spa day gone wrong

once you break the seal and start allowing yourself yuppie indulgences it's all down hill.

my blogmate and are both fairly new to well, having paychecks, and for the most part we plant our feet in firm opposition to fanciness, insisting that we are, in our hearts, low-brow.

but we're starting to crack. first it was the latte. then the storage solutions. sooner or later we were bound to discover pedicures. after weeks of talking about it, we finally decided on a day for the much-anticipated day of foot care to celebrate my having turned 28 and her having run 28 miles (ok, i know that's not quite right, but go with me here). off we went for the post-marathon pedicure at the somewhat shady nail place near her house in hyde park. it was pretty standard stuff. toxic fumes filled the air as the emplyees barked mostly unintelligible orders to us about where to sit and what to do.

the woman who did mine made it clear by her body language that not only was she not interested in helping me achieve pretty feet but that she was pretty gosh-darned resentful at having to deal with me period. how it was my fault that the foot-soak tub-thing was overflowing i couldn't say. i was done with my pedicure and had marginally nicer feet about 6 minutes later.

my blogmate, as it turned out was just getting started. i've given her a decent amount of ribbing in the last few weeks about her desperate need for foot grooming, but really- i was kidding. unfortunately for her (and me, the bored onlooker) she landed on the world's most compulsive manicurist. this guy went at it with the clippers and cuticle pusher and motorized buffer thing for, no joke, 2 hours. it was excrutiating for her (and for me, the bored onlooker). the guy got so carried away that he actually made her big toe bleed. apparently they don't do any kind of first-aid training before they let someone take sharp objects to people's feet, on account of this guy had NO IDEA what to do about the bleeding. eventually my blogmate willed the bleeding to stop and the world's most compulsive manicurist finally got around to actually painting her toenails.

by the time it was all over i'd lost the will to go to they gym and decided that i should just get my traumatized blogmate to a happy place with food and beer.