OW OW OW OW OW OW

I was just in the shower, minding my own business, when I got one of those temporarily disfiguring foot cramps. My right foot was completely normal, and my left foot had suddenly decided to do the Hostel Two-Step, a move that should be instantly recognizable to every international budget traveler, as well as anyone who's ever spent time in the military, at a YMCA, or other hygienically questionable showering location. It's that involuntary thing you do with the bottoms of your feet when you get into a manky shower, where you attempt to minimize your contact with the floor using as few skin cells as humanly possible. The sensible solution is, of course, to wear flip-flops or something into the shower, but if you were remotely sensible, you probably wouldn't be showering at the manky hostel/YMCA/army barracks to begin with.

Anyway, the cleanliness of my shower wasn't the problem here, it was the fact that my muscles were fighting my tendons, or that I had ingested too much sodium, or some other such foot cramp-causing situation. I couldn't very well sit down and rub my foot, and anyway rubbing a cramping foot doesn't do jack to begin with. I tried to just stand on it with equal pressure all over, which helped a bit but didn't make the cramp go away. Then I remembered something that an old coworker of mine had told me. She was the sort who would sing to your injuries and was studying under a Reiki master to learn how to better manipulate q'i. One of the fun accupressure facts she taught me is that the hands and feet are supposedly closely linked, so much so that treating one will cure the other. She would demonstrate this by instructing me to, say, scratch the palm of my right hand if the bottom of my right foot was itching. I'd say that works about half the time, which is pretty good odds if your feet are itching and driving you crazy.

Like I said, rubbing my foot would have done nothing, so I tried massaging my hand. Would you believe that the cramp went away almost immediately? I had to do it a few more times before the muscles relaxed completely, but at that moment I felt like an alternative health rock star. What an awesome trick! Don't say Funundrum never taught you anything.