Picture a Day - Day 239

I've been carrying on this whole vacation recap acting as though we were both toiling beneath 30 tons of boxes and then dropped it all (preferably not on our feet) to drive across the country to be brow beaten into wedding submission. And while we were very busy doing no fun things for just about all of it about mid way through Wednesday we finally had our mini vacation.

We both got a massage. And it wasn't just any old massage, it was our first professional at a salon massage.

I have been a bit hesitant to try going to get a fancy massage my whole life because I have a small tickling problem. While normal people titter and guffaw at the light touches it's when I'm poked hard in the back that I break out into the uncontrollable giggles.

How would some woman feel if I convulsed from laughter and curled into a ball the entire time she was trying to get me to relax?

But after all the mounds of stress we've both been under, I figured I could just stick a bullet in my mouth and stifle all the laughs and giggles. It was about the only hope my poor back had to getting back into some sort of normal human shape (I was one giant club away from giving those Geico spokesmen a run for their money). After you purchase a house they should really write like a 10% off coupon to a local spa into the contract. Or spas should become mortgage loan office chasers, pouncing on all those poor souls who have just had the home loan machine run them over, back up over them, pull a few donuts and then speed off into the night.

So at about 3 in the afternoon my husband and I headed south to the spa. We checked in with the receptionist and were given a very strange form. "Have you ever had a heart attack?" No. "Have you ever had a headache?" Well yes, who hasn't? I don't have one now but . . . "Do you realize that this is not a sexual massage?" WHAT? I sure hope not, I mean my husband will be right there and it'd be more than a little creepy.

And so on and so on. I'm really not kidding, we were asked every single one of those questions before we could go on and a ton more that I am forgetting (I think there was something about your skin care).

We must have passed (I highly doubt the receptionists even looked at them, ah the world of sue happy lawyers) because our masseuses appeared and lead us back to our waiting room. Only I had to make a small detour to the bathroom.

I have a small question. If you're going to build a spa bathroom (which is what everyone at home wants apparently) and you have the space of a small living room, why would you only put in one stall? It makes it very creepy to have a masseuse waiting outside the door for you, while you're just waiting around inside peaking at the huge three showers and twiddling your thumbs because someone seems to have set up camp in the one stall in a 150 sq ft bathroom.

Eventually I made it out and back to my babysitter, I mean masseuse, and found the room where my husband was waited patiently. We were both told to get as naked as we wanted and they'd knock when they'd come back in.

Being first timers and not wanting to wear out any more of our welcome we did as we were told. We just took off our clothes and sat around on the benches talking.

If anyone else has had one of these fancy schmangle salon massages you may have noticed that we were never told an important step. Apparently all those blankets on the table, you get under them. Then they come back inside.

After some quick scrambling while the massagers turned all kinds of fun shades of red we buried ourselves under three layers of blankets (I guess they're afraid it might get a little cold in there). The lights came down, the weird music started up, and here came the massage.I think at this point I was supposed to reach several levels of nirvana, and something something something. But I couldn't get over the music. It sounded exactly like the opening to "You can't always get what you want." I kept on edge waiting for a creepy kids choir to breathily tell me that things in life are not guaranteed but you may get what you need oh and could I help them get a better gig than a Stones song?

When that became a bit to repetitive (anything more than 5 minutes is 4 minutes too long for a pseudo Stones song) I played a little game, Where is the masseuse going next? They were both obviously following some set pattern passed down from the era of Beowulf who gently kneaded Grendel's arm (he was not fully qualified so there was a bit of an accident, but hardly anyone remembers it anymore).

First the left leg and foot, then the right. Getting tired of legs and all the little excitement they can provide, time to move onto the back. Push down on that using a few gallons of oil (mental note look into eel massages, gotta be the next big thing as the come pre slicked) for a while. Flip over. Move onto the left arm, then the right and finish with shoulders.

And my guessing game and figuring out the symmetry meant I was waiting to help her by holding up an arm or shifting a leg before she was ready. Do not ever try to be helpful when you are supposed to be relaxing, it seems to cause an undue amount of stress for your masseuse. Maybe I should have tipped her a massage.

When we were done, my husband and I crawled out from under the blankets and somehow pulled on all our clothes without touching a thing with our Crisco covered bodies. I felt ready to slip through the duct work or compete in a body building competition, my body was one big oil slick.

Like the puppies at a few weeks old my husband and I weaved and bobbled our way through the front and out of the spa our muscles deciding that they were still on vacation. For the next few hours we felt like a pair of drunks that stumbled into an olive oil factory and thought it might be fun to take a swim in one of the vats.

The rest of our pseudo vacation was not quite as exciting, we did what we must do on every vacation and bought something Halloween related and then had Indian food. I imagine that even if we traveled to some remote mountain cabin we'd still find some little store selling a cute skeleton and then a curry place down the road.

Now we know exactly what to do if we ever go back (hopefully there won't be any more home purchases in our near future) and aside from a small giggle when my shoulders were getting worked on I managed to go the entire hour without breaking into a fit of laughter.

Has anyone else ever had one of them fancy salon spa massages? I'm still trying to figure out how they're supposed to be romantic when you come out gooey and bumbling but maybe that's the cultures approach to romance.