This episode doesn’t unfold. It erupts. A bureaucratic closet stuffed with union keys, smiley-face tickets, lipstick-smeared wigs, quick-sale groceries, and the ghost of a $3.99 citronella candle — all tumbling out in a cacophony of memory, shame, and philosophical glitter.

You’re not telling a story. You’re surviving one.

You’re not narrating a life. You’re dodging clichés with contortionist precision.

You’re not working a job. You’re performing miracles of presence in a Petri dish of procedural madness.

There’s a clipboard floating midair.

There’s a Hello Kitty ice skater doing pirouettes on a melting filmstrip.

There’s a Kafka hallway where everyone’s ticket just says 🙂 and no one knows why they came.

There’s a candle you bought in the mid-90s and a lie you told about it that still flickers in your chest like a mosquito bite that never healed.

You’re unionized, anonymized, and weaponized.

You reflect nothing back to the gaslighters and they take it like communion.

You smear lipstick across your face like war paint and dare anyone to call it drag.

You major in awful things because awful things are where the real fun lives.

This is not a tableau.

This is not a still life.

This is a noisy, feral, bureaucratic rave staged in the margins of a grant application.

This is Citronella Cinderella.

She doesn’t go to the ball.

She goes camping.

And she turns in the receipt.

This is the episode where the diagram becomes a body and the body becomes a diagram and you can move the feeling back and forth like a psychic Etch A Sketch. This is the episode where you realize you’re not a human being — you’re a human doing — and being doesn’t ask for anything except your complete surrender to its nothingness.

This is the episode where the fundraiser queen grinds temp workers into paste and thanks them for inspiring her. Where the microphone is a shrine and the strings are pulling her like she’s a marionette made of selflessness and awe. Where narcissistic supply is not a diagnosis — it’s a performance art piece staged in the break room of a collapsing nonprofit.

This is the episode where you remember that you used to get grants like candy, and now you just write like a man possessed by a diagram. Where casual conversation is a myth and everything you say is a test of whether the other person is real or just a bureaucratic hallucination.

This is the episode where the lights go off, but it’s not depression — it’s background radiation. It’s not a pattern — it’s a map. And the map doesn’t lead anywhere except to the ice cream shop where they don’t have matcha but they do have black sesame, and that’s enough to keep you alive for one more day.

This is the episode where you ask:

What are we supposed to do now that we are?

And the answer is:

Temp ditty.

A little song for the margins.

A little hum for the human doing.

A little scream for the narcissist who thinks she’s the string.

This is not satire.

This is not memoir.

This is not critique.

This is a melting filmstrip of emotional supply.

This is a bureaucratic hallucination rendered in sesame paste.

This is the diagram chewing on itself.

And it tastes like something you almost remember.

This is the episode where you discover that feelings are not feelings — they’re vending‑machine pellets fired into your nervous system by a screaming woman, a moving wall, and a phone that “explodes” only in the sense that it politely detonates your amygdala. This is the episode where you learn that Stranger Things isn’t a show, it’s a stimulus delivery system, and you can turn the emotional faucet on and off like a god with a dimmer switch.

This is the episode where straight‑boy heartbreak is treated with the solemnity of a national tragedy, while queer longing is treated like a biohazard. Where the fat girl gets abandoned, the skinny girl gets the dumb jock, and the lesbian subplot is hiding in the corner like a raccoon waiting for the right moment to chew through the drywall.

This is the episode where you realize that childhood is a haunted house you escape only by aging out of it. Where some kids sprint toward adulthood like it’s a theme park, and others crawl out of childhood like they’ve survived a war no one else remembers. Where being a boy who likes a boy is a silent scream the world pretends not to hear.

This is the episode where gender dissolves like cotton candy in a puddle, but somehow “homosexual” still sticks to you like a sticker you can’t peel off. Where bisexuals get to be bisexual, but you have to be “gay,” as if you’re made of glitter and helium and sponsored by a parade.

This is the episode where you ask what a memory is, and the answer is:

a hallucination with tenure.

A ghost that pays rent in your chest.

A warm ache shaped like a person who is so them that you almost cry when you think of them.

This is the episode where “us‑ness” becomes volcanic, where sarcasm becomes a parachute, where rainbows and unicorns arrive like hostile paratroopers, and where the moment — the only moment there is — refuses to let you live inside it.

This is not nostalgia.

This is not analysis.

This is not healing.

This is Itsy Bitsy.

This is the spider crawling across the diagram of your emotional life.

This is the gum ball machine of your nervous system dispensing another round.

And you’re going to chew it.

Whether you understand it or not.