#830 Footsy Fish

I suppose it’s too depressing contemplating all the world’s ills; hunger, poverty, aids, typhoid and cholera, war. If we each spent every day worrying about it all, it would be hard to sleep.
And harder still to justify that pedicure.
I’ve never had a pedicure. I’ve never had a ped that’s sick.
But seriously, it’s always seemed like an almost criminal indulgence. Plus, I’m kind of ticklish when other people are handling my feet.
I mean, I think I could tolerate somebody footling my hands, but handling my feet...
Anyhow, I’ve heard about these pedicure places. I’ve even walked into a few and seen women in recliners leaning back, while their feet were first soaked and then worked on by people who were literally “underfoot” or “at their feet” or some other menial description.
It begs the question: Is doing a pedicure manual labor?
And those skilled foot technicians were working merrily away with a variety of pedicure tools, pedo-rasps and pedo-emery boards and pedo-files—to do everything in their power to undo what nature had apparently done for a reason. Remove callosities and horny old toenails.
Are calluses good or bad? Who cares? They are ugly to some. So they are removed.
But part of me thinks they perform some function. Why else would your body go to great lengths to develop them around the areas of your feet that wear most against the environment?
Be that as it may, never fear, a new callus remover is here—Flesh-eating fish.
When I first read about this, I had a vision of pampered ladies dipping their feet into vats of piranhas. But no, these fish are more like the cleaner fish you see in nature films hanging around the mouths of grouper.
They are the Garra rufa fish—known as “doctor fish” in Asian countries. They are tiny enough so a fish pedicure involves putting a hundred of them in a tub with your tootsies.
They then nibble off your calluses and dead skin.
Yum...
Customers were skeptical, but say after one go around with the fish, they’re hooked.
Maybe when the fish are fattened up, we can feed them to the hungry.
America, ya gotta love it.