Universally, the best way to get over falling off a horse is to get back on.
You have smaller scale traditions too, like having to treat all your horsie friends to jalebi the day after a fall so that you remember the incident in a positive way. But that’s beside the point.
The point is, getting back on is a way to redeem yourself in your own eyes.
And while the situation I’m about to horribly segue into couldn’t be further from the topic of horse riding (I just needed an excuse to talk about horses), I found myself needing a similar sort of redemption.
Of course, I’m talking about yesterday’s McDonalds fiasco.
“Can you guess where I’m writing this blog post from? That’s right. That same McDonalds.
It’s the next day — or should I say the day after, because it’s 12:30am and I’m STILL HERE!
I planned tonight properly for a change. I found out beforehand that it was definitely going to be open overnight, and here I am now.”
You might have been wondering if the first quotation mark was a typo. You might be confused seeing that there actually was an end quote to match. Well, let me enlighten you.
Surprise, surprise. It was on purpose.
Because as much as I wish that that were the story I’d be telling today,reality had other plans.
At precisely 11:45 PM, as we sat in a carefully chosen corner of McDonald’s with our work sprawled across the table, the all-too-familiar tune of Auld Lang Syne began playing once again.
Why? We’d made sure this wouldn’t happen. Mom had even come in earlier in the day, asked a member of staff directly, and confirmed that seating was open all night. They didn’t even know why it had been closed yesterday — it was only supposed to close on Sundays (not what Google Maps said, but given our history with Google Maps, we trusted a human more). Still, they were very clear: it would be open tonight.
Well, this wasn’t the time to debug the root cause of another inexplicable mishap. This was the time to run.
And run, we did.
We packed up in record time and dashed for the train station. The last train home was at 11:57 PM, and neither of us were in the mood to repeat yesterday’s walk. We must’ve ran pretty damn hard because we made it to the platform at 11:52 PM.
Unlike last night, sticking around had been an option today. Yesterday, it was between walking home and waiting it out until morning. With limited options for shelter, we resigned early. Today, we were more informed. I had discovered the concept of internet cafés where you’d pay a modest fee in exchange for a few hours of admission, a comfortable place to sit, Wi-Fi, and even some food and drinks. It fascinated me greatly, and I had tried to convince mom to check one out before midnight. She wasn’t too into the idea though, so we hadn’t acted on it. If we’d known about this last night, it wouldn’t have been a question. But tonight we were prepared to head back home in time in case anything went wrong, and I guess mom found bed was a more appealing option then a net café cubicle.
Even if that weren’t the case, mom was actually (surprisingly) willing to walk yesterday’s route again. She’d walked the same route twice earlier in the day too (I was home working for most of the day and she’d come out to Kawasaki and back during that time) and realizing it wasn’t that big an ordeal, she suggested hanging out in Donki for a bit.
The wise decision though was not to forgo the last train that we were standing on the platform in anticipation of. We successfully traveled to Rokugoudate.
Mom clearly wasn’t in the mood to go straight home, and luckily we found a Lawson that apparently had seating a 4min walk away from home. It was a promising prospect until we arrived and learned that, despite being a 24-hour store, the café closed at 8:00 PM. In hindsight, this made sense given our experience at Natural Lawson yesterday, but I hadn’t connected the dots that all Lawson cafés might have similar hours.
We stumbled upon another large food market open until 1:00 AM and stopped by there for a while instead. We were a lot more comfortable out at this time knowing that we were at least close to home. And soon enough, we were home.
While my original idea of redemption was successfully spending a full night studying at McDonalds, I can’t discredit today’s smaller victory entirely.
The same thing had happened again — McDonald’s had closed on us — but this time, we handled it much better. First, we had done our due diligence to confirm it would be open, unlike yesterday. And when that information turned out to be wrong, we reacted quickly and avoided getting stranded.
To celebrate this small victory, we finished the last 30 minutes of My Neighbor Totoro, a movie we had started watching in Utsunomiya but hadn’t yet gotten a chance to complete.
Mom, having had a much longer day than I, only made a few phone calls home before dozing off. I studied until early morning — not in the setting I had envisioned, but still fairly productively. I’d still prefer studying out somewhere, and I’m adamant about trying an internet café at some point. I now need redemption for two failed study nights out. But given the series of events we’ve just been through, maybe the smarter move, for the next couple of days at least, is to return to a normal sleep schedule and study during the day like normal people.
No more deliberate daytime napping in preparation for all-nighters. No more cutting it close with the last train home. A little normalcy for a while might not be such a bad thing.