Emchap's Shit from the Internet 07/7/21 🍠
When I was 22, I went to a career conference in Miami because it was being thrown by a woman whose blog posts about work and life (most famously Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Should Work More) were hugely influential on baby-me’s approach to employment. It was important in a variety of ways (not least because in attending that time and a few others, I met a huge portion of the dope-ass people who became core to my social life in New York and elsewhere), but one of the big ones was exposing me to women who were a few to several years older who had their shit tremendously together. I was still living in Atlanta at the time and would be for another two years, all of the women there seemed sleek and terrifying, and I could not imagine a life in which I had even a portion of the gravitas of many of them. (My boss told me the other day that I’m intimidating, so I suspect this has ceased to be a problem and I can now carry on the circle of unintentionally terrifying 22-year-olds.)
A huge portion of the conference’s focus was on lifestyle design and ruthlessly pursuing what seems like an elegant life for you. At some point, there was an exercise in which we went around saying what our answers to that question were. I no longer remember what mine was, but I do remember a woman there who said that for her it would be the ability to get monthly massages. I remember thinking that that seemed dope as hell and also an unfathomable luxury.
This sprang to mind as I was getting a massage over the July 4th holiday. It was a combo Thai-Swedish massage—Swedish being the option most folks are used to in the US, Thai involving a bunch of assisted stretching and having your spine walked on, and Thai-Swedish basically I think being a way for people to indicate they want to have their backs stepped on but they are also weak and fear pain. As was expected, a very nice woman who was half my size dug her entire elbows into my vertebrae and it wasn’t soothing but it did feel productive.
At the Thai massage places I’ve been in LA, it seems to be pretty standard for you to be unclothed except for your underwear and covered in a sheet when you’re being worked on. This is pretty similar to my experience with Swedish massage, and hasn’t ever been a surprise. The part of you being worked on is uncovered and then re-covered when they move on; with Thai massage in particular they often keep you covered even when working on a particular limb because they’re stepping on you, and nobody wants feet directly on their skin. (This place had a fun twist where they also gave me Thai fisherman pants to put on, either for ~vibes~ to to make it very clear that this isn’t a sex thing. Either way: fun! Now I know how they work!)
What was more surprising, though, was that at this place the woman who was working on me kept either the back of my head or the front of my face covered with a towel the entire time. I think this is just because it’s sort of upsetting to be stared at when you’re stepping on someone (valid) and I didn’t mind it, but as I stared into the towel while my legs were being very carefully stepped on, I realized that the massage therapist had basically just done to me what a Saudi prince would do to a falcon he’s stuck on an airplane. Thinking about how if the woman fell off both she and I would be injured is distressing—it’s also much, much harder to do if all I can witness is vague moving shadows behind the white expanse of towel. It led to a comforting release of worry about what might happen if things went wrong, which honestly is for the best when it comes to me.
The massage lasted an hour, and when it was done I felt slightly bruised, but relaxed. This is probably not what 22-year-old me had in mind in terms of glamor (after all, I walked to the massage place and on the way back passed a store called Sacred Farts) but I’m not mad about it as an option.
Shit to read
God I love Deadspin.
As someone who is also like 40% spite by volume I found this Hola Papi very comforting.
Twitter is not, broadly, a good place.
This Guardian piece on the author’s relatives’ experiences at a native residential school is tremendous and so sad and enraging.
Shit to eat
Buy a watermelon.
Chop the top and bottom off it.
Stand it up.
Use a knife to peel it.
Chop up the remainder.
Eat an entire deli container’s worth while sitting on your couch in front of the fan.
Repeat for 3 days.
Shit to watch
Shit to buy
I just bought this dress and you should too.