Eliz and I are pretty non conventional people.  We don't adhere to typical gender roles, we attempt to be more nontraditional in interaction with people and general carrying of ourselves.  This has lead us to some pretty amazing an interesting places.  From coffee ground fresh on a Nicaraguan mountain, to the tuberculosis slums of South Africa, she and I like to get into the mix of the world.  We love to experience these cultural oddities together and feel it not only brings us together as a married couple, but opens our eyes the beauty of the world, while strengthening the bond we all share.  That bond of humanity.

We have found subcultural experiences even here in our own town.  Inner City communities accepting us as one, homeless men and woman sharing with us happiness and pain, wonderful taco cart eateries and Latino seafood restaurants where you have to order in Spanish, just to name a few.  But, recently we dabbled in the foray of Easter Medicine.  Acupuncture.

Part of a deal we found on Seize the Deal website, half off a session of Acupuncture.  It was a very interesting experience.  First, it was administered by a very tall, white man with over 15 years of experience.  An ex army man who dabbled in different disciplines of both medicine and meditation all of eastern descent.  He and his very Bavarian wife, were making a killing with this acupuncture using a Chiropractor's office on Saturdays.  He informed us he was in business of dealing with pain, but could work on other "issues" as well.

For me, being an athlete, and an aging one at that, I have some aches and pains from my unwillingness to admit my age, combined with being the oldest on my soccer team, a need to prove myself.  Along with my running this has left me with a tight and pained left hamstring, a sore right knee, and an odd pain in my right rotator cuff, when my arm is engaged in one motion for too long (like running).  These were the maladies I explained to him, for which he was hopeful some relief could be obtained.

He himself was a runner, and a talker.  This came with lots of time chitchatting, or in this case him talking to me with my monosyllabic grunts to acknowledge a partial participation in his conversation.  He put me in a room, had me to lie on the bed and begun sticking needles, with force, into my knee.  I waited for the relief, none came, but then he pulled out a Tinge machine and hooked it up to the needles and pulsed electricity to my knee.  Something he repeated with both my hamstring and my shoulder. As I lied there, feeling like a human pincushion, and wondering what my poor wife was going through, I found it to be no big deal.  Perhaps years of yoga and my preconceived notions of a Confucius type man centering my Chi and defining my shockras led to my lackluster approached to a modernized, ancient medicine.  But, I don't think it is something I will regularly do.  Plus it's damn expensive.  I will admit, however, I've run a few times since and have not had any pain in my hammy, my shoulder, or my knee. So, maybe there is something to it after all.

Here are some pics I attempted to snap off, kinda hard with pins all in you body, hard to move, but if you look close you can see the pins and the tinge machine's electrodes: