lamer lifestyles: tubular narcissitude

I googled esalen+big+sur just to see what'd pop up, you know? In the science of text search, recall and precision are technical terms of art. To achieve perfect recall and perfect precision is impossible; they're inversely proportional. Never mind what that means, except for the fact that if it were not true, what we'd lose is serendipity. And serendipity makes the world go round -- like (to paraphrase the early Airplane) my plastic stochastic lover. So somehow I ended up on an About.com page (if you'll pardon the echo) about Big Sur's Esalen Institute. Oh yeah. He wrapped me in a warm sheet and I laid down on one of three massage tables in a large room with ocean views and an open air ceiling that let the ocean roar drift in and over my body.... As my masseuse stroked his last stroke, a thought passed through my head, "This is my true nature. I release all negative thoughts." Leaving aside the misuse of "laid" ( | ) when things were getting steamy enough already (voulez-vous coucher avec moi?) -- plus the fact that a masseuse could hardly have been stroking his last anything -- I was so moved by that passage that I, also, released all negative thoughts... or was about to before I encountered the following "Exclusive Video from About.com." You can view it by clicking on Anne-Marie Barton's picture, below. Whoever the hell Anne-Marie Barton is, she is captured here mid-morpheme, allowing... "Perhaps there is something to be said for being a bit... selfish." There's a little VISA ad before you get the video, but even that's instructive -- in a sickly fascinating culture-critical sort of way -- and if you keep watching, you'll get all kinds of useful tips on... well, you'll see. stay tuned

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