The Main Attraction hr589

On the first day of my latest trip, I checked in the hotel after I left the shopping mall. The room had a big window looking out on Tokyo Bay. A night view of the jet-black sea and glittering skyscrapers of stylish condominiums was spread on it. Onto the gorgeous glass table, I laid out packs of deli foods that had a sticker telling ‘Half Price’ on each lid that I’d gotten at the grocery store in the mall. My chief delight of a trip is to enjoy drinking in a hotel room. I usually get food outside the hotel and bring a small plastic bottle that I refill with cheap brandy beforehand at home. Compared to the room service, the cost is digits lower in this way although the place to have it is the same. It feels like I order room service of a space as an elegant cocktail lounge by staying at a hotel instead of drinks and foods. Since I bring cheap liquor and snacks, I can enjoy drinking in a quiet, luxurious setting without worries of the bill or the closing time, which is somehow my main purpose of a trip. I was nibbling on half-off seafood looking out the view that I couldn’t possibly see out of my apartment window and wished this moment would last forever. Although I had feared the hotel might be crammed with Chinese tourists because of the Lunar New Year, it wasn’t the case here and I didn’t see many of them. But as the way the world goes, hotels are never quiet enough to sleep in well. I woke up next morning by noises from neighboring rooms without sleeping tight. Quite a few hotels stand together in this area and I walked to the different hotel for lunch. A restaurant in that hotel has a lunch buffet that is reasonably priced and served in a chic atmosphere. About 95 percent of the customers are women and the place is always full. I had no trouble to get a table though, as I had made an online reservation that gave me a discount. I enjoyed as much roasted beef and dessert as I wanted that was too expensive to have in my daily life. Then I moved to a nearby outlet mall. Because my apartment is about to be burst with cheap clothes already, I just strolled around as a window shopper. But when I found a bracelet at $5 that was marked down from $30, I couldn’t help jumping at it. I was staying at the same hotel that night, which meant my favorite drinking time would come again. I got a plastic bottle of wine at $4 and, as I was still more than full from the lunch buffet, some salad and light snacks for dinner at a convenience store and walked back to the hotel. Before going back to my room, I had an important thing to do – using the hotel’s premium member lounge as a nonmember, again. I repeated the extravaganza of the previous day there, having expensive coffee and tea for free as much as I liked. I didn’t know why free drinks tasted especially good, but I knew for sure that I was the one who made the most of the free use of the lounge as this hotel’s off-season promotion. It was early evening and there was still time until I opened my cost efficient bar by myself in my room. So I went to the fitness club of this hotel for the first time. The club requires an outrageously expensive membership fee and normally I just do nothing but ignoring its existence. Only, this off-season promotion stay came with preferential treatment at no extra cost that included the free use of the club. I was curious what an astronomically expensive fitness club looked like. As I walked through a glass corridor leading up to the club, I saw the whole new world unfold before my eyes. I had cherished drinking in a hotel room as the main attraction of a trip for years till then. Yet the experience I was about to have in this fitness club overturned and changed everything so easily…

Genetic Parsimony from Atavism hr571

I was brought up by my grandparents who led an extremely saving life. Although we were well off and lived in a big house back then, most lights were kept off to save the electric bill and the house was always dark. Turning on the TV was available by my grandfather’s daring permission. We would eat dinner in the poor light under a small kitchen fixture. My family had farmed in those days and what we ate were vegetables we grew in our fields. We grew some kinds for our family’s use, but most vegetables on our table were what were too damaged to be sold in the market. We ate eggplants almost every day in summer and spinach in winter. Meat seldom appeared and we lived like vegetarians. Protein was supplied mainly by beans from our fields. We kept hens that brought us eggs. Sometimes my grandmother got cheap fish at a nearby mom-and-pop store and grilled it that seemed to have more small bones than flesh. Every meal was bland and tasted terrible, as my grandmother saved seasoning. Snacks were hopeless too. Since my grandparents had tried not to waste money on them, we had only few snacks of Japanese style cookies that occasional visitors brought as gifts. They were damp and limp because we kept them as long as we could. I usually didn’t have any appetite and was thin probably owing to that eating habit. When I visited a relative’s house and ate there once in a while, everything on their table looked gorgeous. In that case, I devoured and called the house a restaurant. My relatives would wonder and ask me what I ate at home while they were watching perplexedly the way I was eating their regular meals. My grandmother spent most of her spare time sewing and mending something. She mended holes in socks and patched futons so that we could use them for a long time. I had never seen her get new clothes and she wore an old kimono every day. Her scarce cosmetics were the cheapest ones on the market. My grandfather went out by using a senior citizen’s pass for a free ride of public transportation, wearing an ancient drooping jacket and shoes with a hole. Whenever he ate out, he brought back the leftovers in a doggy bag. As a child, it was a mystery to me why they lived like that although they had plenty of money. I hated it and longed for a better life. Then I grew up and got to live in the way I liked. And now I find myself mending tirelessly my tattered socks. I’m not rich, but not that I can’t afford new ones. I replace elastic at the waist of pants, turn off the lights in my apartment as much as I can, buy and eat old food that is half price, ask for a doggy bag, and find free samples for my cosmetics. I think it’s not about saving money. I simply hate wasting. Not just money, but anything. If we waste time continuously, we will end up wasting our whole life. When I avoid wasting something successfully, I feel like I’m smart and that feeling brings me joy. I imagine my grandparents thought the same way. I gradually don’t loathe being stingy myself while I’m duly aware that someone notices and sneers at mended marks on my socks…