees.

i’m just saying.