First World Guilt

Saturday my wife and I had a date.  She had informed me that she thought it would be fun for us to go to the mall and get pedicures together.  Adult time. No kids.  Just a chance to be together and relax.  I gulped.  The place at the mall? The one where all the chairs are by a big plate glass window where people gawk at you as they stroll by?  THAT place?  She chuckled.  Yep.

Well I am certainly not going to hurt my wife by refusing a date, so I womaned up and agreed.  But, oh, it was such a weird experience.  Not the gawking actually.  I found I didn't notice all that as much.  I found I am not much for massage chairs.  I think they  felt sort of creepy. I rediscovered the fact that I actually dislike sitting still for longer than about 15 minutes. I discovered I did love the hot rocks that got rubbed up and down your calf and over the arch of your foot.  My feet were warm, people warm I tell you!

But what I did not like and could not get past, was the creepy feeling with someone crouched on a stool below me, doing all this stuff to my feet.  All the employees of the salon are asian, and it just felt exploitative for all these caucasian women (all right I will give you one black and one latina woman came in but the vast majority were white) to be pampered and have all this attention to our feet  in this way. There was something that was both so intimate and so subservient in the relationship.

I will give you that my feet look amazing. Well as amazing as my feet could possibly look. Years of dance, years of hiking, they are sort of misshapen but hey, the polish is really super!  But despite how I love the way they look, despite loving the fact that my feet were warm for a few hours, I really don't want to go back. I want my relationships to be on more equal footing, if you can pardon the pun.