TGIF, I'm Getting a Massage

Ahhh, Friday.

I'm not much of a party person, but there's something magical about knowing the weekend is arriving. I love sleeping in, leisurely making breakfast and having tea, going for a slow walk around the neighborhood, and most of all, doing anything I want on a whim.

And this evening I'm getting a massage.

Just thinking about getting a massage is calming me down. It's been a busy week at work and more physically demanding than usual (multiple trips to court on Wednesday, standing all day to take inventory of twelve boxes Thursday, assembling several gargantuan binders today, etc.--paralegal stuff). I've also been eeking out every last morsel of strength from my calves as a beginning "barefoot" runner in Vibrams, my minimalist running shoes. So I'm ready to dissolve in a heavenly massage.

New York is an optimal place to live if you love getting massages. You can find plenty of cheap hole-in-the-walls (holes-in-the-wall?) on Yelp, or you can do what I did as a college freshman between essays and logic problems and before the days of Yelp: sniff out massage parlors. You need a kind of sixth sense to do this, and I had an uncanny ability to almost literally sense which corner to round next in order to arrive at a Chinese massage place.

ANYWAY, massage has numerous health benefits that are increasingly well documented scientifically. The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that a single massage session literally causes biological changes, imparting significant decreases in the stress hormone cortisol, decreases in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can amplify cortisol levels, and increases in lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.

I particularly enjoy deep-tissue massage, which is useful for athletes, anyone with tense or injured muscles, and those recovering from surgery. It alleviates chronic pain by loosening tight tissue clusters, it breaks up scar tissue, "facilitates the movement of toxins from the muscles and helps stretch tight or twisted muscle mass," and even lowers blood pressure, according to Livestrong. All of this is very relaxing and feels delicious.

So "clean bathroom" and "stop at drug store" just got bumped from the to-do list to another day--tonight I'm getting a massage!