Chapter 1

It started, I think, when I first understood that I saw the world differently. I was young, maybe twelve, and I watched a man in a long coat walk down our street with a cardboard sword tucked under his arm. He was muttering to himself, and the other children laughed. But I saw something else. I saw a knight on a quest, a man who had decided that the ordinary world was not enough. I wanted to be like him, even if everyone thought he was foolish.

That image has never left me. It returned, fully formed, when I began to shape this memoir. I am not a knight, of course. I am a woman in her forties, living in a small apartment with too many books and a phone that never stops buzzing. But I have a quest. My quest is to find meaning in the noise, to tilt at the windmills of digital absurdity, and to record every step of the journey so that I might understand it better.

My name is Danguole. I am Lithuanian by birth, though I have lived long enough in the English-speaking world that my accent now lives somewhere between a song and a shrug. I write. I post. I scroll. And I have a tendency to see windmills where there are only advertising billboards, and giants where there are only algorithms.

Take last Thursday, for example. I was sitting in a café near the university, trying to finish a piece about the psychology of mobile gaming. I had my laptop open, a half-empty latte beside me, and the soft hum of conversation around me. A notification popped up: a comment on my latest post about the illusion of easy money in apps like Fruit Mahjong. The comment read, "You are tilting at windmills, my friend. These games are harmless fun."

I smiled. That was exactly what I was doing. Tilting at windmills. The commenter didn't know how right they were.

I looked up from my screen and saw a man sitting two tables away. He was tall and thin, with a weathered face and a long, flowing beard that seemed to belong to another century. He wore a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and he was reading a book with a faded cover. I couldn't see the title, but I imagined it was something about chivalry or lost causes. He looked up once and caught my eye. He nodded, as if we shared a secret, and then returned to his reading.

I felt a strange kinship with him. He was probably just a retired professor, but in that moment he was Don Quixote, and I was his squire, Sancho, or perhaps the other way around. I am never sure who is the knight and who is the squire in my own story. Some days I feel like Quixote, charging ahead with grand ideas. Other days I feel like Sancho, weighed down by practicality, muttering proverbs to steady my nerves.

Sancho, in my life, is a friend named Ričardas. We met years ago at a writers' workshop, and he has been my anchor ever since. He is short and stout, with a round belly that shakes when he laughs, which is often. He works as a farmer, believe it or not, and he has a way of cutting through my elaborate theories with a single, simple question. "But does it make you happy?" he will ask, and suddenly all my abstractions dissolve.

He is the one who tells me to put down my phone and eat a proper meal. He is the one who reminds me that not every comment is a sword fight, not every troll is a giant to be defeated. "May God help us," he says when I start a new project, "for we are in great need." And then he brings me soup.

But I also have a Dulcinea. She is not a person, not really. She is an idea, a figure of pure beauty and virtue that I project onto the world. In my mind, she is the reader who will understand everything I am trying to say. She is the perfect audience, the one who will see past my clumsy sentences and grasp the heart of my story. I write for her. I post for her. I record my voice memos and imagine her listening, nodding, smiling.

I know she is a fiction. I know that the real people who read my work are complex, flawed, and often distracted. But I need that ideal to keep going. Without her, I would be a knight without a quest, a lost soul wandering the digital plains with no purpose.

This memoir is my attempt to make sense of that quest. It is a recording of my life, filtered through the orange lens of social media, the absurdities of online culture, and the quiet moments of grace that happen between screens. I will tell you about the time I lost $505.25 to a game called Fruit Mahjong, and how that taught me more about the cost of illusion than any philosophy book. I will tell you about the dental procedures that reshaped my smile and my confidence. I will tell you about the code I learned to write, and the code I learned to break.

But first, I need to tell you about the moment I decided to write this book. It was a Tuesday. I was lying on my couch, scrolling through my feed, when I saw a post from a friend. It was a picture of a man wearing a crown made of tin foil, with a caption that said, "The potentate of the absurd." The comments were a mess of languages—Lithuanian, English, Spanish, something that might have been Arabic—each person trying to outdo the other with jokes and insults. I laughed at first, but then I stopped. I realized that this was my world. A world of curated absurdity, where everyone is performing, and the performance is the only thing that is real.

I sat up. I opened a new document. I typed the title: "Recording to me."

And I began.

Outside my window, the sky was turning orange. A car honked. A dog barked. The world continued its chaotic dance, and I sat there, a woman with a phone and a dream, ready to tilt at the next windmill.

I am Don Quixote, if only in my mind. I have resolved to undertake a great and perilous adventure—the adventure of telling my own story, honestly, without filters. Let the world laugh. Let the trolls mock. I have my Dulcinea in my heart, my Sancho by my side, and a crown of fools that I wear with pride.

This is Chapter One. There is no turning back now.