For Valentine’s Day, Mr. Right and I bought each other professional massages. He went to his regular place, a Shiatsu massage place in the mall (that he first discovered from Groupon) and came back raving about how much better he felt.

He warned me that I might not like it there, because the massages are deep tissue. Which I took as a challenge. I love a good deep tissue massage. And I’m no wimp. I can handle a Shiatsu massage.

Please.

And so I confidently walked into the Renu Shiatsu at the mall (red flag) and signed up for a 90 minute massage (that cost well under market value – second red flag).

The lady who helped me didn’t speak a word of English. Not a single word. (third red flag)

She pointed me to a room with a curtain instead of a door (fourth red flag) that was right next to the main mall thoroughfare, so you could hear the mall music and people talking as they walked by (fifth red flag). I undressed, nuzzled under the mismatched sheet (sixth red flag) and waited for my masseuse to come in.

Next door I heard a masseuse literally beating on the customer (seventh red flag) and thought to myself, I hope he’s getting a different massage than I am (nope).

The masseuse entered, and what followed was the most painful 90 minutes of my life. I think childbirth may be more relaxing than what I endured in that tiny little room next to the busiest part of the mall. You see, Shiatsu involves hitting pressure points with the thumb… the palm… and the elbow. Translation – this lady dug her elbow into my spine over and over and over. She didn’t just massage my muscles… no, she kneaded right over my bones leaving bruises in her path. When she did hit muscle, she dug with all of her might – not with a flowing, rubbing motion, but more of a repeated jab – as hard as she could.

That’s when she wasn’t hitting me.

I was in so much pain that I almost puked through the hole in the head pillow. At one point I winced so hard my left leg flew off the table – which she took as a sign that I needed my leg worked on (again – she didn’t speak A SINGLE WORD OF ENGLISH). She grabbed my leg and yanked it backward until my foot was touching the back of my head – then she bent it over to the side so that my foot was at a 90 degree angle from my knee, touching it to the table. And with my leg contorted in such an unnatural way, THEN she started massaging and digging into my leg.

It was all I could to not cry.

After she finished jabbing me over and over and over… the hitting started. I’ve had massages before when they give you little karate chopping motions over your back – lightly – and it feels pretty good. This was more like heavy hitting with her whole hand. It was horrible. But some part of me kept thinking, obviously she knows what she’s doing – maybe I’ll feel better after it’s done. 

Nope. I didn’t feel any better. I could barely walk out afterward.

But I forgot the most horrifying part. At the very end of the massage, she had me flip over so that my face was pointed to the ceiling, and she rubbed the back of my neck and gently massaged my face. Finally, it felt like a regular, relaxing massage. I was just about to convince myself that THIS was the part where they go from causing pain to causing relaxation…

And she started to choke me. She literally grabbed her hands all the way around my neck, and started lifting my head off the table… by my neck. Granted, she hit muscles in the back of my neck, but she also hit my vocal cords in the front… I could barely breathe. For a moment I thought that if by some horrible coincidence I died that night in my sleep, the police would logically assume that Mr. Right had choked me to death because of the bruises this lady was surely going to leave on my neck.

And then it was over. I pulled my battered body off the table, got dressed, paid as quickly as I could and ran out of the “salon.” I called Mr. Right who assured me that his experience was NOTHING like that one. And then we both had a good laugh.

Not exactly the most romantic Valentines massage ever. Poor Mr. Right couldn’t even touch my back for three days because of the bruising. But, I did gain a new funny story, and I can cross “Get a Shiatsu massage” off my bucket list.

Trust me, you should go ahead and delete it from yours as well.

It was a treacherous drive in to work this morning. My driveway was a solid sheet of ice. The streets near my house… solid ice. I slid straight through a stop sign. And a red light. Lost control in the parking lot of my favorite donut shop (because even an ice storm won’t keep me from my favorite breakfast stop). I skidded my way into the hospital parking lot. Once there, it was too frozen to walk, so I sat in my car and patiently waited for a shuttle. While waiting, a truck barreled through the parking lot, losing control and spinning in circles. It narrowly missed me.

Now I can add another item to my list of reasons why smoking is annoying.

I was walking to the Rangers Ballpark tonight (and running late because I stupidly left my tickets at home and didn’t realize it until I was half-way to the game!) and some stupid guy was smoking in front of me. He reached back and flicked the ashes off his cigarette, and one went up my nose! It was still hot, and it burned me! Those little ashes float in the wind, dude. Next time check behind you please.

And while you’re at it, go ahead and quit. It’s bad for you. And apparently, bad for me as well.

I seem to be blogging a lot before 6 a.m. and it needs to stop. This morning at 3:30 I woke up to a huge storm–louder than I have heard in a long time. My electricity was out, the wind was howling, and it sounded like hail pelting my windows. I have put off buying a weather radio for a year, so I had no way of knowing if what I was experiencing was as bad as it would be, or if tornadoes were on their way. I would hate to get hit by a tornado while I lay in bed reading an US Weekly under the covers with my flashlight instead of hiding in my closet under a mattress like a responsible girl.

So I woke up my roommate, called and woke up sister Lindsay, who lives in Dallas, and she was kind enough to relay the weather warnings from the TV news. Apparently we were under a tornado warning, along with my parents who live about 30 minutes away. So I called home and woke them up, then got back on the phone with Lindsay so we could get updates and find out when it was safe to go back. It was a funny sight… me, my roommate, and Harley the Wonder Schnoodle, hiding under a mattress in my closet, with my comforter just in case we needed the extra cover. After 30 minutes of waiting (and catching up with Lindsay on school, work, and life while we had her on speaker phone), she cleared us to go back to bed. But now it’s 4:30 and I am wide awake, unable to sleep and happy that I at least have a wireless internet connection.

I think we did well tonight. Tomorrow I may be hating life as I try to work with only 4 hours of sleep, but tonight we were brave and resourceful. I found the following quote, and while I don’t fully understand the meaning, I think it’s pretty fun, sassy, and a bit descriptive of our evening:

When life gets you down – just put on your big girl panties and deal with it.

Last night I found a spider in my toilet. A large, hairy, thick brown spider. The kind that could probably kill you. I just happened to glance into my toilet before plopping down in my sleepy state, and there it was, staring back up at me, daring me to come any closer.

I tried to flush that sucker, but it kept swimming upstream and surviving. After I flushed the toilet so many times it began to run, I went with Plan B… I doused it with toilet bowl cleaner. Sure enough, those chemicals quickly killed it. I finally got him flushed down the drain (and then I flushed another three or four times just to be sure he was good and gone).

But now, every time I use the toilet, I’m paranoid that a spider might be hiding in there. It’s kind of like those stories about snakes coming up the pipes and ending up in a toilet. I never believed it. But now, I’m terrified!