Zen and the Art of Massage

I’m finally back writing here. I took some time away from school-related things over December and early January and got back into it at full speed come January 10th, when classes started again.

And did they ever. I think I understand now what folks meant when they said that fourth term is the most difficult of the program, and has the highest dropout rate. Like previous terms, there is a lot to learn here, but unlike previous terms, the amount of integration of information into previous learning experiences is fairly low. This means that we’re having a lot of new material taught to us in sort of a mismash fashion. One week we may be covering ‘diagnosis’ and treatment of degenerative disc disease, and the next we may be talking about lateral epicondylitis. To add to our confusion, in theory classes topics are only taught to a certain degree; we will be getting further information in pathophysiology class some months from now.

To this I can only try my best to keep on top of required reading and homework, and hope that with time I will have my moment of clarity. I’m told this comes sometime at the end of fifth term.

I’ve been having some frustrating experiences in clinic this term. I still feel like I’m not ‘getting’ a number of things, and I’m not able to do certain assessments correctly and don’t feel very positive when my instructor corrects me on them. I know that’s why they are there, and I know I’m just learning. I guess it comes back to my wish to be ’super therapist’ and just do everything perfectly the first time. I know that’s not possible, but its still there in the back of my mind.

Midterms begin next week, which I’m looking forward to, if only because I have a week off directly after them. I need a bit of time to rest and regroup, and am looking forward to it.

Today was exam number two for my oral practicals. We have two of them at finals this year.

Yesterday’s exam went well, I believe. I had to do an assessment of the shoulder, and while I felt a bit limited by the time I was given, I think I completed all the necessary parts.

Today’s exam involved doing a mini treatment on someone. I went in and pulled out a case study on the lower back. The case involved poor posture (hyperlordosis) and various muscular and fascial imbalances one might experience with such a condition. I was asked to do four different things, which I did as quickly as I could, considering the time frame I had to do them in. When I was finishing up the last one, my instructor, Ian, said ‘ok, that’s good, thank you!’ and I re-draped my ‘client’ and left the room.

Naturally, I was wondering if I’d screwed something up or missed anything because I was cut off. I decided to wait a bit and relax outside the exam room. When the person who was my ‘client’ came out, several people asked her how she thought they did. I joked that we’d all failed, and she turned to me and said ‘actually, he was really impressed with you. He just cut you off because he was dying to go get a coffee and a bagel.’

Ahem.

Something that has often amused me are the contents of my search query report from my site’s daily statistics logs. For those unaware, this basically shows you what people typed into a search engine in order to land on your website.

Often, the search requests are for some sort of erotic or sexual massage. I believe the reason my own site is getting hit is because I posted entries emphasizing how massage therapy and erotic massage are absolutely not the same thing. Other requests appear to be looking for sexual-massage pictures. Imagine the surprise that must be felt when opening my massage photos directory and finding these.

Of course, I fully realize that posting about this issue is only likely to increase the number of hits I receive from folks looking for sexual massage. This is the price I pay for writing about it, I suppose.

Speaking of referrers, I noted a massage therapy student from Ohio has mentioned my own journal in his, citizen keith. Nice to see other students are journaling their experiences. I attempted to leave the author a note, but comments are not functioning — I’ll have to try to return and do so again soon.

I have some thoughts regarding my first few weeks of clinical practice, but I’ve been busy and unable to put those thoughts into words. My hope is that I’ll have more time to write down my thoughts come October, when I’ll be settled into my new apartment. I expect to be offline for at least a few days starting this Wednesday. Here’s hoping the move goes smoothly.

Friday night I had the pleasure of seeing Kim Barlow at the Black Sheep Inn, over in Wakefield (Quebec), about a 45 minute drive from where we live in Ottawa.

Let me first day that Wakefield is a cute little town. I’d heard of it before, of course, and has met people who live in Wakefield, but I’d never gotten the chance to spend some time there myself. It’s very peaceful on the water and has a steam train, which we got to watch roll through. Much to our amusement, not only were the conductors and staff waving at us while it went past, but there was a string quartet playing in one of the cars. I remarked to Rich that I’d have to tell others about this, but that people probably wouldn’t believe me, as the idea seems rather surreal.

Anyhow. The opening band was called Pork Belly Futures . From reading the information on that website, you’d figure they might actually be good. For all the award-winning writing their front man has done in his career, this band was a disappointment. The music needed to be up-tempo a few notches. The lyrics were bordering somewhere between bland and just plain strange. And I’m not terribly surprised to find out that the band’s keyboardist and female singer were added later on — they seemed like additions while they were on stage, pushed off to one side as if they were extras. Cap that off with the fact that the front man never once stood up from his chair during their entire set, and you get the picture. They weren’t horrible, but I was more interested in my pint of beer than in the music, and I’m usually pretty open minded about that kind of thing.

I was glad when Kim Barlow finally took the stage somewhere around 10:30. It took some time for her to get set up, but it was well worth the wait. Her stage companion (whose name I’ve since forgotten, unfortunately) patched his guitar through an interesting setup involving several microphones, smaller speakers, and an old radio. This gave it a rather unique sound quality that I’m sure will show up on her next album, due out sometime this fall. Kim herself gave a wonderful performance. Her voice was amazing. She projects so well; even standing several feet from the microphone I could still hear every word. And, she clearly is very comfortable on stage, which just added to the performance on multiple levels. There were several times that she missed a verse, or played in the wrong key, or even forgot to plug in to the amp(!) but she still maintained her composure and was able to laugh at herself in a manner that made you feel like you were attending a jam session between her and the other musician, not a live show. She interacted with the audience a lot, commenting on various things she’d been thinking about, including details of the new album, life in the Yukon, and the fact that she always looks forward to hearing the crickets in eastern Canada. This is the kind of performance I love to see. It not being flawless made it so much better.

I’d not gotten the chance to hear Kim Barlow live before, and I’m very glad I did. Well worth it.

Too bad about that opening band.

First entry of my new journal. Unfortunately, it’s going to be boring ramble about installing the software package. Ahh well.

WordPress was extremely easy to install and configure. Worst part was waiting for my webhost to activate my MySQL database, which took about an hour and a half tonight. I’ve also still got some CSS customization to do, but that won’t be terribly hard.

My website is also undergoing some changes at the moment, so it looks pretty ugly and contains random text used for testing it. I’ve been wanting to do some redesign for a while, so I’m pleased I have the time to do it.