cindy's world

I was listening to a radio talk show on my drive in to work this morning. The celebrity gossip is that Pamela Anderson is now dating Kanye West. They were out clubbing over the weekend at a celebrity event and at one point, Kanye affectionately rubbed her back. She said to him, “The fun stuff’s in the front.” She is 10 years his senior, and apparently has younger competition. While Pam and Kanye were dancing, Ashley Olsen reached out and pinched his butt.

The very practical on-air male personality said hesitantly, “That was a weird night.” I agree. The celebrity world is so bizarre.

The more flippant female on-air personality asked, “Wait. Who’s Kanye West again?” They told her he’s the guy who sang the song “Gold Digger.” To refresh her recollection, they played the opening of the song.

[Jamie Foxx]
She take my money when I’m in need
Yea she’s a trifflin friend indeed
Oh she’s a gold digga way over town
That digs on me

[Chorus:]
(She did me wrong)
Now I ain’t sayin she a gold digger (When I’m need)
But she ain’t messin wit no broke nigga
(She did me wrong)
Now I ain’t sayin she a gold digger (When I’m need)
but she ain’t messin wit no broke nigga
get down girl go head get down (I gotta leave)
get down girl go head get down (I gotta leave)
get down girl go head get down (I gotta leave)
get down girl go head

The very catchy percussion ending each line doing the boom, boom, ba-boom was still hanging in the air when the female personality said, “Great. I’m seeing Pamela Anderson’s breasts now when I hear this song. Everybody see Pam Anderson’s boobs when ya hear this?” And I did. Gargantuan famous pink vinyl-clad boobs bobbing along to the boom, boom, ba-boom.

I wanna gouge my mental eyes out.

I’m starving. Mr. W reminded me a few minutes ago that I’d left a container of my mom’s big bone stew in his fridge from the weekend. I started salivating. I love munching on big bones. My mom had saved that big pork bone for me, I haven’t had a good pork bone stew for a long time. She’d warned me to eat it alone in front of the TV or something, and never in front of someone whose opinion of me matters. However, what can I do about that now? I can’t run over to Mr. W’s house, grab the container, drive home, eat the bone, and still make it to jujitsu on time. Or, Mr. W proposed, I can just go over and skip jujitsu.

Arrrrrrgh. Big bone? Or jujitsu? Well, I can go to jujitsu anytime, but that bone will go to waste if it sits there in his fridge any longer. And yet I don’t want to gross him out. He already said the bone looks pretty gross in the container.

What to do, what to do? Big bone? Jujitsu?

Well, I am totally sore from yesterday’s abs during jujitsu, and I did a 32-minute hill run at lunch that almost killed me.

Big bone, here I come! (Oh, and seeing Mr. W is nice, too… =P …But I wouldn’t be going over if he could figure out a way to teleport that container of bone and broth to me.)

Reading Wilco’s recent blog post about being sick from too much fried food, I was reminded that I had a terrible combination of food yesterday for dinner.

I’m not going to eat after 6:30p anymore, so we’re looking at the small window of time between when I get home after work to when I have to leave for 6:45p jujitsu. Since I also want to cut out fast food, I did a last fast food meal and went to the Pizza Hut Express drive-thru on my way home from work. I ate a personal-size supreme pizza on the drive, and instantly got acid reflux. When I got home, I thought I should supplement my bad food with something healthy, and also something that will hopefully quelch my acid indigestion. So oatmeal it was. After eating the oatmeal, I realized that I had no fruits or vegetables in my meal. So I ate like 3 sheets of straight seaweed, nori, unseasoned. It wasn’t the best nori I’ve had, and it didn’t even envelop sushi, but hey, it’s a vegetable, right?

I was just glad I didn’t throw up in jujitsu yesterday. No one would’ve understood what I had in my stomach.

I realized last nite that all the rebates from the purchase of my mother’s xmas present (laptop, printer, wireless router) expire on the 24th of this month. What the hell?! They require that your purchase be made between Dec 19 and Dec 24, and they make the rebates expire on Jan 24?! Who has time the month after xmas to cut out all those stupid cardboard proofs of purchase and collect all the receipts to mail to all these companies?

To make matters worse, there’re 2 rebates per product. That’s 6 separate forms I gotta send in to 6 different addresses with 6 different requirements. The laptop’s rebates are easy enough. But the router and the printer are only rebate-able with the purchase of the laptop, and the forms are totally confusing as to what form pertains to what product, and it has the barcode for the laptop AND the rebate product on the form, and then it’s vague about whether it needs me to send in UPC symbols from just the product getting the rebate, or also for the laptop to prove that I bought both together. And some rebates take photocopies of receipts and UPC symbols whereas others require the originals. Unfortunately, I only have 1 original UPC cut-out for the printer and it looks like both printer rebates ask for originals.

There are 6 piles of forms with their corresponding cardboard cutouts and photocopies, and on the photocopies, I’d even labeled what product they pertain to and what rebate it’s for. To err on the side of caution, I also included a copy of the laptop UPC with the products that only give rebate with the simultaneous purchase of the laptop.

I hate mail-in rebates now. Hate them. Why are they so vague?! Why do they make them conflicting?! Why do they require a college graduate degree in order to get a stupid $350 back?!

Jujitsu was funny today. We were so worked on abs that there were literally puddles of sweat on the mat where those of us less conditioned (or more moist) had strained. Okay, it was the older men, especially the ones new to jujitsu. One of the girls that I’m friendly with was walking toward me after the floor warmups, and she inadvertently stepped in a puddle. Instantly her face crumpled and she walked off the mat to the edge of the carpet and started scraping her foot on the carpet, while whimpering at me and saying, “Oh, ew, ew, ew…” I could not help but laugh. I had never seen her, Ms. Former Air Force Girl Vanessa, whimper like that. She said she was picturing sweat mixed with hair product and it was all squishy and cold. We both gagged.

Then later, the instructor was trying to fine-tune a new girl’s arm-twisting skill, and I was the next one up to be twisted after a punch. He was telling her to grab my hand and pull, then go into a quick twist so that it’d turn my shoulder downward as I turned counter-clockwise from the arm pressure. “You’re supposed to whip ’em with the arm,” he said. When she tried it on me, I deliberately and almost exaggerately whipped my body counter-clockwise to let her know her motion was correct, altho she didn’t have enough control to actually whip me, and then I did a forward fall. The instructor told her she did good, and I hopped off the mat to the end of the line to Vanessa, whispering as I got close to her, “I whipped myself.” I was all proud of myself for helping the new girl out, when I saw that Vanessa looked kinda shocked. “You what?!” she whispered back. “I whipped myself,” I repeated, and then realized what she thought I’d said. We both tried hard not to laugh out loud. “Yeah,” I confessed, “that puddle you stepped in earlier was actually me. Why is this class so LONG?!”

About an hour later, at a water break, I was standing about a foot away from the aforementioned puddle that was still there. Josh started walking toward me chatting with another guy as I tilted my water bottle into my mouth, and right when I got a mouthful of water, I realized he was about to step in the puddle, but I couldn’t say anything. I watched his face carefully as I swallowed. No expression change whatsoever. He did, however, meet my eyes when he saw that I had this huge smile on my face. “I was gonna warn you before you stepped in that, Josh, but I had just taken a swig of water.” “Yeah, thanks for the warning. That was — cold and squishy,” he said, still without any changes in expression. I guess guys just handle these things better.

I’m blogging from my desktop PC, which I’ve probably turned on twice since I got my laptop. The wireless mouse wasn’t responding, and I went all over the house in search of AAA batteries. I have AA disposables, AA rechargeables, even a few Ds (why the heck did I ever buy Ds?!), but no AAA. So pathetically, my DirecTV remote control is lying face down on the desk next to me, the disected victim of a desperate soul. But I had to do it — I have to email something from this C: drive to my work account because my home printer is out of ink. I really need to go shopping for supplies.

We’re doing a criminal trial, and I’m half listening to testimony but keeping myself busy processing more divorces.

Is there a sick irony that the 2 self-addressed stamped envelopes a petitioner included in her divorce papers, in which envelopes I’m to send the final divorce documents back to the parties, have postage stamps showing a hand holding a big bouquet of flowers with the word “L O V E” written across the bottom in big block letters? I wonder if the petitioner (the person who filed for divorce) thought anything when she put the stamps on these envelopes. I’m probably just thinking too much, as usual. But if it were me, and let’s say the respondent, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, cheated on me, the only way a “love” stamp would’ve been on the envelopes would’ve been deliberately, as if to scoff, “Love, ha! If you knew how to love you wouldn’t be receiving this in the mail, ya jackass.”

Wilco told me in the wee hours this morning that I need to stop hanging out with people who are so down and disillusioned about marriage. Even if I started hanging out exclusively with happily married or optimistic-about-marriage people, this basketful of divorce cases alone would make me cringe. Sometimes I get lucky. I get a phone call from a divorcee inquiring about the status of their divorce case in my courtroom, and I get an earful of how he/she got screwed by the soon-to-be-ex.

Sad. It’s just sad.

I fell asleep watching TV, and woke up to The Mask of Zorro. I watched it till the end, when Dodo looked up at me and meowed. I patted his head, looked at his black coloring over white. I used to call him the BatCat because his black fur goes from the back of his head over his little ears to the tip of his black nose like Batman’s mask. Now I noticed how his back is black to the tip of his tail, like a cape. “Who is that masked cat?” I asked him. “It’s ZoDodo!”

I feel like poo. The 3 pieces of fried chicken I ate at 5p are sitting in my stomach like 3 fatty overcaloried, oversodiumed rocks. Why do I always feel like poo late at nite? I wanna go to the gym but when I feel this yucky, I’m extremely antisocial. Maybe I’ll just do some crunches, pushups and lunges or something. Actually, now’s a good time to reinflate the balance ball.

I gotta remember to work on the jujitsu beginners’ flyer when I have access to a printer.

I just got back from the chambers of another department, in which we were all gathered for a birthday celebration for one of the judges. The topic of Brokeback Mountain came up because director Ang Lee had just won Best Director in the Golden Globe Awards this weekend, and quite a few of the judges had seen the movie. One judge who had not seen the movie said that he’s waiting for the sequel. “The sequel?” I asked. “Yeah, two cowgirls,” he said.

My judge just told me that Michelle Williams (“Jen” from the WB Series Dawson’s Creek), who played Ennis’s wife in Brokeback Mountain, was actually married to Heath Ledger in real life. And then I remembered. I did hear that Michelle Williams was pregnant with Heath Ledger’s child, but I didn’t know who Heath Ledger was at the time. I wonder if they met in that movie, or whether they were already together when they agreed to take on the project.

My staff hasn’t seen the movie, and it sounds like they won’t. It’s too bad that one’s social queasiness robs them of the appreciation of, well, just a really good story.

There’s more than one way to greet a new January morning. You can leap out of the bed to embrace the day, go outside and lean into the balcony, take in an eyeful of the peach and blue color changes in the sky, let the crispness of the air pull on your skin until it puckers and your nerves awaken with an exciting shiver. Add a fresh-brewed cup of coffee to that and you have Mr. W’s mornings.

Or you can do it my way. With the covers drawn up to my eyelids, I stubbornly refused to surrender the pocket of warmth in which I was nestled in fetal position. A grouchy voice in my head observed that people should not be up and about when it’s still cold and dark outside…it’s just unnatural, it’s still night for gosh sakes. In response to Mr. W’s politically correct way of asking if I’m getting up, I announced that don’t plan on getting up — ever. He said, in a tone way too understanding to be taken seriously, that okay, I can stay home and in bed and he’ll see me in 9 hours when he gets back from work, and then he turned and walked back to his kitchen.

The only thing that gave me the strength to get out of bed was the anticipation of putting on my big warm cushiony slippers to pad around the house in and finally, driving in those slippers back home to see my Dodo.