[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here's an idea-- every hotel room is the same place.
This summer, I'm staying in a lot of hotel rooms.
And I've always wondered where a hotel room is meant to be.
A hotel room is a confusing place, because hotels, I think,
would have you think that it's somewhere to treat like home.
But it's better than home.
There are amenities.
It has services-- those funny hangers with the tiny tops.
My home is not like that.
You can make yourself at home in a hotel room,
but the hotel room doesn't make itself your home back.
This is not your beautiful, bolted to the wall painting
or standard unit of furniture, which the hotel housekeeping
staff will gladly replace to its intended location
if you decide to get creative.
At home, you may have responsibilities,
but in a hotel room there are rules,
which are enforced in the nicest and most passive way possible.
If you would like to take a robe home,
they are for sale at the concierge.
Maybe this is the tension responsible for the popularly
considered, if rarely actually engaged-in
practice of wrecking up the place-- the rock star
hotel stay, the frustration of being encouraged somehow
to make yourself at home among objects
and within a structure that is completely foreign and totally
managed.
The hotel is an institution, a more or less clinical one,
depending upon which hotel we're talking about.
And you are its subject.
So you are expected to make yourself at home, subject.
All hotel rooms are susceptible to this tension
because all hotels, weirdly, are the same place.
Not just the sort of home, sort of not place, but also
the weird, liminal space that only travel can create.
And maybe we are wrong to assume that everyone staying
in a hotel room is traveling, but for the sake
of this argument, we'll assume anyway.
The struggle with the hotel room is making yourself comfortable
knowing you will only ever leave,
both at the end of your stay and immediately upon arrival.
The point of a hotel room is to not use it.
Travel which sees not but the inside of a hotel room
is generally considered to be less than fruitful.
A hotel room is a hollow shelf with furniture and your socks.
A friend of mine who only ever stays in terrible, cheap hotel
rooms puts it really well.
He says that his hotel room is just a place for him
to keep his body when he's not using it.
He doesn't stay in his hotel rooms.
They sort of stay around him.
He floats within them, never truly arriving.
An impermanent home, but not for your body
when you're not using it-- a place
where you arrive just to leave.
Every hotel room might be in a different location,
but they're are all the same place,
a node in the massive global network of rooms in transition
for people in transition.
Welcome to Hilton Time.
So not knowing where I am in my hotel room also
makes me wonder who I am supposed to be.
In our hotel rooms, who are we?
I mean, mostly, I would guess ourselves,
unless one is staying in a Vegas hotel room.
Those hotel rooms tend to give one the option and also
encouragement and materials to become
someone completely different.
But otherwise, who are we to our hotel rooms?
A guest?
Momentary owner?
Customer?
Inconvenience?
It feels always like a hassle that I'm using my hotel room.
Ubiquitous staff tasked with the near impossible goal
of resetting every room and the public spaces
to remove the mark of guests.
Cleaning, tidying, and making the beds,
rearranging the pool furniture, wiping down everything.
I am always the first person to use everything, even
if the last person was also me.
And this is how I never really arrive at my hotel room.
As Joanna Walsh put it in her "Object Lessons" book
on hotels, I'm not a guest so much as I am a ghost.
And like a ghost, I'm in transition.
I might have left somewhere, but I never
really arrive anywhere else.
What do you guys think?
When you're in a hotel room, where are you?
And who are you supposed to be?
Let us know in the comments, and I'll see you
back at the record well.
Oh, New York, how I missed your smells and humidity.
That is not true, but it is really good to be home.
And it was also good to hang out with everybody at Geeky Con.
Thanks to everybody who came to my panels, who
came to the signing line to take photos,
and anybody who stopped me to say, hey, while I was there,
it was tons of fun.
If you want to check out this week's Comment Response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding leaked media.
You can click right here to watch that, or find
a link in the doobly doo.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these Pacific Northwest tree octopi.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a Subreddit links
in the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from SimonBoba,
who points us towards a post about the NRK doctrine,
which states the best way to control your content is
to be the best provider of it, which I think is a very, very
interesting and astute idea.