the ocean

I went for a massage yesterday, which naturally resulted in one of the most stressful hours of my entire life. I decided to try a new place, since my old place is much farther away now and, to be frank, occasionally somewhat skeezy. Things got off to a bad start when I couldn't get any of the lockers to open and eventually decided just to pile my clothes in a corner. They got worse when my massage therapist looked at the two medications listed on my introductory form and said, and I quote "dude, you got a lot of shit going on here." She then spent the next hour telling me I "needed to get off my meds" (which are for my skin and anxiety, by the way), and that I could do it if I would just learn to breathe deeply and relax. She repeatedly yelled at me for not relaxing, which obviously makes a person relax, and accused me of lying when I denied having pain in my upper back, because I did not. She said she could tell I was lying because she has a certification in reflexology and asked me to evaluated my (nonexistent) pain on a scale of one to ten (I said two). She then insisted that I wasn't breathing deeply enough to decrease my pain and that she would just keep pressing her fingers into my back (which actually did kind of hurt, to be fair), until I had reduced my pain through appropriate breathing. So that was fun. To top things off, she ended what was supposed to be a seventy-five minute massage after fifty-five minutes, which I certainly did not complain about since I was desperate to get away from her. And then she told me I should come back every couple of weeks so she could really get me to relax. Obviously, I am opting for visits on a bi-daily basis instead.