Each of the three acupuncture treatment rooms has its own black boom box, each with its own CD of soothing music. After each initial interview, Mae sets that CD playing while she places the needles, turns out the lights, and leaves me to lie still for twenty minutes. And I lie there.

Today, as I lay there reminding myself to relax those pesky places that prefer to stay tense, listening to the voices from my day play on endless loop in my mind’s ear, and wondering if this would be the day when I’d lose the battle and actually fall asleep during my treatment, I realized for the first time that the room I’m in determines the music I hear.

In one room, a rippling piano anchors the new age-y strains. In that room I find myself consciously relaxing sets of muscles in the same way that we’d relax in the last minutes of a yoga class. It seems that if I move my hands to either side of the treatment table I’ll feel the grooved hardwood floors of the yoga studio, and I find myself thinking that a sheet is a much nicer surface to lie on than a yoga mat.

In another room, a different piano picks its way delicately through the calmer classics. In that room, with that familiar music, the treatment table feels more like my parents’ couch on a summer evening as the cares of the day melt into the quiet question, “how shall I spend my evening?” With no urgency to come to a decision, I sink into the weave of the upholstery, feel the cording press into the small of my back, and wonder idly if I should lie still or expend the effort to turn onto my stomach.

The third room amuses me. In this room chamber music from the classical and romantic periods have been laced with nature sounds. The effect is very much like attending a concert in an arboretum (except for the one track when “Air on the G String” seems to have been performed on a sea-facing cliff). And for the most part, the effect can be relaxing as long as I work a little at imaging myself as the sort of person that would get invited to a chamber orchestra concert in an arboretum… and a sea-facing cliff. But then, just as I have the effect firmly in mind and can almost feel the organza of my garden party dress tickling my legs in the breeze, a goose honks. Geese are not relaxing or melodious. Geese would wander through the garden party nibbling the ribbons from our dresses, biting those who refused them hors d’oeuvres, and leaving piles of dung to decorate the bottoms of our shoes.

Tonight I spent time in the garden party room. The improbabilty of my place in such an environment turned out to be a welcome distraction from my internal narrative, which was bent on explaining to me that a goodly number of my current friends have only known the sick version of me. Sobering thought. Sobering, that is, until you realize that by this time in the garden party, there’s no way your shoes could have escaped all the goose dung.