

My PayPal Account Was Compromised. Six Months Later, I Am Still Waiting for Answers.
In January 2026, something happened that I never expected. An unfamiliar phone number was added to my PayPal account. Shortly afterward, my password was changed. Then, a total of $517.90 USD was spent through three separate transactions that I did not authorize. At first, I assumed this would be a straightforward case. I reported the issue to PayPal and expected the transactions to be investigated. Instead, I received a response stating: "We've completed our review of your un


Photographs Waiting for Their Stories
Yesterday, I found myself doing something that felt less like design work and more like archaeological digging. I had been circling around a problem that looked simple on the surface: the cover image for my novel Nonimportantech. But as often happens with visual decisions, the “simple” part quickly dissolves once you start actually looking. I opened my Google Drive, thinking I would quickly find something usable. Instead, I found mostly videos—recent fragments of life, short


When Memory Arrives in Boxes: Two Clients, Thousands of Fragile Histories
A week ago, I began working with a long-time client from Westmount. He brought in a collection that felt less like a “job order” and more like a time capsule that had quietly survived the century: photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, old newspapers, birth certificates, marriage announcements, obituaries—entire lives compressed into paper, ink, and fading emulsion. As I started scanning them, something unexpected happened. It wasn’t just technical work anymore. Each d


Why I Couldn’t Kill Xia Liu
When I was in high school, there was a girl who seemed to have everything. She came from a well-off family. She was intelligent, athletic, confident, and admired by almost everyone around her. She was the kind of person who made success look effortless. Years after graduation, another classmate told me that she had died of leukemia. The news hit me harder than I expected. Life had already taught me that bad things happen to good people, but somehow I had never imagined that s


When Words Are Not Enough
Today, a gentleman walked into my shop. As I always do, I greeted him first in French, then in English. "Bonjour." "Hello." He smiled warmly, pointed to both of his ears, and then made a soft sound from his throat. In that instant, I understood. He could not hear. For a moment, neither of us spoke. We didn't need to. He smiled. I smiled back. And somehow, communication continued. What struck me most was not his deafness. It was how quickly two strangers found another way to u


The Little Garden Between the Sidewalk and the Wall
This morning, while walking through the neighborhood, I suddenly stopped in front of a small garden. Not a famous botanical garden.Not one of those luxury landscaping projects designed for magazines.Just a narrow strip of soil between the sidewalk and a brick building. And yet, it felt strangely beautiful. There were hostas overflowing onto the walkway, small evergreens planted with patience, flowers blooming from recycled tires painted green, and an old wooden wagon wheel le


A Story in Progress — Working Title: The Label World
This is a novel I am currently writing, unfolding in real time as a fragmented narrative about systems, identity, and the quiet mechanisms that organize modern life. At its surface, the story begins with something deceptively simple: labels. Names on lunch boxes. Tags on people. Categories assigned to objects, events, and even emotions. In this world, everything is readable, sortable, and transferable. Identity is not fixed—it is assigned, exchanged, corrected, and sometimes


When My Dystopian Novel Refused to Become a Dystopian Novel
I originally thought I was writing a dystopian story. At the beginning, everything pointed in that direction. A collapsing environment.Biological systems escaping control.Administrative absurdity.Media manipulation.Political structures feeding on narrative instability.People slowly losing the ability to distinguish memory from constructed reality. The world of the novel became increasingly strange, humid, fragmented, and emotionally unstable. And yet, somewhere along the way,


The Door Left Open
This morning, after dropping my son off at the Saint-Henri metro station, I came back to park the car near home. That was when I noticed it. A neighbor’s car door was slightly open. Not wide open.Just a narrow crack. The kind of thing you almost miss unless your eyes happen to pause for half a second longer than usual. My first instinct was immediate and modern:take a photo, record a short video, and post it in the Saint-Henri Facebook group. People do that all the time now.


A Funeral for a Familiar Stranger
Last weekend, I attended the funeral of Donald (Don) Robertson. For years, Don had lived in the small square park facing Saint-Zotique Church in Montreal’s Saint-Henri neighborhood — Sir-George-Étienne Cartier Square, though few people around here ever use its full name. To most residents, it was simply “the park where Don lives.” He was one of those figures who slowly become inseparable from a place. Not famous.Not powerful.Not even particularly talkative. And yet, almost ev








































































