Instead of being conscientious I just sat and watched the rest of Macross Plus. Well, I didn't get anything done, but I suppose I kind of needed to be reminded why (and how much) I like anime. Macross Plus is nice.

A week or two ago I finally called my friend in Japan. It was nice to be reminded how much I like the place. It's hard to explain exactly how or why, but remembering puts things in perspective. One memory in particular stands out for some reason; me going from the hotel bathroom back up to my hotel room in the middle of the night after having had a bath. I remember it less as a narrative and more as a cloud of sensations (some physical, others intellectual) so I'm just going to present it as such: the surreptitious edge to the whole affair arising from your going really late so you have the bathroom to yourself (it was communal) and the faint urgency that has you careful to get the hell out of there before the staff come in for their baths; the vending machines selling beer and the thrillingly foul Pocari Sweat in the room just outside the bathroom glowing in the darkness; the visceral ecstacy of floating suspended in really hot water as 10 hours of accumulated shopping pain leaches out of your body; the hiss of the shower head on the walls as you spray it around the room in a fit of 'hey who's going to know' behaviour; the slap of your plastic slippers on the polished pebble floor; the crisp feeling of your complimentary kimono thing that you tie closed about one-and-a-half times tighter than you need to because the damn thing always seems to be coming undone and the girl at the front desk is sort of cute and wouldn't it be mortifying to lose control of the thing in front of her of all people; the taste of the litre-bottle of Asahi orange juice waiting in the room upstairs. And for some reason I remember all of this and the things here that worry me just don't seem to matter so much any more. Which is blissful.

I need to make sure I get to bed before 1am tonight because my capacity to think has been steadily declining all week as a consequence of my never managing to get to sleep before 2. It's starting to rain outside but I need to go for a quick walk because I'm feeling twitchy in that way that you do when you just haven't had enough exercise.