Breaking Up Chronic Patterns of Tension

This weekend I went with Mom to one of the many local spas and got a deep tissue massage. (As if you didn’t hate Little Ms Sits-around-the-house enough already.) Well, turns out, it’s not as wonderful as it sounds. I’m not completely clueless, I knew there would be pain involved. Though I was a little surprised when the petite massage therapist caused pain I would categorize as being somewhere between excruciating and torture.

It seems that this might be just the information extraction method that the Bush administration is searching for. (Not that I could have said anything with an elbow shoved under my shoulder blade.) The logic being, that if it’s something people in the U.S. pay $95 to have done to them, it couldn’t possible be a human rights violation. Why, adding such amenities as Bikini Waxes and Colon Hydrotherapy, could turn Abu Ghraib into the Club Med of prison camps, and would surely quell all of that inconvenient clamoring about torture and illegal detention.

I was the one who suggested deep tissue massage, instead of our normal Swedish massage, so I was a worried that Mom had suffered similarly. I walked into the waiting room to find her a little too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But she was apparently ready for more, and already talking about our next trip to the spa. When the massage therapist was done I felt drunk, and was glad that Mom was driving home, because I can barely handle driving under normal conditions. It also made me wonder if the power of massage to rid the body of toxins wasn’t complete bunkum, and if I’d had a little too much fun over the holidays.

The next day I was sore, as I kind of expected. But yesterday the soreness turned into a stabbing pain in my neck. So I’m writing this with an ice pack wedged under my head, and if I’m not in a dreadful enough mood because of that, I’m also having problems getting the Putrid Properties Warranty Service to fess up and fix my cracked tub. And our lot is so not graded properly! I think I might reward them with an all-expenses paid trip to that hot new vacation spot located a mere 20 miles outside of Baghdad.