When I left my boring desk job nearly two years ago to move to Japan, I immediately made it a goal to never hold a full-time office job again. Now, as I am starting to ponder Life After Japan, I feel it is important to remind myself again how depressing and mind-numbing it is to be locked inside eight hours a day, five days a week. So I dug out the following, a writing exercise I did for a workshop three years ago. We had to write about five minutes of our daily lives, any five minutes. I chose to write about the five minutes I spent every morning getting from my car to the front door of my office, the last five minutes of freedom I had every day. (We were also randomly assigned first/second/third person and singular/plural, which is how I ended up writing from the "we" point of view.)

If this is interesting to you, I recommend trying it for yourself. It's like a written snapshot of a certain time in your life; rereading this has inspired me to write another about my current life. And if you do write your own, please share!

We turn the key that kills the engine, but not all the way; the CD player is still on. Stop button: beep. Turn off the little white transmitter that broadcasts the signal from the CD player to the car stereo – don’t worry, the science of it doesn’t make sense to us either. Static blares loud from the station in between stations, so we twist the knob all the way to the left, then turn the key completely and take it out. Keys into pocket, so we don’t forget. If there’s no pocket, we tuck them into one of the many bags we carry.

Plastic handle of tin lunchbox goes into our hand, unless it is a day that we have brought something in a large container that does not fit in the lunchbox, in which case twine handle of the wider lunch bag goes over our wrist instead. Cell phone is pulled from its little cubby and the tiny button is pressed off: boop. Then into the cozy that we crocheted and into the purse that we chose to carry today.

Open the door. We struggle with the two or more bags and feel ridiculous and wonder if anyone sitting near the windows can see us. The sky is gorgeous – bright and swept clean – and the air is fresh and good, so we breathe in deeply because this is it until 6 PM. The plants that line the brick walkway up to the double glass doors have been watered; they sparkle in the morning sun. There is always at least one squinty old guy lurking by the ashtray just outside the building, staring at our kneesocks or ass.

We dislike the people who push the handicapped button in order to open the double doors automatically, so we never use the button on principle, even though some days it would really come in handy. We wipe our feet on the rubber-backed carpet. We adjust our eyes to the silvery fluorescent lights. We sigh, not on purpose.

This is it.