The Bad, Bad Massage

I decided to finally splurge and get a massage in Palolem, the beach town Summer and I stayed in for ten days in Goa, India. And by splurge I mean pay $24. A virtual fortune here, but a price I would be over-the-moon-excited to pay in the US.

Taking very seriously a warning for women to hire only a female therapist in India, I reminded the man who scheduled my appointment. Twice. And then he followed me into the room and told me to take off my clothes. Three times. While he stood there, staring at me. 'Are you my therapist?' I asked him. He said 'Yes!' and I said again, 'No. I want a woman.'

Dejected, he left and a woman came in. She stood there watching while I stripped down to just my underwear. Oh well. Then she had me sit in a chair. This was uncomfortable for me, but I went with it: boobs hanging out, thighs looking squashed and fat sitting in a chair while she karate chopped my shoulders, neck and head for three minutes. Then she poured three handfuls of oil into my hair and rubbed it around. Not into my scalp, mind you. Just into my hair.

Poke! Poke! She jabbed my eyebrows. She made two small circles at my temples for an inordinate amount of time. Abruptly, I was instructed to lay on the table, face down.

What happened next I can only describe as the worst massage I have ever received. And I've had hundreds of massages. This woman karate chopped, pinched and applied oil to my entire body and especially my underwear for an hour in rapid, erratic sweeping motions. Foot-leg-underwear-back-shoulder-back-down-to-foot-never-missing-getting-hung-up-by-pesky-underwear-in-lightning-speed. Only once did she slow down to focus on any particular part of my body, and thankfully it was my calves, which were screaming from running barefoot on the beach all week.

I didn't miss the fact that she did not even rub my back when it was time for me to flip over to have oil applied speedily to my front side. And by front side I mean boobs. She rubbed my boobs for twenty minutes. And not in a good way. Swoosh-swoosh-quick-quick-make-an-awkward-circle-on-stomach-pour-oil-into-belly-button-more-more-more-oil-rubbed-into-underwear-boobs-boobs-boobs-and-don't-forget-snap!-every-finger-and-toe-twice-or-three-times-back-to-boobs-more-boobs.

The massage ended with her hands on my face and a whole new kind of oil applied, more of a cream actually. She did it this way: one hand on forehead and one hand on chin. Switch hands. Switch switch switch switch for ten minutes. With six pounds of cream in my mouth I couldn't breathe, much less ask her to please stop.

When it was all over, she handed me a towel that was not washed between customers and watched as I tried to swab the oil from my skin unsuccessfully. I put my clothes back on and paid without looking her in the eye or tipping. I went back to my hotel and showered for twenty minutes, soaping up multiple times and never seeing even the slightest bit of lather. The water sat on top of my skin and beaded up as I shampooed, rinsed and repeated over and over. Even after a second day shampoo, I'm still Grease McGoo carrying a backpack seven pounds too heavy from my poor underwear, sodden with oil.

Don't believe me? Here's the evidence: my laundry bag, with the underwear inside.

 

Though she wasn't "happy" to hear about it, Summer appreciated knowing that this bad foreign massage curse wasn't exclusive to her anymore.

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Kady and the Chiropractor

I have mentioned that even though my dad had five daughters, he really was kind of a prude.  In that you didn't say the word period around him.  And you certainly didn't talk or joke about inappropriate subjects.  Why, just the other day I saw a dog with big huge testicles running in front of the car, and I said, "DAD!  Did you see the BALLS on that dog?"  He replied, "KADY!  Don't say the B WORD."

Anyway, that's a little background to hopefully make the following story even more hilarious.  When I was about 17, I was rubbing my dad's back, walking on it to try to crack it, (family stuff), I pushed on it...nothing.  I wasn't getting the crack he wanted.  So I told him,  "Dad, flip over.  I'll try something my chiropractor does for me."

So he laboriously and painfully rolled over onto his back, hopeful for the new and exciting treatment straight from the professionals.  Then I said, "he doesn't really crack anything...but he says it helps".  And then I started rubbing his boobs.  Grotesquely. 

For just a millisecond, I could see in his eyes that he was ready to kill a man.

"I'll kill ya."

I Wouldn't Want to Hurt His Feelings, Vol. 3

When I lived with my sister in Oregon, she had an older gentleman co-worker whom I called "Habib". This was incredibly racist yet also incredibly innocent on my part. In my defense, his real name was "Hussein" and, being that it was 1995 for some reason I couldn't remember/slash/didn't want to call him that. He took a shining to us because we were young and alone in the big city and perhaps he felt he needed to father us. He was constantly cooking us dinner and dropping it on our doorstep and we'd come home to a yummy casserole. I digress.

Hussein considered himself to be somewhat of an expert massage therapist and one afternoon I considered myself to be quite in need of one. I was fresh out of massage school, and very used to trading massage with whomever felt like ponying up their end of the bargain. I set up the living room floor with pillows, went into my room, disrobed and wrapped up in a towel. Hussein massaged my back and it felt pretty good. It felt. Normal.

Until he started massaging my legs. He started with both hands on one side of my right knee and in a very normal massage-therapist-action, he moved them up towards my butt. Only he didn't stop where massage-therapists-normally-stop. In fact he bumped into the side of my no-no-special place. My eyes opened wide. Surely there had been some sort of mistake. Close eyes. Bump. Open eyes. He wasn't being creepy...Bump. No. It couldn't possibly...Bump. Bump. Bump. Then he moved on. As if nothing had happened.

Did I scream for my sister, working there at the kitchen table? Did I *cough* (the universal sign for "stop doing that")? Did I tell him what he was doing was making me uncomfortable?  

NO! I wouldn't want to hurt his feelings!

We moved to Minnesota three days later.

I Wouldn't Want to Hurt His Feelings...

I don't really know how I get myself into these situations. And yet, they happen all the time. Take one night last summer for instance: I'm bartending at the Lodge in Northern Minnesota, sitting on a barstool, and some strange man is opposite me, rubbing lotion onto my stinky waitress foot, cradling it too near his crotch. It all started innocently enough, of course, earlier that evening:

I'm returning to the bar from outside on the deck. I have dirty dishes in hand, and need help getting the door open...which interrupts one male customer from bear-hug-cracking the back of another male customer. I decide against making a "that looks a little fishy" joke. Later, I find out the crack-ee is a doctor and I mistakenly assume the crack-er is a chiropractor. Nope. Massage therapist. One of the screwy kinds. I know this because four minutes later he's telling me that he has diagnosed cancers. Fast forward to me standing behind the bar. He's belly up. I'm serving him beers and he motions for my hand. He rubs it. It feels just OK. Nothing earth shattering. In an attempt to involve all of my customers in conversation, I decide to play “how old am I?", my favorite game because people are too nice to guess anything near my real age and I always win. (This may also be because I haven’t yet learned to dress my age.) He looks at my hand, rubs it some more, looks into my eyes, and guesses one year older than I am. The hands don't lie. Harumph. He asks me to take off my "mood ring".

NOW LET ME BREAK FROM THE STORY REAL QUICK-LIKE TO TELL YOU THIS RING THING IS A SORE SPOT WITH ME. Dude, you’ve already put me at 34, and now you’re calling my ring a mood ring? It’s not a mood ring. Who over the age of fourteen wears a mood ring? The stupid thing happens to have cost me $120. A virtual fortune for me, an unemployed person. I picked it up in Australia under duress. My travel companion was buying a wheelbarrow full of jewelry at this adorable boutique and I felt as if I too deserved a bauble. My one concern was that I wasn’t sure if it looked like it cost $120. If I'm going to spend that kind of money on a piece of jewelry I want it to LOOK expensive. The friend I was with assured me that it did, and so I bought it. A few weeks later I flew to New Zealand and accidentally left it behind in Melbourne. My hosts mailed it to my new address in New Zealand. On the envelope, the post office asked the sender to list the value of the goods enclosed, where "$20" had been scribbled in. Blurg.

BACK TO STORY. Now to add insult to injury this dude calls it a dern mood ring. I blow him off and decide I’ll forgive him since he’s totally massaging my bartending, 34-year-old hand. He asks if I can feel the warmth as his hand hovers close to mine, but doesn't touch it. I ask him what vibes I am sending him. He says, "oh it's not about what you're sending me, it's about what I'm giving to you." I feel nothing.

A few minutes later he's rubbing my neck and shoulders, which somehow leads to him asking about my feet. I can tell so much from a person's feet, he says. (Show me one waitress who would say no to that.) It's only as he's spreading the lotion on my foot, and his eyes are closed, lips pursed and head raised up to the ceiling that I wonder if I've made a wise decision. Still, I don’t know how to stop this crazy train and instead I ride it all the way to the same outside bear-hug-crack situation in which he had the doctor previously. It’s not until mid-crack, when he whispers in my ear that he's a little clairvoyant and he's sensing that I'm having problems with my brother that I realize that sometimes I let people get a little too close. Do I tell him I think he's full of crap? NO! I wouldn't want to hurt his feelings!

p.s. the guy looked like the guy with the cane above 

Life is Very Difficult

Sometimes the Japanese Reflexologist pokes really hard

The Massage

I’m leaving for Thailand, the land of the $10 full body massage. Why spend $110 NZ on an hour in a tourist town like Rotorua? I was sick. I was sore. And I hadn't had a massage in months.


Across the street from our hotel was a massage center, boasting the AIX Massage, (ironically pronounced "aches”.) It's the only one of its kind in the whole world. While you're being massaged, thermally heated naturally occuring mineral water is sprayed onto your entire body using a contraption made up of eight shower heads.

I waited in the lobby. Down the hall, a customer was walking toward me wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. He was putting on a robe. Mmmmmm…I was feeling relaxed already. I took my seat in the lobby to wait for my appointment. Then, the man in the robe walked into the lobby and introduced himself to me as my therapist. Eek.

He showed me to the changing room, where I undressed, threw on a towel, and then met him in the AIX shower table room.

He started the water, and had me get up onto the table, face-down,my towel still in place. He pulled the shower heads just over the table so that they sprayed my back, butt, and legs. It felt so amazing -- I wondered why I hadn't invented laying down in the shower. He explained that he was going to remove my towel. According to the brochure, all therapists are trained in "towel placement", so there was no reason to fear exposure. I assured myself of this, yet I felt the surest sensation that I was completely naked. Later I was able to discern “towel placement” as he continually adjusted my towel thong by pulling it tight up into my butt.

Working feverishly, he rubbed oil into my calves and hamstrings. It felt SOOOO good. Add to that the pounding of the water into my back and I was in heaven. He asked if it would be OK to work my gluteous muscle, in order to loosen up my hamstrings. As he said the names of the muscles his hand touched them. "Go for it," I said. I've had a thousand massages. I'm even certified to perform them. With an elbow in my glute, he grabbed the corresponding foot in his other hand. He then began rotating my foot, which caused sharp pains to shoot through my hip. "Just relax", he said, and I tried to figure out what had betrayed me. He couldn't see my face, my hands weren't clenched...but I couldn't say the same for my butt cheeks.

"That's tight," he said, and for a moment I forgot myself and took it as a compliment.

I really don't know how he got me flipped over without seeing all of my body parts, but he did. You may be familiar with the massage phenomenon where your sinuses drain when laying on your stomach. Moreso when you’re totally sick. With all of the water spraying everywhere I didn’t notice it until I was rolling onto my back, when a huge chunk of snot stretched from my nose to the towel. I wasn’t able to ‘get it’ properly without him noticing, and so it stayed there and I prayed that he just wouldn’t look at my face. Mercifully, he announced that he “didn’t want me to drown”, and put a towel onto my face.

The massage continued. And continued. I don’t know how, but this one hour massage felt like three hours. I felt drugged. Drunk with relaxation. Mr. Massage, ‘man-in-towel’ had to lift me off of the table.

Sleepovers and Saturday mornings

So after the soap making party I was saying goodbye to my friend Krista and then I was like, "see you tomorrow at 12:30" because she was coming back to get a massage from Nancy the next afternoon, and then I was like, "Hey! Just sleep over, duh!" And so she did. And so I'm really really sick I slept in until 11am, and then she woke me up and she said that she couldn't wait anymore to eat and that she had already walked to the store and Caribou and would I like some breakfast? And I came downstairs to find my Caribou coffee all warm, (because she had put a towel all around it to keep it warm) and then she made me HUEVOS. RANCHEROS. She baked some potato wedges, cooked some black beans, had fresh yummy guacamole and eggs over easy with cilantro on top. YUM!!! YUM!!! I love sleepovers and I love my friends and this was the best morning ever.

Check it out!




Oh, and then Nancy came and did 5 massages!

p.s. if you're wondering what I look like after a massage...


and that is a cold sore under my nose if you're wondering. part of me being SO SICK. Nancy gave me some toilet paper and I shoved it up my nose during the massage to catch all the dripping, and then I had a couple coughing spells and she said no wonder my back is sore, all of the muscles tensed right up for the coughing.

Massage day

Nancy came over on Saturday and did massages for a buncha people including me and we cooked a whole chicken (see prior post) and made a puzzle and knitted and drank wine. I know the picture makes it look like I was all alone but there really were people here. Those are Beata's feet!

Then Nancy stayed over night and I coughed and coughed all night and she brought me breakfast in bed and did all the dishes. I haven't left the house all day and I hope I'm feeling better. I tried to get all the broth out of the crock pot that cooked all night but it's really messy and I'm so sick I ended up just getting all the chicken goo and bones out and throwing the liquid in the fridge to separate and hopefully I can make soup tomorrow. I'm so sick. But I did watch Wednesday night's Lost episode on the Internet and I put three dishes from my bedroom onto the kitchen counter. Baby steps.

The end.

Hey Jude

So here's the third cutest boy in the whole world taking over a recent get-together at my place where he was the only male in attendance.

Tellin' stories. All beginning with, "Guess What?"

Some Jude-isms:

Nancy was giving us all massages and I came down the stairs with CRAZY MASSAGE hair. Jude had to hang out with me lookin' like that. He goes, "You know how you can fix your hair? Just brush it. Really quick."

And then I made us some salads and he didn't want mushrooms. He explained that he didn't trust mushrooms because anybody at the store could switch them with the poison kind of mushrooms and he didn't want to get poisoned. I said he was smart to be skeptical.

Then he said, "I know my mom would never poison me."

Later on we played Would You Rather?

He asked me if I would rather be a Burp or a Fart? Naturally I said a Burp, because then I only had to be in a mouth and not a butt. Then he asked me if I would rather work on a pottery wheel or sell Tupperware? I was like what? But thought the pottery wheel job sounded more interesting. And then he asked, would I rather be a billion human farts or a thousand elephant farts. I didn't know how to answer that one. I said a thousand elephant farts because I can't really count to a billion and that would feel horrible.

Back to massage stories

So I used to have a client who was around 400 pounds. She came in every week and her insurance was paying for her therapies so after all was said and done, I got approximately $7 per hour to massage her, and it waren't easy. But that's beside the point.

Well she was also the patient of the doctor and one day he had to say something to her and so he knocked on the door of my massage room.

I said, "come in" before I even thought about it and he opened the door. I was relieved because she could have been like exposed or something but thank goodness she was not.

So he said his piece and then left. But I didn't leave it alone. I said to the lady "WELL AT LEAST YOU DIDN'T HAVE YOUR BIG OL'..." and then I stopped talking. And we finished the rest of the hour in awkward silence.

Old Massage Stories

Thinking about that robe got me thinking about all kinds of awesome embarrassing massage stories.

For example, one of my obsessions in life is blackheads. I have often been accused of not paying attention to someone, because I am actually staring at their blackheads and dreaming of extracting them. I spend about 15 minutes in the mirror every morning and every night pinching everything on my face. I pinch the backs of my arms whenever I am sitting down, like at work or at meetings. So it was a natural career choice for me to go into massage.

I had lots of older clients who had awesome monster blackheads on their backs and using massage oil, I could usually ease the stuff out without anybody being the wiser. This is disgusting and embarrassing to admit, but I would sometimes put the awesome extractions on my little massage shelf so I could look at them later. ICK I am so gross!

Anyway, one day I had a client who just so happened to be the Chief of the Fort Frances tribe of Native Americans. He had a huge rock lump volcano crusty black head on his right shoulder. I massaged it, and massaged it. It was nowhere near a muscle. I must have worked on it for quite some time, because pretty soon the Chief goes, "What? Do I have a blackhead?"

I was mortified. No one had ever busted me before this! I recoiled in horror. And all I could muster in response was, "What's a blackhead?"

Robe?

This embarrassing story just popped into my head today:

When I was in high school I worked at the local chiropractor's office as a massage therapist. I had some really nice clients from Indiana who had a cabin in Canada. The woman had severe fibromyalgia and came to see me for two-hour sessions a couple of times per week. Her husband also came in for ear candling appointments. They were so cool, and I loved them. Great clients. Anyways, the woman asked me if I would please get a robe for the massage room, in case she ever needed to use the restroom and didn't want to completely get dressed. She could just throw the robe on and walk over to the restroom. So, I went to KMart and purchased something similar to this:

Why in the heck did I buy that thing? It goes over the head, is unflattering, and is not a robe at all. One would find it easier to get dressed in their clothes than to try to wrestle this ugly thing on. Every time I think of this story, I get incredibly embarrassed. And I think of it often.

If I only had a time machine...

Massage

I got a massage from a nice lady in her home. She was excellent. But, I realized that I must do something about these fat thighs. Why is it that every time I get a massage, I forget to unstick my thighs from eachother, and so the therapist has to unstick them for me? Mental note: unstick fat thighs from each other at all future massage therapy sessions.

Hectic!