Day 40: Hotel Living

There is nothing simpler than a life that takes place in one room. For a writer deep in the creative process, it's gold. While Boyfriend works in the field from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m., I enjoy a languid expanse of creative time, interrupted only by people who bustle in and clean my "house" every single day, supplying fresh towels and fresh coffee. My phone doesn't ring. There are no social obligations. There is a treadmill and sometimes a pool. I write, I read, I sleep. It's glorious.

During writing breaks, I wander down to the lobby to make small talk with the front desk women, who I am usually best friends with by the time I check out. Each hotel chain has a different brand of front desk woman. At the Coast Hotel, they were in their early-60s with short, white coifs and golf shirts. The Quality Inn's brand is early-20s, highlighted, curling ironed and heavily mascara-ed.

Late mornings, I get anxious anticipating the knock at the door, followed by the singsongy, "Housekeeping!" so I throw my stuff in a bag and preemptively get out of the way. I assess the character of the city as I seek further caffeination.

The character of Lethbridge is For Lease Call 1-800-333-9275. There are more empty storefronts than full ones. Even the downtown movie theatre is silent and dark. Despite a desperate need for vitality on ground level, there is a fancy steak house silently overlooking the city from fifty feet up in a giant, bizarrely shaped water tower. It's like an ominous Alberta Beef skyscraper.

The best coffee shop in Lethbridge is the Round St. Cafe. It smells of homemade baking and proudly displays a massive selection of flavoured syrups, as though that proves their coffee shop cred. I bet those bottles have been there since the mid-90s when exotically flavoured lattes were hip. Back then, it made perfect sense to stock seven hundred types of syrup. "Dude, Mulberry. Trust me, order a case. So hot right now."

Yesterday, I made the fatal error of sitting next to an expectant-looking man with glasses. I knew immediately he was the type to strike up overly friendly coffee shop conversation with anyone who sat near. Like the guy in Calgary that asked me how I liked my "Apple Mac" as a lead-in to the play-by-play of his entire personal computing history. Or the man in Canmore who looked over my shoulder to see what I was working on and then began offering his opinions on it.

In order to avoid interactions such as these, I've learned to adopt the kind of facial expression that says, 'If you so much as glance in my general direction, red-hot laser beams will shoot out of my eyes and melt your brain.'

But it wasn't me Glasses Man was waiting for – it was a bland corporate stooge middle management type in a windbreaker. Within seconds, I realized Glasses was more of a problem than I'd imagined. Glasses was a loudtalker. The kind of person who seems to think that what they are saying is interesting enough for the entire planet to hear.

I couldn't tell if this was a job interview or a New York Times interview, but Glasses was pulling out all the stops. He broadcasted his resume and "25 years of expertise" to the entire cafe. He screamed things like Quarterly Strategic Objectives, Existential, Stratification and Mileu to the four corners of the earth, while Windbreaker Stooge oohed and aahed.

Mileu? COME ON. Under what circumstances would anyone need to say Mileu in Lethbridge, Alberta? And seriously, did he not know an adjective besides Strategic? I began to think he was a politician with too much time on his hands. That his misguided campaign strategy was to meet his aide in cafes and talk really loudly about himself so his mulberry-latte-sipping constituents would hear him and think he was amazing. All I knew is if he said Mileu one more time, he would not only lose my vote but he'd ensure his brain ended up in a steaming grey puddle on the floor.