Published Dec 23, 2006
In our last episode, it was revealed that our hero had a very very sore shoulder. Well, insofar as it’s the holidays, and I’m with my family, and they’re footing the bill, and we’re staying at a hotel with an attached spa, I thought I’d get a massage. Because, as we learned in Thailand, massages fix things.
So I booked myself a massage appointment (only had to wait two days for it) and walked about 300 feet to the Trellis Spa next door. The smell of eucalyptus and soothing South Asian-inspired instrumental music greeted me, and I was soon ensconced in a deep chair with some (too-citrusy) spa water. Now, most everyone knows that doing nothing is acutally beyond relaxed, it’s boring — my normal state is doing two things at once so mellow is just doing one thing, and that not very hard. So, after a second of sipping, I whipped out the ol’ Treo and began to play games on it. That held me for ten minutes until a nice woman took me into a small room and had me take off my clothes.
About 2/3 of my hour massage were spent on my shoulder. My masseuse said that, in the ten years she’d been massaging, this was the worst shoulder she’d ever encountered. I’m sure that was part upsell but the pain in my back told me it wasn’t all marketing. I got hot towels, elbows, pressure points, various infused oils — nothing would break my shoulder up.
Sitting here now, it’s kind of funny — I can reach behind myself and touch my back, and the right side is normal and relaxed, while the left is all hard as a rock from the bottom rib up. And this is after my massage, which I would count as good, but not better than the nice old Thai lady who was trained at the Thai Royal Massage School. I think I need me another one of those. Otherwise it’ll just be me and this back against the coach class seats in Continental. Ain’t that Christmasy?