cindy's world

I think I AM making progress in jujitsu, despite what my bruises and missing hunks of flesh seem to say about me. There were some new people in the class last nite and I found myself giving them instructionals and quick tutorials as we were going up for a throw or a spar against each other. I have a natural “teacher” in me, but it’s that I felt competent enough to pass on some knowledge that I was kinda surprised about. We learned a few new defensive-turned-offensive moves which ended with arm bars placed on the attacker, and as I was watching 2 people in my sector practice this move, the main instructor walked up to me and said discreetly, “I want you to learn some of these moves for use in competition.” Well, I have a year. Should be no problem. I haven’t even been in class a month yet and I’ve already got some moves I could do in my sleep.

* I watched “Dance With Me” this weekend. Altho I enjoyed the choreography, I was NOT impressed by the presentation of the love story between Vanessa Williams’ Ruby character and Chayanne’s Cuban Rafael character who worked in the dance studio Ruby was competing for. The pivotal scene was set at a finals ballroom dance competition in Las Vegas (Vegas has been popping up EVERYWHERE lately, it’s been making me sick) in which Ruby hooked up w/her old dance partner to compete, and the partner is a jerk but the father of her young son, and at the last dance her legs were cramping and she couldn’t continue anymore but she looked out into the audience and saw Rafael and their eyes met, and she started crying, and he encouraged her by swaying gently to the music as if he were dancing with her and she closed her eyes and imagined she was dancing with Rafael instead of her actual partner. She looked horrific in this scene, really scary, with her mouth open all teethy and her raccoon eyes stage makeup and her shiny tears all messing up her face. But I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, and I didn’t know why. Cuz I certainly couldn’t relate.

* I also watched some other TV show, a sitcom, I believe, that was so unimpressionable on me that I can’t remember what it was, but there was a declaratory love scene that made me cry. I remember sitting on my couch going, “What is WRONG with me? This is a freaking comedy, for gosh sakes!”

* Driving home from work today, “I Still Believe” played over the radio and I started singing along to it, but soon I welled up and couldn’t continue singing. Just listened to the song with tears running down my cheeks.

* After “I Still Believe,” the radio thought to really bring it up with some R&B song I’ve never really listened to the lyrics before, but basically it’s some girl singing about how she heard a friend calling her name the other day on the street and she turned and was surprised to see someone from her past. They went for lunch and they caught up on each other’s lives, they reminisced about his old habits when he was with her, his bad habits now, and he showed her photos of the girl he’s now with. She thought she was over him but all these feelings came back and she thought to herself, “I’m still not over you,” etc. Does anyone know this song? Anyhow, I cried thru that one, too.

* I keep having very vivid dreams of being involved in a new but very safe, loving, romantic situation with men who are already in my life. It’s very confusing when I wake up.

If I connected the dots, what picture is my subconscious forming here?

Sunday afternoon, I went to the Shoshin Ryu Region 1 Kata Contest that 2 teams from my jujitsu dojo were competing in. I’m so proud of them – they competed as green belts (they were initiated green belts just before the contest) against brown belts and took away first and second place in the adult division. It was fun to see what the competition is like. They were egging me on to compete for next year.

I took a bunch of photos, but here’s my beef with the digital camera. 1.) The delay between clicking and the actual photo taking is over a second, and by then the move’s already done and I ended up with a bunch of photos of them getting up from a fall, not of them in mid-air. 2.) I put in fresh batteries when I got to the site, and 38 photos later, I was running out of juice and the battery symbol was flashing. 3.) It takes too long for the flash to recover in between shots. Not that the flash works well anyway; it barely illuminates to the middle of the gym.

As I was driving out after the contest, I got a call from my instructor asking me to join the other instructors for an In-N-Out burger. I was craving In-N-Out because I saw a bailiff walk in with it at lunch last week, so how could I resist? I am now so bloated that it looks like I have puffy ciabatta bread dough wrapped around my lower abdomen.

Sandy and I were sitting at the bar at BJs Restaurant Brewery in Brea, pigging out on loaded nachos, spinach-artichoke pizza, margarita and beer. I was listening to her tell me, all aglow, about her new boyfriend. And then we were interrupted by an older (mid-late 40s) white guy sitting on her left (she had her back turned to him to talk to me) who tapped on her shoulder while we were in mid-conversation, and when she turned, he asked if he could take the menu that was sitting on the bar. Why couldn’t he just take it?! It was on the rack at the bar, it wasn’t in front of her. I knew he was doing the lead-in and I rolled my eyes. We went back to talking. He tapped her again. She turned. “I’m sorry for interrupting you,” he apologized to her. She said, “Oh, it’s okay” and waved it off dismissively. I glared at him. We went back to our conversation. He let almost half an hour go by this time before he tapped her on the shoulder again. I couldn’t hear their conversation over the bar noise, but she told me when she turned back that he wanted to know her situation, whether she was with anyone because he didn’t see her talking to any guy. No shit, she was talking to me. She told him she does indeed have a boyfriend. This guy was seriously on my nerves now. I would never interrupt 2 strangers’ conversation to ask stupid questions. He couldn’t talk to her when I had gone to the bathroom?! About 10 minutes before we left, he once again tapped her shoulder. They talked for about a minute, he handed over a scrap of paper. She told me he said, “I know you said you have a boyfriend, but you never know what the future will hold. If your situation changes or if you want, call me.” Now I was so annoyed (PMS helped) that as we stood to leave, I said extremely loudly as I walked by him, “What a LOSER! Why doesn’t he just open with ‘Hi, I’m desperate and old and have an Asian fetish’?” It’s men like this. Have some self-respect! And do you really want a woman who’ll cheat on her boyfriend?! Sandy said, as she wadded up his name and number and tossed it at a trash can, that he’s just thinking with his dick, he’s not looking for his next wife, and that there are plenty of women who would indeed call a man like that when she’s fighting with her boyfriend or when she’s bored and a man like him would say, “Hey, it’s not my problem. She called ME, I didn’t tell her to cheat.” THIS is why I have no faith in people and relationships.

I just came back from shopping and dinner with my girl friend Sandy.

Why would anyone wear panties that have a big (3-inch diameter) puffy fabric flower sewn on the front right side of the panties? Those flowers are bad enough when sewn onto the upper corners of skirts, or the strap of a camisole, cuz it looks cheap and cheesy, like you cut some large silk flower off an artificial floral arrangement and stuck it on your clothes. But on underwear? What would that look like underneath your clothes? “Hi, I have a tumor on my abdomen.” “Hi, my right ovary is a bit swollen.” “Well, lookit that! My fetus moved!” WTF.

I started out “Point Four” in the last post with all intentions of listing the positive attributes of my ex, but I failed utterly. I’m just too angry about everything still. He’s not all bad, there are good things about him and about being with him, or I wouldn’t have stuck around that long or even attempted to maintain contact with him after the breakup, but I’m just not there to be able to list them without plunging into bitterness. (My bitter comments he calls “verbal abuse.” *eyeroll*) <-- see what I mean? Maybe I'll try to give him some credit when some time has passed and I get out of man-hating mode.

First of all, it has sucked that I couldn’t write what I wanted to write in my blogs, this outlet for all the happiness, sadness, stress or anger that I feel, just because my ex has found his way to this site. But I have creative license. It’s like radio programming. It’s free, so if the listener doesn’t like what he/she hears, there’s no loss, just change the station.

Second, I don’t make false claims to represent anyone, speak for anyone but myself. I am not advocating anything, or advertising anything.

Third, he’s already said that he was going to stop reading my site, and he has since then had many adverse reactions to what he’s read on this blog. If you know you can’t handle it, don’t read it. We’re all adults. Let’s deal with life with some maturity.

So this is why the last few posts have been more unadulterated.

Fourth, just to straighten the record, no, the ex is not just a drunk jerk who has treated me like crap in our relationship, neglected me, cheated on me and lied to me. He is also a great friend to have (hey, he even rolls his girlfriend(s) under the bus to benefit his friends, so if you’re gonna aim to be anything with him, the most advantageous position is to be his friend), if you’re a girl and you want to be his friend, all his female friends are “friends with benefits.” He’s also an excellent optometrist, he knows his stuff both in eye care and eye disease. I hear he’s also a great clinical professor. Just ask his students (some of whom have slept with him, even when he had a girlfriend, one of these girlfriends being me). He’s also an aspiring poet. You can ask his female “friends” to show you the love poems he’s written us all to make us feel “special.” He’s smart, smarter than most women he’s dated, cuz he was able to fool them all into thinking that he’s faithful and loving. And he’s wonderfully affectionate. Ask all the girls who he’s seduced into bed (while he had a girlfriend) by saying things like “I’m so affectionate with you. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to be like this and feel this way with someone.” And he’s got a very healthy ego. All these women are “making passes at” him and he could have anyone he wants, strippers are constantly throwing their numbers at him and begging to go out with him when they get off shift, and even I, if I were making love to someone else at this very moment, would be thinking of him. And he feels he’s given so much after we broke up, but I’m just too blind to see it. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I see that he’s offering me what every woman out there would die to have in my place? He just bought a beautiful house, he has a thriving respectable business, he makes good money, and darn it, he loves me.

Because, it’s not just about love. It’s about respect. It’s about loving me enough not to hurt me over and over just to stroke your own ego. It’s about not joining your friends in referring to me as “lockdown.” It’s about sensing what I need, not just demanding what you want. It’s about giving, not just taking. It’s about appreciating what you take. It’s about not taking for granted when I give. It’s about working with me to reach a common goal (like rebuilding shattered trust), not just telling me “You have trust issues and I’m not going to show you anything to prove anything. You’re just gonna have to trust me,” and then going thru my phone bills behind my back even though I wasn’t the one who cheated. It’s about integrity and self-control. It’s about sticking to your word. It’s about being able to trust each other’s values. It’s about phrases like “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” and “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her” NOT being applicable in a relationship. It’s about being a team; we’d never survive if you let your loyalty get pulled away in all directions, toward friends who want you to betray me, girls who want you to choose them over me. It’s about so much more than material things like money, houses, and a new Mercedes. Or do you not know me at all? I don’t want a rich guy. I want someone I can be proud of. If he’s struggling, at least I can be proud of him for his efforts. I can pitch in a hand to help a struggling business. I can’t deal with a man whose ego over his profits is so large that he thinks men are trying to pick up on him because he’s all decked out in his bling bling and Kenneth Coles.

I don’t mind living a humble life. I just want to be able to sleep at night. I already know I can’t sleep when I’m with you.

The voice mails I listened to this morning (my cell phone battery died last nite and altho I plugged it in, I never turned it back on) had no derogatory remarks or insults or dares in it this time, but it did ask what it would take to make me open my eyes for one moment and realize what I have in him. As much as that made my jaw drop, my jaw really hit the floor when I heard “Well, I haven’t given up on you. I will see you when I get back to LA.”

My ex is scaring me. He’s been in Vegas since Thursday with some friends. I tried to maintain some sort of friendship/relationship between us, but that has proven time and time again to be impossible because of the embittered history and the still-bleeding wounds on both of us. Last week was a string of ugliness. I left my cell phone in my car last nite and when I got to it this morning to go to work, I saw I’d missed 5 calls from him between 10:30 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.. The voice mails he left were insulting in parts, bittersweet in others. I was hanging out with coworkers at Outback Steakhouse after work today and missed 3 more of his calls at 7:30p.m.. These voice mails are even scarier. From phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, he’d switch gears from “I miss you, I love you” type stuff to spiteful, cold accusations that I seem to be doing better judging by my outgoing voice mail message and that it’s “shit [I] play”, that he hopes I enjoy doing some guy while I’m thinking about him, that he’s proud of me for walking away from him and yet disappointed in me because “I know it’s bullshit.” And how he forgives me for everything I did to him. (!?!?!) And then he urges me in a saccharine voice to call him back. Is he kidding??? Those voice mails give me the heebie jeebies and I want to go into a witness protection program, I certainly am not tempted to call him back! The ironic part is that if he knew this is the reaction I’m having to his – in my opinion, passive-aggressive, mentally unstable – voice mails, he’d be highly offended. I can hear him now. “You ACTUALLY think I’m gonna hurt you? When have I EVER caused you physical harm?”

I got permission to blog about this.

Our criminal trial got a late verdict today and we had 4 deputies backing up my bailiff when I read the verdicts. One deputy is a friend of mine and he was showing an overtimer, a stranger to me, the ins and outs of our courthouse. The following conversation took place (unbeknownst to me until just now) as the courtroom was being prepared for taking the verdicts.

New guy: She’s really pretty.
Friend guy: Wait till you see her stand up.
[Right then I was instructed by the judge to go get something, so I left my desk and walked out the back door of the courtroom. In my fitted sweater and plaid skirt.]
New guy: Whoa! Very nice! [or something to that effect, I may have misquoted a bit] How’d you mess that up?
Friend guy: I’m an idiot.

Later on down in lock-up, apparently there was another conversation about me between these guys and another regular bailiff in the building.
Regular bailiff: She recently broke up with this doctor she’d been seeing. You single?
Friend guy: Yeah, but we’ve just been really good friends for too long.

The reason why the 2nd conversation is notable is…I never told that bailiff about my social status. He’d heard thru “the grapevine.” How come I try to plant the rumor seed that I’m a lesbian and that didn’t take (I even went so far as to hit on our waitress in front of everybody at a restaurant/bar), and I break up and everybody knows?