Today I am very grateful for massage therapy. Yes, I love the kind meant for pure relaxation but today I am grateful for the kind I am currently getting - medical massage. Yes there is such a thing and for this wound up chick it is a good thing there is. I am wound up. Who knew? (Rhetorical question - if you know me well this doesn't surprise you that I am.) I carry all my stress and heartache and frustration in my right shoulder area. Then it shares and spreads all over my neck muscles and down into my lower back and makes a journey sideways to the left side. Like I said, I am wound up. Well sometimes it really bites me and in the past 6 months I could count on one hand the number of days I haven't had a headache. Clearly something is wrong. So I finally bit the bullet and got in with a medical massage therapist. She is going to be REALLY helpful. I've seen her twice and she kept saying under her breath, "Wow. You are tight." Yep. Welcome to me, wound up Beth. She's not only working out my muscles and teaching me how to not hold my stress but she's teaching me, unknowingly, how to relax. How to let loose of what winds me up. Tonight I was laying on the table and she couldn't get me to loosen up, she kept having to remind me. And I started thinking, Beth what's up? Relax already! I already know it about myself but was reminded again tonight, I am not good at relaxing. I am not good at loosening up. Is it my Type A personality? Is it feeling things too deeply? Is it over-analyzing? Maybe it's all of those things combined. No matter, I stink at letting go. So my gratefulness for medical massage is probably, hopefully, going to extend into gratefulness for learning to let go a little more.
There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.
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