Ever since I was a little boy, I’ve enjoyed making up words. One of the first neologisms I ever invented was yuckleburpia. It was an interjection, a sort of ultimate form of “yuck,” as in “Yuckleburpia! Carrots aren’t supposed to be that colour!” It could also be used as a kind of clunky adjective, as in “Those fuzzy blue carrots look really yuckleburpia.” It wasn’t an elegant piece of word-making, but it worked well enough when I was five years old.
Suzi has such a talent for inventing words that I’ve made a Suziisms dictionary, complete with terms like apocaplectic (to be so angry as to bring about the end of all things), monkoidal (monkey-like in appearance), skullular (resembling a skull), onionated (containing onions), succention (an ascending succession), and (of course), weasicular (similar to a weasel, ferret or other small mustalid).
In my career as a massage therapist, I’ve worked at some pretty wacky places. One of the craziest was in the heart of downtown Garland, Texas. The gals there were sweet, funny, and exceptionally silly. One time, apparently, someone’s child saw a chinchilla on the television and asked what it was. One of my colleagues slammed the words “squirrel” and “rabbit” together in her odd brain and told the kiddo “it’s a squabbit.”
It caught on almost instantly. We started calling each other “squabbit” and the word took on the meaning of anyone cute and/or silly. It usually means a kid, but its meaning has expanded over the years to include adults too.
So that’s your vocabulary lesson for today…
Squabbit: (noun) 1. A small child, particularly one who is very cute or mischievous. “Sofia is getting to be a cute little squabbit these days.” 2. Any particularly cute, silly, or mischievous individual. “She is a real squabbit when she feels the mood come on.”
Squabbiticious: (adjective) 1. extremely silly and goofy. “I don’t know what was with Jake, he was in a really squabbiticious mood that weekend!”
I still love my made-up words…squabbit that I sometimes am. So long as I don’t sound too much like a norkasaurus* or say anything cringeworthy**, I’ll probably keep using my panopoly*** of them for the rest of my life!
I love my job. Back in my days of working 60+ hour weeks at the world's worst print service bureau, or faking it as a graphic artist, I never thought I'd be typing those words. At least, I never thought I would be saying them without sarcasm.
Massage therapy has been a very rewarding career for me. Not financially, well, I mean, I pay my bills on time and never lack for things, but I'm not making the big bucks by a long shot. In terms of personal satisfaction, however, it just can't be beaten! People come in to see me with soreness, tight muscles, tension headaches, insomnia, and a host of other problems. I work with them and they feel better. The praise I receive makes me feel like a hero, and knowing how effective massage makes me feel as though my job is actually making a difference.
Doing massage, even 20-30 hour weeks, is very taxing. Repetitive strain ruins backs, shoulders, elbows, and thumbs. We learn ways to keep ourselves safe, but so many of us ignore those tips and wind up sidelined. A commonly-cited figure holds that most therapists practice about three years before burning out (injuries are only one reason, among the others are low pay and dissatisfaction with the actual practice of massaging people).
The second day of April marked the seventh anniversary of my massage practice. If you count massage school, it's been nearly eight years...and I love my career more than ever.
Lately, however, there have been a few dark clouds looming on my horizon, so to speak. The deep joint of my thumb (the so-called 'saddle' or sellar joint) has been aching. My shoulders often hurt and sometimes there are fiery pains in my forearms. I recently heard that seven years is another peak for massage therapist burnout.
This is a little bit scary...or sobering at least. I really don't do anything else very well. (No, I don't. I'm not just being silly or self-effacing here...read on for explanation...) I'm one of those generalists who does a whole lot of things adequately and one or two very well. I've definitely never had a job I've feel such mastery of. Not to say that I couldn't be as good at something else, but it sure would be a long path to get there.
In my career, I've met a few exceptional massage therapists. One has been practicing for 28 years, several others for well over 10. One of our local clinics has a man in his 80s who is still massaging, and apparently does a heck of a good deep tissue massage.
So, I have resolved to be careful. I recently took a "Safe Hands" course that gave me tips on preventing injury and protecting my body for a nice long career. I have been putting ice on my shoulders and wrists, soaking in Epsom salt baths, resting, exercising...last week I got a (great) massage from my colleague, Kate. That helped a lot.
I dream that some day people will tell their friends: "You have got to go to Massage Envy Frisco...they have this 75-year-old therapist, and he does SUCH a great job!"
This year has been one of trials and triumphs. I haven’t been reading, studying Danish, or even writing very much. House cleaning, and my favourite goofy online game Kingdom of Loathing have likewise suffered. I miss those things, and I hope to get back to them as soon as I can.
There have been quite a lot of ups and downs lately. As Danish director Lars von Trier said, at the end of each episode of his bizarre show the Kingdom: “You have to take the good with the evil.” Of course, he said it in Danish, so it sounded all cool and punk and stuff.
Anyway, there’s been some good, but also a bit of evil.
Over Christmas, our little ferret Ayumi ended her far-too-brief time here on earth. Bright little lights who burn so briefly, ferrets bring a lot of joy while they are here. But they are fragile and her tiny system gave up after a protracted fight with illness. That was four days before Christmas.
In January, Suzi’s dad got pneumonia. Hospital stays, oxygen treatments and a long recovery followed. Suzi spent more than two weeks out on the West Coast, helping out, leaving her hapless housemate to deal with things here. She was even out there through her birthday, which I guess we’ve still not really celebrated, two months later. We were both exhausted.
When she returned to Dallas, we both caught the flu.
The flu sucks—it’s not like some wimpy little cold where you sniffle for two days and return to normal. No indeed, this was a week of absolute misery, unable to do much of anything—high fevers, coughing, sleep for two hours, get up for one, then repeat the process. So anyway, instead of enjoying Mardi Gras in Port Arthur with my friends Sue and Jason, I got to enjoy a week of the flu. Not nearly so much fun, I’m afraid.
I don’t get paid if I don’t work…so that was not good. The last half year has had some highs and lows financially. One of my most stalwart private clients has had to quit getting her weekly massages. Her reasons are very good, I can’t blame her a bit, but it wasn’t exactly a welcome hit, particularly as Annie came out for two whole weeks in November. We had an awesome time, but two weeks with no work was not easy for me to budget.
Our immune systems thus compromised, Suzi and I entered into a roller coaster of sicknesses, with my germs heading for my lungs, and hers heading into her sinuses. She wound up with a root canal, I wound up with a hard-to-shake cough and inflamed salivary glands. Seven hundred dollars to the doctors, and the constant fear that I’m going to give this to my clients (even though the doc says I’m not very contagious). As of today (Saturday the 25th) I’m almost completely recovered.
We’ve also lost some on-line friends in the last six months. First there was an altercation in the game Urban Dead. Some people accused Suzi of doing some things that ranged from bad to downright hateful. First they didn’t like the expert way she and Chris role-play their characters (too good…intimidates everyone else and makes them not want to play with them), then accusations of varying sorts flew. They even accused Suzi of being so clueless that she “accidentally betrayed” her group to the bad guys. Next thing I knew, we were all on the outs with a group we’d been hanging with for years.
But we remained friends with some of them…for awhile anyway.
Then, well, our other characters got into it. I thought we were playing a game. Their characters started, to my perception, picking on someone we didn’t know. I tried to ignore it…and it persisted. I asked them nicely to stop, and it persisted. So, I had my character have a temper tantrum and storm out. In the game.
On the forum, I tried to explain that I was playing a character. But they realized that I am a bad person, not to be trusted. It got more and more vehemently personal. Chris and Suzi came to my defense and some WEIRD things were said about them.
We had it. We left. People who had said they would be our friends forever, evaporated. They didn’t return emails. They said things that hurt. A lot. Now they’re gone.
But we still have our Brits—some of the nicest people I’ve ever had the chance to meet.
But there is good to go with the evilness, of course.
I’m picking up more regular clients at the clinic. I keep hearing things like “That was the best massage I’ve ever had”, so that makes me feel good about my chosen field. The summer months are often a bit lean for massage therapists, so I have to try to get as many regulars as possible. When things are slow, I console myself by going through my notebook of them, reminding myself how many people really love the service I provide.
One thing I love about working in Frisco is the amazing variety of people I get to meet. One of my clients, from Taiwan, has taught me a few words of Chinese. Another, of Middle Eastern lineage, has let me try out my mad Arabic Skillz.
While I was in high school, we got a student who was born in Jordan. He was a great guy, and he taught me some phrases in Arabic. He even gave me some language tapes with Arabic phrases. Later, in college (Uni to you Brits), a nice guy named Sameer in my Organic Chem lab helped me learn some more.
So I met this wonderful client (Jeannie my dear young friend introduced us) and next thing you know, she, her husband, Suzi and I were eating great food at Afrah. I had tried out some of my Arabic on my client, her hubby was no less impressed. Turns out my pronunciation is still surprisingly good, even after over 20 years. So strange. My favourite phrase:
Hahl tata-kallum englizi? (Do you speak English?)
My client has promised to teach me some other useful ones. So, you know, when I visit Oman or where ever, I’ll be able to order coffee and say howdy to everyone!
And we got another fuzzy-wuzzy. After Ayumi’s death, we took little Nick to the rescue shelter in order to let him pick out a new companion. He actually *sighed* when he saw all those ferrets, he was still missing Ayumi and I don’t think he wanted a new friend. But one little white ferret picked him out and came over and bothered him.—relentlessly. He eventually gave up, and we brought her home. We named her Xev, after the delightfully amoral (and frighteningly hot) woman from the insane science fiction TV show Lexx.
Little Xev is fitting in just fine. Fun loving, eager to please, and very friendly, Nick even gave up and started being friends with her after a while.
I’ve also had the opportunity to see a couple of amazing live performances. Ordinarily, I’m lucky to catch one show a year, but, but happy chance, I saw two within a week.
Brilliant Canadian songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen came to the Nokia Theatre and absolutely floored us. Ten virtuoso musicians, including three backup vocalists (each phenomenal in her own right) and a Spanish guitarist who completely stunned everyone with his technical artistry and the beauty of his work. Mr. Cohen, 74 years old, did eight encores, playing about three hours altogether. It was among the finest shows I’ve ever seen—ever.
Six days later, comedian-actor Denis Leary did a show at the same venue—his Rescue Me tour featured Leary and three other stand-ups taking turns on stage. Leary was crankily brilliant, of course, and Adam Ferrara was side-splittingly funny. The other two were not quite so funny, however. The first man seemed more suited to the Howard Stern Show, or working with that Imus guy perhaps—lots of vulgarity and not so much hilarity. Or perhaps the vulgarity was in place of actual funny content. It was hard to tell.
Lenny Clarke, who plays Uncle Teddy on the show, was pretty uneven. He was extremely political, and while I can usually laugh along with opposing viewpoints to my own (hey, our guys are just as idiotic as the other guys), his material often seemed to be geared toward inciting cheers or applause of agreement rather than actual laughter.
Overall, the show was excellent, despite the unevenness, and I got to see two of my absolute favourite people an stage within a week. Songwriter and geek favourite Jonathan Coulton will be here next month—I’ll be there too!
Among all this, I’ve had precious little time to write. In February, my friend Ella and I did a Brevity Quest for Everything2 (write as many articles as you can in a month—the only requirement being that they must be under 300 words). It was great fun, and we had even more entries than our last Brevity quest (which one of the guys called “possibly the most successful quest ever”). A guy who goes by the name “The Custodian” on there, was a one-man-writing-machine, cranking out close to a writeup a day, and they were really good ones too. I wrote three things, which is the last material I’ve added to E2.
Ella and I commissioned a BQ09 logo from Suzi, and she’s created some limited-edition swag in her CafePress store for the lucky winners.
That done, I’ve resigned my post as an editor on E2. It’s been a lot of fun, and a real honour, but for reasons you can probably infer from this blog, I have not had time to do a very good job—and you probably know me well enough to know how important it is for me to do a job I can be proud of.
Amidst all the craziness, my older sister Nina came into town. After Mother’s death, I kind of withdrew a bit, just wrote and kept to myself, it was really nice to see her again. She looks great! Healthy, happy, her family is doing well. We chatted over coffee at Starbucks and caught up.
Like a gift from the blue, unasked, Nina told me that she and her business have a stack of airline miles…she offered that if I ever want to go see Annie…
So guess where I am probably going this October!
Speaking of travel, I’m going to try to send Suzi to England to see Chris, Kat, Matt, Jess, Isla, Walter and that crazy gang. We are hoping to get her over there for August, they are doing some LARP thing called “The Gathering” I believe, and Lucian (Chris) needs his long lost sister Laura (Suzi) there. Besides, Brianna (Jess) is her bodyguard. What fun is it to have a bodyguard with nobody to guard?
So, obviously, despite the health issues, Suzi is still having a great time with her Brits. These people are just amazing friends for her. When she opened her CafePress store, they SWARMED it, buying dozens of items. They dote on her art and comment on her Flickr page. I’m so thrilled that she has people like that in her life.
I think things may be improving now. So I’ll hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and keep taking the good with the evil
(I wouldn’t mind a slight increase in the ratio, anyway.)
When I started writing at E2, I meticulously avoided courting controversy. There was plenty of it to go around on this crazy encyclopedia website, and I thought, as the new guy, I should just concern myself with improving my craft. Then I found a series of mini-articles at E2 that I had to contribute to.
On E2, a single title is called a “node” and numerous people can contribute to it. This can lead to back-and-forth arguments (something the editors detest), fleshing out of main stories, or even brilliant connections. This particular node did not have any good articles…mostly crummy one-liners. And it was entitled:
Hairy Armpits on Women Are Attractive
A matter on which I have a distinct opinion…in the positive.
Now I know how most people feel on this matter. Not just here in the US, but most of the world, my opinion on this matter is distinctly in the minority. I even had some rather insulting things said to me by someone I thought was a friend because of my opinion on that matter. I’m not one for controversy, really--all that bickering and sniping just makes people hurt. But then, one night, while doing my rounds with Dining In…it just hit me, and I started writing. The resulting article came out like this:
(Hey blogger...how do I do indented margins??? doggone it...I'll just put a section marker)
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I grew up with a pretty thorough knowledge of the absurd cosmetic rituals that women have to go through. Proud possessor of two older sisters, things like lipstick, false eyelashes and a variety of facial and body care products were familiar sights around our home. One thing that puzzled me as a lad, though, was the shaving.
My father, who was born before the custom of women shaving caught on, told me that it was "classy looking" when women shaved. I was an inquisitive kid, and remained unconvinced.
I was aware that ' foreign' women did not always shave. Occasionally, I would catch a glimpse of an unshaved shin or armpit at the mall or on TV. I always thought it looked exotic. I can remember, as an adolescent, seeing an Asian woman in a swimsuit (maybe some picture from the Olympics) and noting that she was unshaven. I thought that this was very sexy.
I was delighted when Playboy, of all people, decided to run pictures of Madonna with her lightly fuzzy armpits and legs. I hoped that perhaps the sight of a beautiful, sexually attractive woman with natural body hair might inspire more men to think of this as less fetishistic and more natural. After all, I had heard that the whole custom was started as a marketing gimmick to sell more razors, so couldn't it be undone as easily? This was not to be, of course, and a lot of people found the pictures disgusting, because she had body hair. I doubt that Playboy ever ran any more pictures of women with natural body hair after that.
On occasion, certain famous women have decided to fly in the face the depilatory custom. Gillian Anderson had an infamous picture with David Duchovny and X-Files creator Chris Carter. The magazine (Rolling Stone or Spin, I forget which) decided to airbrush Ms. Anderson's pits rather than risk freaking out their audience. Susan Sarandon has likewise raised a few eyebrows by bucking convention and singer Paula Cole actually accepted a Grammy and made a video with unshaven underarms. The horrors!
The thing is, when you get accustomed to natural growth of body hair on women, the converse looks a little weird. It looks fetishistic, maybe even pedophilic, as if our society is trying to get women to look pre-adolescent. Maybe that is the point, I don't know, I'm not a trained psychologist.
I don't actually think this custom will change in my lifetime, but attitudes in some places may have shifted a little bit. While on a trip to Austin, I happened to spy about six women who did not shave within about 30 minutes on the Guadelupe strip. That is more than I have caught in Dallas in the last six years.
It is not so disturbing that someone would shave a part of their body, what is weird is the lack of any choice in the matter. A man, for example, can go clean shaven, he can even shave his arms, legs and chest. He can grow a big mountain man beard, a pencil-thin moustache or a big old-timey handlebar. At worst, he'll be thought of as a wee touch eccentric. A woman, at least here in the Bible Belt, who does not appropriately shave her body, is considered too grotesque for words. But it is the way that God, or nature at least, decided to make women. And it is beautiful, at least, to some of us.
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I set my expectations aside and posted it to everything2. To my great surprise, I got a huge outpouring of support, upvotes (we vote on one another’s work on E2), awards (we call them “C!’s”) and humourous anecdotes. Some of the people who agreed with me were (gasp) Americans, and not all of them latter-day-hippies, either! I was stunned.
Even a few people who disagreed with my basic premise found my candor and my writing interesting. I had one guy memorably tell me that he thought my premise was flawed—that even men should shave their entire bodies, but he found the essay such a great read that he voted it up anyway.
So, just today I was recalling this little essay, and it occurred to me with humourous irony, actually none of my girlfriends ever have had the natural look. I mean, not since college anyway. I had one very special lady who said she’d be fine with it…but her genetics served her in such a way that she never really had to shave her pits or her legs.
And so we come to today, I have met a woman who is very precious to me. And guess what? She’s European. And, as the gods of irony would have it, she stays completely clean-shaven at all times. And she’s made it plain to me that she’ll never change that habit. Oh well, I suppose true love has no eyes for such trivial superficialities anyway.
(I have decided, at Annie's suggestion, to start putting some of the more interesting anecdotes from my studies down on the blog and simultaneously to Everything2.)
Part One: Al begyndelse er svær (The beginning is always tough)
Here in the US of A, people who speak a second language are something of a rare commodity—let alone those who speak a third or fourth one. The reasons for this are myriad, way beyond the scope of this article, but it offers a few disadvantages to us monolingual Yanks.
There is something uncanny about hearing someone switch gears from your native language to another, unfamiliar one. It is almost eerie—the voice is the same, although the accent changes, but suddenly the words are incomprehensible. There’s an odd feeling as if your brain just lost its ability to process words altogether. Perhaps there is just a mild drop of helplessness too...or at least self-consciousness.
I vividly remember the occasion when I introduced a wonderful German client to a coworker whom I knew spoke some German. It was a very odd experience, hearing two women I knew pretty well as they happily chatted...barely a word of their conversation comprehensible to me.
While visiting London with Annie, I had several occasions to remember that my own tongue is not her first or only. She would show me texts—-absolutely undecipherable to me—peppered with strange-looking words like ‘og’ and ‘på’ I told her it looked like moon-man language.
I will confess that I had next-to-no background in Danish. As much as I love languages, I had never studied the Nordic ones at all. I just knew a bit about their taxonomy and the high degree of mutual intelligibility among them. I knew the word ‘bastard’ in a couple of them (I used to collect that word in foreign languages—don’t ask, I can’t explain these things). I had seen “the Kingdom” (Riget in Danish) and heard a lot of the language because of that, but all I knew was it sounded a touch like German.
One afternoon, I sat at the end of my bed in our room at the Lynton Hotel in London, and Annie napped peacefully on the other bed. I went to wake her gently with a hand massage. I sensed consciousness returning to her. She sighed and said something like this:
“Vudehklogeh?”
The three pound meat computer between my ears went “Database search—not found. Alert: Data received contains no information.”
I think I awkwardly said something like, “Honey, are you awake?”
Upon which, she opened her stunning blue eyes, looked me in the eyes and said, “Vudehklogeh?”
For an instant, I had the irrational fear that the English lobe of her brain had shut down and this could put a real dent in our holiday. But mercifully, she blinked her eyes slowly, stretched prettily and said, “Was I speaking Danish?”
Soon after the end of our vacation, I resolved to learn some Danish. Who knows? I love learning language, this could be fun!
Recently, I purchased a big bag of Bit-O-Honey candies for my occasional sweet tooth. In case you aren’t familiar, Bit-O-Honey is like sticky taffy, flavoured with the oddly organic sweetness of real honey. They’ll pretty much pull the fillings out of your teeth, but…mmmmmm… honey…. so delicious… so strangely funky…. try not to think about the fact that an insect made it…
Deciding to have a bit-o-fun with the name, I told Suzi “Now that we have Bits-O-Honey, we can share them with our guests. It’s too bad that Kofi Annan and Boutros-Boutros Ghali don’t drop in more often—we could have Bits-O-Honey with the Secretaries-General.” I thought myself awfully clever for that.
Without missing a beat, she retorted “We could take ‘em to Burger King for some Whoppers Junior.”
(She admitted that this was borrowed from The Onion. Still funny though.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go get a couple of Cokes Zero to drink.
For more information on pluralizing postpositive adjectives, see the following article on Everything2: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1717187 or visit your local library. Reading opens up an amazing world of wonderment and knowledge and whimsy and other things like that.
In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye and Golde, our parental protagonists, sing a gorgeous and bittersweet piece called Sunrise, Sunset, about the joy and pain of watching their children grow up. We can feel their tristesse as they sing “I don’t remember getting older/when did they?” But I don’t know if Tevye and Golde knew that the pain can run both ways.
My mother died late one night, four years ago. My dad passed away quietly in 1995. While I was never all that close to my dad, it’s still a bit weird to think that Mother is gone. Every time I took a trip, I would call her on the phone and tell her all about it. I think she got a vicarious kick out of hearing about places she never got to see and things she never got to do. These days, each time I go on a trip, I feel as though I should give her a call and hear her laugh as I describe my adventures to her.
Richard and Carol Eberhard have been so good to me…they are like a second pair of parents, Suzi and Carl are the best siblings I could have dreamed of. You know, that feels mildly unfaithful to Mother, and the rest of my family. Mom had such a problem with the Eberhards—she later confessed to me that it was because she feared I loved them better than her. It is so sad that she never really believed that I had enough love in my heart for all four parents.
I also sometimes feel, albeit very mildly, that I am stealing from Suzi and Carl…but that’s another story.
I just spent a week with my “second parents” at their home in Los Angeles. We drove up to Cambria and stayed in a beautiful hotel on the beach. We dined like royalty, spent happy times talking, shopping, and just being together.
I see my second set of parents dealing with their own mortality now. Carol walks with a cane—Richard, still strong and vigourous in his late 70s moves a little more slowly than he once did. They discuss their mortality with their children, all three of us. I’ve come to love these geeky, ultra-intelligent, adoptive folks of mine, and it hurts to see another set of parents grow old.
A few years ago, songwriter Warren Zevon was unexpectedly confronted with a rapidly oncoming death from cancer. Someone asked him what he had learned about life and he said, “Enjoy every sandwich.”
See the beauty in every tiny detail of every day, because you never know what tomorrow will bring.
I think that is the only advice I can offer myself…to hold every minute in my heart, and to be thankful for those fine folks who took in a 17-year-old stray back in 1981, and made me a part of their lives.
I'm a massage therapist, a dreamer, a writer of avid amateur status, a lover of history, a reader, and a friend. I enjoy German beer, cold weather, Kingdom of Loathing, Sluggy Freelance and Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
