Birthday

From my old blog (chairmanofthedog)


Last week was my birthday. While not an especially meaningful number, it turned out to be a nice, slow roll into the next year.
The biggest "moment" of the celebration was my Day of Beauty.
I have a yearly ritual that I feel sure my mom knows to expect. Every year around my sister-in-law's birthday I ask what she is getting. My mom always has a great gift which has been wrapped, shipped and confirmed long before the actual day. As a sort of torture device/attention getting tactic I then ask my mom if she has my gift. Every year there is a silence on the other end of the phone. Oh, yeah, what will I get my daughter? Hm...
Having learned from one year where "you get what you ask for" and hadn't asked for anything, I told her I wanted a Day of Beauty.
A month later, with cash in hand (we live in different cities and my mom knows I am way too practical to be bothered by the fact that, in the end, I got an envelope of cash rather than a well thought out gift) I made my reservation for a "European Day Spa". I had convinced my friend to join me, having recently secured the promise of an offer for a job, reason enough we both agreed. We booked the "Day Together" package at the local "European Day Spa".
When I thought of a "European Day Spa" I hadn't thought it would be an "East European" experience.
While my manicure has lasted longer than ever, I had the distict impression that the older russian lady doing it hadn't had access to the disposible culture of America when she learned how to file and paint. She used the same 1x1in square of cotton for the entire manicure. She used toilet paper to separate my toes, which worked rather well, but she counted the squares before tearing it off.
The massage was fine, but the ambiance was lost when I was lead out the back of the building across the parking lot to the other building.
Lunch was served in a cute little room with ivy on the walls and a glass top table. It didn't occur to me until I was half way through my salad that this was the room I had walked through to get my massage until someone else was escorted through.
Finally, the facial was the only disappointing procedure. Perhaps the feeling of an asthma attack when they put that steam right into your face that ruins it for me.
In the end, as my friend said "we got what we paid for". We wanted a day of beauty, but since neither of us had the cash for the super-luxe salons, we indeed, got what we paid for.
5:23 PM