After the busy day we return to the Inn and our just-right sized rooms to retreat from the collective into our selves. If we don't already have dinner plans, I crash for a bit and embark for the fluorescent horizon.

The Lawson's on our block is huge and brighter for it. Awash in indecision, I browse the neatly wrapped vegetables and the spastic designs of dried ramen packages. My appetite is only so big and the number of attractive options vast. How to choose? I browse and imagine what it would be like to have the different things, and then I buy the same thing I always do. Green onion ramen. Coke. Super dark chocolate ice cream, individual size. If I need to secure a quick breakfast, I grab a yogurt and one of the exotic pseudo-European breads.

But, I could buy an SD flash card for my camera, ore envelopes for the teachers in my life. If I just wanted to chow on pickled eggs or those dizzy wieners, I could buy them straight from the case, rip open the package, and ravish them right there in the store while seated in orange plastic swingy chairs and brightly lit in full view of the whole city passing by.

Instead, I carry my little sack back to my rectangle on the 7th floor. I turn on the white flat panel tv to any channel and put the coke and ice cream in the cutey fridge under the desk slash vanity. Then, out of these tight clothes and into the stiff and all-too-thin yukata. I take the one-person stainless steel pot from its warmer qua Buck Rogers era launch pad and step up into the bathroom to fill it with water. Back to the launch pad it goes; I start countdown.

The TV is a kaleidescope of variety shows, weather, sumo or go, and interviews. Hi, dozo. All these many days, I've not caught a thing in English. All of it is entertaining anyway; I don't need to understand it to enjoy it. Tonight: A murder mystery in the fashion industry. A young starlet make-up artist is murdered and her protégé resolves to fill her shoes and solve the mystery—at great peril to her safety... and her career.

The launch pad disengages when it senses the pot being lifted from it. That is the only way to turn it off. I pour the hot water into the styrofoam cup, add the dried goods, and close the lid; then I grab the coke from the fridge and decant from it whatever will fit in the tiny glass that came with the room. I pull out the rolly stool from under the desk slash vanity so that it rests against the bed and functions as a nice soft-top table for in-bed dining.

Noodles ready. Remote in hand. It doesn't get better than this. And when I finish the noodles and am satisfied but for wanting that little bit of chocolate, I can take exquisite comfort in knowing that the dark chocolate ice cream has been slowly softening, just for me, in the cutey fridge this whole time.