Can Feng Shui improve your sex life? That’s the subject line of an actual email I received recently.

No, Feng Shui is not a beautiful Asian movie star with a thing for pudgy underpaid humor columnists with bad haircuts. Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese art of moving furniture around until your life improves or you get a hernia, whichever comes first.

No really, Feng Shui means arranging the furniture and other objects in a room based on these fundamental concepts:

– Flow of energy
– Balance of yin and yang
– Interaction of the five elements

If you’re not sure what all that means, then clearly you’re just not a very spiritual sort of — OK, I don’t know, either. But if it can improve understanding and harmony among my loyal readers, not to mention improving my love life, it’s my duty to find out.

The email in question was from a newsletter I signed up for a while back. I can’t figure out how to get off their mailing list. I’ve asked to be removed, but they must think I’m just kidding. They provide people with the very valuable service of letting you buy stuff from their advertisers. I followed the relevant ‘improving your sex life’ link in the email, and ended up at a web site, www.wind-water.com where the following information was found:

The southwest corner in every room — especially your bedroom — should be a romance area. Accessorize with candles or a lamp (fire to create earth) and romantic motifs such as hearts, lovebirds and doves in earth materials (clay, porcelain, terra cotta, crystal, geodes, stones and unusually shaped rock) — all in multiples of two. Pictures, statues and illustrations of loving couples also belong in the southwest.

I’m not sure what they mean by ‘Pictures, statues and illustrations of loving couples’. Are they talking about piles of old Playboys? I don’t think my wife would go for that.

The web site also offers proof that feng shui really works by showing a picture of feng shui expert Angi Ma Wong posing with Oprah Winfrey. For some money you can even have ‘Angi Ma Wong, feng shui expert, seen on Oprah, assess your home or office for harmony and balance’. Seeing as how Angi Ma Wong is close personal friends with Oprah, you’d have to be nuts not to give her lots of money to come to your house and tell you to move furniture around for several hours.

One article on the web site by Angi Ma Wong is titled ‘Does energy whoosh through your front door, out the back’. Can you imagine life for Angi’s children? Shut that back door, you kids! All the energy is whooshing out!

And here is a question someone had for Angi on the web site:

Is it OK to use lemon-colored wallpaper with a gold music note imprinted on it in a music room if I want my career to take off?

Angi gave a thoughtful and reasoned response which made no sense to me whatsoever.

My own response would have been: Definitely, if your career involves picking out really tacky wallpaper and asking lots of stupid questions.

I don’t know if there’s anything to all this ‘feng shui’ stuff. However, if I can’t even figure out how to program a VCR, I probably shouldn’t be recklessly moving furniture around, screwing up everybody’s harmony and energy flow and stuff.

At least, that’s what I’m telling my wife the next time she wants the couch moved.

by Joe Shockley, June 18, 2000