The last time I got a massage in 2023, I was fighting a daily losing battle with chronic neck and shoulder pain that sometimes progressed to the point where my elbow would lock up and I would have to call into work because I couldn’t get a shirt on or off. The massages were nice, but they weren’t fixing anything, and that’s the point where I decided that since being nice wasn’t working I was going to show my body who was boss by picking up strength training.

So now my chronic neck and shoulder pain is gone but everything else on my body hurts, and when I walked past the massage place two days ago, I thought, “fuck it, why not.”

Which is how I ended up face, a woman digging her elbow into my glutes, saying, “This is okay for today, but we’re really going to need to work on getting you more relaxed in the next few sessions.”

Here’s the thing: I have been gainfully unemployed the last month and a half. I have slept more in April and May than I have in years, both at night and in the form of a mythical thing called a nap. I have gone on little adventures by myself, read a bunch of books, binge watched some TV shows, built houses for my pocket monsters in Pokopia, and scammed my friends into a half dozen sidequests. I have watched three seasons of Alone, and even though nobody has been eaten by a bear (yet), I live in eternal hope. This is the most stress free I am ever going to be.

Lady, I did not have the heart to tell the massage therapist, this is the most relaxed I have been in the last four years. Things are not going to improve.

And then I came home and made Emily come over and install a bidet, an activity that contorted our bodies in such a way that any progress that was achieved in the massage has been immediately obviated. Fair to say that when I suck it up and visit again, I am going to be getting another bad grade in massage.