Week 1

The past couple mornings the valley has been inundated with freezing fog, the moisture in the air solidifying as it comes into contact with the edges of leaves, delicate spider webs, and even the front of my jacket as I bike to school. Thick banks creep up the hills muffling the outside world and putting it on pause. My life feels like this, too, as I get wrapped up in a new environment, a new set of people, a new language of description. Massage school is not for the faint of heart. There's something to terrify everyone, be it intimate self-exploration or copious amounts of memorization. By 4:30 on Friday we all looked like we had been run over by a herd of stampeding bison.

My mind is running around in circles; even my body is adjusting to the new, rigorous schedule. Waking up in the morning before the sun, getting home around dark, remaining engaged all day long takes its toll. Luckily the teachers are the caring, understanding kind who know how difficult a transition this is for most of us. I at least have the benefit of attending school in the last five years; for others it's been a lot longer since they sat in a classroom. This week we covered introductions (many times over), expectations, how to drape and undrape someone on a table without exposing anything embarrassing (it's harder than you think), and began learning the language to find our way around the body: superior, inferior, lateral, medial, proximal, distal (and those are just reference terms - just wait until we actually start in on bones and muscles).

Thank goodness I've got a live-in study guide. Carl has been settling in to his job at the White City VA as a recreation therapy assistant. He's been to two high school basketball games, got paid for them, and soon gets to start organizing his own trips. It's quite convenient having a body around to poke and prod, flex and extend. And drape - have you ever tried to manhandle 200 pounds of dead weight? After that I'll be ready for anything.