Skip to main content

Short Escape

A couple of days before J returned to college after winter break, we went to the nail salon together as a treat. Its been a strange few years with the pandemic and I was not even sure I would see her during break with the rapidly evolving travel guidelines. But we did get to meet and this felt like a nice way to bookend her visit - it would be the first time for us too. The nail salon experience felt surreal - the intense focus on nails for an hour to the exclusion of everything in the world. The place was quiet except for a some soft background music and the sound of an indoor waterfall. Pedicure clients were all on their phones. The manicure ones maintained silence as they observed their nails being worked on. 

The age range of clientele at the shop ranged from teen to post-retirement - this might have been everyone's short escape from the real world of empty grocery shelves, shoveling snow, being stuck in traffic, getting hit with the virus or having someone at home self-isolating,  without power after the winter storm, unsure of what's round the corner and so on. Here it was okay to focus on getting your nails painted the perfect shade of fuchsia as if nothing else existed or mattered. 

Coming out the salon into a blast of cold air was like a reality check. There is only so long escapism can work. For me the "escape" itself was fairly stressful. Having a young kid my daughter's age work on my feet made me intensely uncomfortable - something about it felt deeply wrong and I simply could not relax. I was glad when it was over I could get back to the real world where I generally fend for myself and don't have anyone laboring over my hands and feet. Going to a nail salon as it turns out is not all fun and games

The $10 manicure is the equivalent of supermarket sushi or high-fashion knockoffs at H&M: It only feels luxurious until you consider what you’ve really purchased. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...