A New Leaf

So the end of my semester wrapped up finally a little bit over a week ago. My new semester starts this week. Ho hum.

It's funny because as you start to near the end of a program, it just doesn't seem to have the vibrancy that urged you to write and blog so much when you started. I suppose that's mostly just because it's become something familiar, and although it's just as extraordinary in many ways, there's only so many times you can comment on its extraordinariness before it starts sounding repetitive.

I *did* get a 100% on my business plan, which I was uber-pumped about. Not because I'm a grades-nerd, but because it said to me that my idea is actually viable and that, once I'm further down the road and feeling a bit more stable job-wise, I might actually be able to *start* my own thing. And even moreso, because a guy read it over, and despite it being a business plan about starting a women-focused massage business (which would specialize in Trauma Touch Therapy, for abuse survivors, Lymph Drainage, for breast cancer survivors, and Prenatal Massage, for the preggos), he was all over it like vegan mayo on tofurkey. And that bodes well.

In other massage-related news: I've been distributing (in small numbers) massage flyers around my neighborhood (as you can see, I've appropriated Rosie as my logo--both for my potential business plan and my flyers), since I have a table and figured why the hell not pick up a few extra bucks by offering my services up to people at their own houses. Out of the 60 flyers I distributed, I only got one call back (which seemed anticlimactic to me, but which my friend P seemed to think was pretty good, cold-call-wise), and this past Friday, I went and gave a massage to a woman at her house down the street from me.

And man, I guess I didn't realize how different it could be once you were massaging on your *own* terms and not the terms of the school clinic. I finally got to massage without the claustrophobia of a pair of scrubs. Instead I wore a tank-top and loose-fitting short-pants. Beams of sunlight tumbled through the woman's bedroom window as I moved around quietly and paced myself for an hour massage. A light breeze comfortably tickled my skin the whole time, a stunning view of downtown catching me off-guard every once in a while as I pivoted to work on a new body part. And I got to pump my own little mix of instrumental relaxation music. Granted, there was some genero relaxation music thrown in, with birds chirping and the occasional whale. But there were also quiet songs from Amelie and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as well. And I cannot tell you how amazing it felt to pace myself so perfectly that the final moments of the massage, when I just rest my hands quietly on the person's sacrum and neck, fell perfectly in line with the final song on my mix, an instrumental Elliot Smith song, that gave me chills as my hands rose and fell in rhythm with this woman's breathing, in quiet harmony, until the last note of the song broke, and I quietly let go.