cindy's world

Lunch was great! I had a strenuous workout, someone found and turned in my workout gloves to lost-n-found and thereby restored my faith in humanity, and a very fit guy at the gym complimented me on my personality. Heh. When I got back to work, I had a Tijuana bakery cookie that my reporter’s friend at the gym just brought back fresh, a white peach, and a tomato. It’s not pizza, but yummy nonetheless.

An article entitled “In China, Bloggers Have Limitations” in today’s Los Angeles Times paints the picture of China’s censorship and internet restrictions, which are in stark contrast to our own. Microsoft Corp. launched a new China-based Web portal on May 26, 2005 and this portal offers “MSN Spaces” which gives free blog space thru the China portal. There has already been 5 million blogs created in China since MSN Spaces launched. However, to do business with China, Microsoft has to of course taper its services and technology so that it fits within Communist confines. These confines are as follows, which I will quote in part from the article:

“Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.’s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities – such as democracy, freedom and human rights.”
“Online tests found that apart from politically sensitive words, obscenities and sexual references are also banned.”
“The Chinese government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to ban access to material that it deems to be subversive. Although details of the authorities’ efforts are kept secret, users of many China-based Web portals are prevented from gaining access to certain websites. For example, a search on Google’s China-based Web portal for such topics as Taiwan or Tibetan independence, the banned group Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama or the China Democracy Party inevitably leads to a ‘site cannot be found’ message.”
“The consequences of defying Chinese government limits can be severe: At least 54 people have been jailed for posting on the Web essays or other content deemed to be subversive.”

Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” lives on in the technology age. I am grateful the United States is generally against censorship, but I would hope that the educational system or good parenting instills enough common sense such that we can trust ourselves to apply discretion and good judgment in our evaluation of the myriad material out there. Maybe this is wishful thinking. Can parents and society be trusted these days to teach our children good sense and moral judgment? Or must we hang our failures like white flags and stand silently with bowed heads as the government takes over to rectify our shortcomings? I really don’t like extremes, but how do you keep things perfectly aligned in the middle, across the board, across different cultures, backgrounds, realities? If left alone, does society balance itself out in a sort of socio-economic colloidal suspension?

I would not want to rule the world.

I don’t usually think too highly of what celebrities have to say in interviews, but what John Mayer said in a live radio interview about a year ago still sticks to me. When asked by the radio DJ whether he’s currently single, he said he was in the true sense of the word, and went on to elaborate. People these days, he explains, all claim to be “single” but they’re really “single with baggage.” They’ve technically broken up with the ex, but are still seeing the ex, sleeping with the ex, in some weird sort of personal limbo, under the delusion that they can be or are “friends” with the ex, etc. He said the way he was single, was that he was completely and utterly unattached, he doesn’t need “permission” to go out with a new girl he meets or have to figure out a way to weasel out of plans with the ex w/o offending her or giving too much information away. He was so single that, if he met the right person right then, he’d be able to instantly go into exploring that relationship baggage-free, wholy and completely.

John Mayer’s a smart man. Then again, what else do I expect from someone whose album has the periodic table of elements on it?

I’m tired of complications, of other people’s baggage, of having to find excuses to talk myself into being okay with this flaw or that flaw even tho the flawed guy doesn’t even bother making excuses for himself. Does “integrity” mean anything to you men out there? Does the “golden rule” exist for you guys? Why don’t you weigh your instant gratification and just take one second of your life to evaluate what you’re about to trade in for your 10 minutes of pleasure? And if you choose your 10 minutes, have the backbone to not come running back to me and expect me to “get over it” while you tell me you love me too much to let me go.

Oh my gawd, this blog took an awful turn. Andrae was right. I’m gonna stop blogging for now.

I think I’m okay with plans changing on me, as long as I’m given courtesy notice. No guarantee I won’t be disappointed, but at least I won’t be mad. The reasons tonite’s plans changed (at least, the part that concerns me) were good ones, and ones that had occurred to me, too. Instead I had a nice nap at home and then went to visit a friend and had a Tea Station barley milk tea w/him. I didn’t get home until a bit past 2am, but I did get a nice nap in at his place, too. (No, nothing happened.) After I got home, I took a shower and am now wide awake. I’m becoming a serial napper. Sleeping thru the nite no longer exists for me. I need to get my sleeping patterns adjusted back to normal, tho. I failed so miserably to exercise discretion yesterday in the elevator that my friend Andrae forbade me to speak to anyone else until I got a nap in. “And no blogging, either,” he said. (No, I didn’t screw someone in the elevator. May as well have, tho. But just verbally.)

The 45 minutes of hard cardio I hammered out at lunchtime didn’t revive me as it usually does. I’m just tired and my eyes and skin are sore. I almost skipped the gym today to join my coworkers for a comfort food binge at a local Mexican food restaurant, but at the last minute, I remembered that I’m supposed to give advertising help/tutorials to a friend and his business partners after work, and that my friend had planned to order pizza for the meeting.
Ah, pizza… that’s always something to look forward to and save calories for. Unless the plan falls apart, in which case I may be just as content to clean my house and veg out in front of my bigscreen and order my own pizza.
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gan aft a-gley. Robert Burns, “To A Mouse”

Are pissy moods contagious? Cuz I just caught a HUGE bug.
Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep to begin with. (I’m slightly febrile now having had an hour of sleep last nite. For the past few weeks I’ve been getting about 4-5 hours and that seemed to be sufficient.) Maybe it’s being caught in a family law pass-the-buck case this morning. Maybe it’s all the family law phone calls and the random phone calls using us as a switchboard, asking for #s to different departments, different offices, different government buildings. Maybe it’s the fact that the ex parte Arizona family law case we got last Friday STILL hasn’t been input in the system so I STILL can’t update the record as to our hearing and it’s coming back in a few days and I probably still won’t be able to update the system then, either, which puts me farther behind on just that particular case. (I’d called the supervisor last Friday and he’d said he’d make sure the case is set up in the system THAT DAY.)
Aside: I just got a call from the attorney involved in the pass-the-buck family law case this morning. She said the pass-the-buck department misunderstood the situation and it IS indeed supposed to be their hearing so I’m just going to set it back in their department for a future hearing date. At least that takes care of that, and the small vindication feels good.
And then I get an email from someone I’m fed up to HERE with who made an offensive statement that totally pushed a button with me and I swung the axe. Cyber blood all over the place. Flesh fragments oozing down cyber walls.

I guess what I learned about myself in this is that people should do as I say, not as I do, considering the placating advice I gave a pissy cranky friend yesterday.

Today, I hate everybody and everything.

“Crash,” the movie starring Matt Dillon, Ryan Phillipe, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, among others in an all-star cast, is in a nutshell “Pulp Fiction” with themes of racism and karma instead of underground gang warfare and drugs. Racism and karma also happen to be extremely dominant themes in introspective conversations between myself and the college roommie for the past 2 weeks or so. This is yet another way for the universe/spirit guides/powers that be to throw the obvious in my face. Kinda like what it did with “What Dreams May Come.” I immediately called the college roommie upon exiting the theatre. “You have to watch it before I get up there so we can talk about it,” I told her. “It is the culmination of everything we had been talking about.” The film artfully portrays the loose ends created between 6 or so sets of people and their relations to each other, and in the second half of the movie, it welds together each of these frayed ends. The result is many relationships of self-realization and interpersonal growth, some pleasant and touching, some uncomfortably baring. I won’t give away any more in case anyone wants to watch it. I highly recommend it, and would enjoy discussion with you on the movie.

In my capacity as “judicial assistant” or “courtroom clerk”, I have had the opportunity to meet many sheriffs from the LA County Sheriff’s Department. Sometimes we get into discussions and battles of wits (but not very often; the ones who regularly work around me know better), such as the one yesterday, in which we were arguing about the legal definition of “conspiracy.”

Sheriff: Two or more people is a conspiracy.
Me: I don’t think so. I think it’s six or more people, or maybe four.
Sheriff: It only takes two. Four is the definition of a riot.
Me: I’m pretty sure it’s at least four for a conspiracy. Two people just make co-defendants.

I get on the cell phone to call college roommie, a bar card carrying (almost) attorney, and ask her, “What’s the legal definition of conspiracy?” She responds instantly that it’s two or more people who form an alliance to commit a specific felony.

Me: Damn it!
Sheriff: Why do you even argue with me about this?!
Me: Because I was so sure it was four or six…I remember the legal definition of something being four people…
Sheriff: I told you, it’s “riot.” Four people make a riot. You can’t have a riot with just two people. Two people can incite a riot, but…
Me: [turning to him suddenly] Spell ‘incite.’
Sheriff: What?
Me: Spell it. ‘Incite.’
Sheriff: I-N…S-I-G-H-T.
Me: Nope. That’s insight, like to have specialized knowledge about something. Spell incite.
Sheriff: E-N –?
Me: Nope!
Sheriff: I give up. How do you spell it then?
Me: I-N-C-I-T-E!
Checkmate.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is how you win an argument against a cop. [Curtsy]

Well, there you have it. Not guilty on all 10 counts, lessers and all. The first commentary I heard on radio after the live verdict reading was, “I can’t believe it. The sonavabitch got away with it all.” There was apparently some lady fan outside the courthouse with 10 doves and every time there’d be a ‘not guilty’ read, she’d release one dove. All 10 doves are, as I type, circulating happily over the courthouse, probably pooping on the cheering and crying fans. “So what would she have done if there were ‘guilty’s? Kill a dove?” asked the bitter radio DJ, who apparently lost a bet to his co-DJs now that MJ is acquitted of all charges.

I was at my parents’ house last nite for my usual weekly visit. I thought I’d run the motorcycling thing by them and see how strong the parental reaction is.

Me: Dad, have you ever ridden a motorcycle?
Dad: Yeah.
Me: I’m considering getting one.
Dad: Well, you should be okay learning because you already know how to ride a bike. They’re somewhat similar. But you get more of rush and a feel of power when you’re on a motorcycle.
Mom: That’s dangerous! It’s flesh hugging steel. [Translated Chinese saying is that a bike is “zen bao tieh”, flesh hugging steel, as opposed to a car, which is “tieh bao zen,” steel hugging flesh.]
Dad: It’s not that bad.
Me: I plan to take the full courses, learn about the bike and everything, not just buy a bike and try to ride it on my own until I can take the DMV test.
Dad: That’s good, because then you can do the simple repairs by yourself, too. It’s of course a lot less complicated than learning the inner workings of a car.
Me: Yeah, I also don’t want to be in mid-ride and unaware that something’s wrong with my bike.
Dad: That’s good. What kind of bike are you thinking about? A cruising bike or a street bike?
Me: I don’t want a Harley. I want a street bike.
Dad: Harleys give a comfortable ride! But you can get a street bike that have the really wide tires, and your posture on those bikes are different. You can turn at a very steep angle and almost lay the bike flat on the ground without scraping your knees on the asphalt. You can’t do that in a cruising bike.

Either my dad knows I’m really responsible and trusts me, or he has never really loved me.