cindy's world

Today at lunch, I learned that I can run 3 miles without socks on.

Five minutes later, I learned that I can not run 3.25 miles without socks on.

It’s really too bad, because for once I have enough energy, time, and MP3 power to hit a solid 4 miles. “Murphy’s Law,” my court reporter told me in the locker room. Oh well. At least I ran something, 3.3 miles of it, plus 0.2 miles of a cool-down walk. When I realized I had neglected to bring socks after I was parked in the gym parking lot, I contemplated turning around and returning to work, or grabbing a bite. But I had already missed yesterday’s lunchtime workout to have lunch with my coworkers, so I can’t skip any more lunchtime workouts this week. (New rule: I can only miss 1 evening [jujitsu] workout and 1 noontime workout a week.)

I limped back to work just now. I have a blister on my right foot right at the side of the arch, where these particular shoes happen to connect with my foot. *sigh*

Today, as I sit here watching the time tick away while waiting for the last of 4 attorneys to arrive so that we can take the verdicts on our 3-defendant gang-related armed robbery case, I am grateful for the cut-and-paste function which I applied in the many minute orders for today’s proceedings.

What the heck? I wrote a whole entry and it appeared to save but then it totally disappeared! Ugh, I hate doing the same post again, it never reads quite the same. And the constant phone calls and interruptions! Grrr.

Jordan copied and posted my “Iris” entry on her blog, and I read it on there through the eyes of people who don’t know me and have never read my blog. And boy, I sound vain and conceited in the I-tie-everything-in-to-my-looks part.

People who don’t know me don’t know that I was anorexic for years in high school. It was all about trying — and failing — to get myself to look a certain way or fit into a certain size. The more I failed, the more I obsessed about getting there. Success and happiness in life became defined by losing a pound; failures in life were gaining 3 pounds. My weight was the end-all to everything. If someone was mean to me, it was because I’m fat. If someone had a crush on me, it was because I’d recently dropped a few pounds. That’s how it was in my head. Pulling on a fat roll frustrated me to the point of tears. I had started defining who I am by my appearances, whether good or bad, and not not based on who I actually was.

Of course I blame my body’s present inability to respond to diet and exercise on anorexia. I have to work 5 times as hard to get a fraction of the results. Any normal person with my workout and diet regimen would be slender, toned, with a six-pack. Instead, I sit here, a chubby girl, always battling battling battling. My metabolism’s ready to switch off at any time and turn into fat-storing mode whenever I skip a meal. It sucks. I have frustrated many a good personal trainer, who have encouraged me to get my thyroid tested (I’m borderline hypothyroidism, too.)

I think it does help to be with a man who thinks I’m beautiful whether I gain or lose 5 pounds (at least, he sounds sincere in expressing his attraction to me), and realizing that over all the obsessing about physique, I value my mind more than I do my physical appearance. Maybe I can never get down to 22% body fat. Maybe I just have to be okay with 30% body fat, as long as I’m healthy. My heart, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, everything have invariably tested in the “very good” range.

Or maybe I should just get liposuction and let my body maintain its same equilibrium now, just with 10-20 pounds less fat hanging off me.

I was too tired to go to jujitsu yesterday evening, so I decided to run my errands after work. I stopped by the bank, upgraded my checking account to this great new free checking program they told me about just before I ordered checks, and thereby ordered my free checks (now I’m so glad that stupid mail order check company screwed up). Then I went to a local haircut place. There were 3 people waiting, 1 in the chair, and there appeared to be 1 person cutting hair. I left. Mr. W suggested I call the upscale salon by his place that had me on the wait list all weekend. I did, and they said they were completely booked up except for…oh…a 6pm appointment. “What time is it now?” I asked. “5:20.” “I’ll be there.” I grabbed my laptop and tax stuff and drove 20 miles down there, arriving 5 minutes late.

I pretty much told the lady to do whatever she thinks would look good cuz my hair was completely grown out, anyway. I told her the backup was to cut it really short, above my shoulders. She didn’t want to do that, she said she liked my hair long, thought about trimming an inch or two, but then opted for about 3.5 inches and relayered everything. She trimmed the bangs a little, left them long and sweeping across my forehead, blew the layers outward to give a very retro-70s go-go-girl flip. It was really cute. Of course, when I do my own hair, it’ll flip inward, not outward. The first person to notice today was my trial DA. So I guess it isn’t very extreme of a cut, but it is a nice refreshing change.

While I was at the salon, Mr. W and his daughter (who had been having dinner at a Red Robin nearby) stopped by the front glass wall and waved and pointed and mimed. Yes, mimed. Mr. W mimed walking down stairs with his daughter piggyback on his back, and almost couldn’t get back up from the squat position. “You know them?” the lady doing my hair asked. “No,” I replied.

Then I went to Mr. W’s house where I did most of my taxes. It was a very productive evening.

I didn’t get my haircut. The salon I’d wanted to go to was so booked up that they put me on the waiting list for the entire weekend and never called me to go in. This actually makes me want to get a haircut MORE. I may go do my old thing where I walk into any random cheap place and say, “Do whatever you think will look good. I’ll trust you.” I don’t have a hangup about hair and never understood people who cry over getting what they feel is a bad haircut. Whatever the salon does, I can fix on my own, and besides, it’s just hair! If I can’t fix it, it’ll grow back! Who cares?! When it grows out in a few weeks, no one would remember (if they even noticed in the first place) an old haircut.

P.S. I just re-read my last entry about the movie Iris. I had some grandiose ideas but had some trouble expressing them, and that last entry was barely coherent. *sigh* So much for good intentions.

Just finished watching Iris. Mr. W had put the DVD in while we were still having brunch, so that the main menu played repeatedly. In a sunlit spot in a white hallway of what appeared to be a convalescent home or a hospice, the seasoned actress Judi Dench danced alone with an invisible partner, drifting contentedly to soft orchestral music. The blank wall on the left showed, like a superimposed slideshow, a misty image of a young woman (Kate Winslet) swimming underwater naked, reaching out with her arms, and then a man’s arm joined and locked fingers with hers as the two swam toward each other. The blank wall on the right showed an equally fuzzy picture of an aging Judi Dench swimming alone underwater in a black swimsuit. “Ugh,” I sighed wistfully at the music during the main menu display I’d described, “This is like On Golden Pond meets The Notebook.” And that was exactly how the movie went as it unfolded.

Stevie Wonder had directed me to note the two lectures Iris Murdoch gives in the movie, which “are brief extracts” of “the promise of everything she has to offer.” The first speech Iris gives in the film was during what appeared to be a benefit dinner for her college. She stands and tells the audience of the “importance of education.” To her, education is the key to happiness, because education allows one the means to realize that one’s happy. I disagreed with this instantly. I think of those people less educated or less intelligent, and the ease of their contentment. I think of those aware of the boundless possibilities of the universe, who realize the insignificance of their achievements and the distance between their finite personal probabilities and the infinite potential imaginable, even those potentials past the limits of our imaginations and perceptibility, and I understand why Einstein was manic-depressive, and why the higher a person’s IQ, the more likely he/she is to be diagnosed with depression. I remember my court reporter telling me about her new appreciation for our lives here in the U.S. after she went abroad to Panama and watched the local poor carry water baskets on their heads, sweating and straining as they bring their family’s only source of water from the river to their village. She said that these Panamanians’ lives are so hard and they have it so bad that it makes her feel like she has nothing to complain about in her life of luxury in this country. And I had asked her then, “What makes you think their life is hard? If that woman’s entire goal is to bring that water back, then she has done it, and she is successful to the full definition of that success, and she may be happy because her family’s needs are met. I don’t think she is dissatisfied with her life, or unhappy about what we perceive to be their limitations.” That water-carrying woman will never know the stress of meeting a publishing deadline, or fear losing her job for not logging enough billable hours this month. She will not lose years of data due to a computer crash, and the stocks mean little more than fresh meat or labor animals to her.

The movie Iris depicts the decline of novelist/professor Iris Murdoch’s life (along with her husband, a professor John Bayley), as she is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. The storytelling of her mental deterioration is broken frequently by vignettes and snippets of her early years from the time she meets John to the time they become a serious couple. The scenes in which the previously bright, ultra-coherent Iris begins to first be confused by Alzheimer’s were especially terrifying to me. Iris defines thought through words. Without words, she has said, how does one think? As much as I am not a particular subscriber to the theory of limiting thoughts to words, the fact that Iris does, and seeing her lose her words while slowly and simultaneously losing cohesion in her thoughts, made me unravel some of my own fears and associations.

For the first time, it occurred to me that something may be more of a sense of identity to me than looks. Having tied my self-esteem, identity, social behavior and just about everything else to my looks since high school, I had not realized until this moment that I would be more lost without my thoughts than I would without my looks. All this time when my primary physical goals orbited around getting into a particular physical shape, maintaining or getting back into a certain dress size, hating myself for the fat rolls, loving myself for muscle tone, being oversensitive to the way people treat me and attributing their responses to me to how I look to them, being fearful of body changes that come with age, gravity and pregnancy, it had not occurred to me that there’s a reason why when asked what my greatest fear is, I had always answered it with “becoming ignorant,” or “being unaware,” and never with “getting fat.” My mind is who I am. My opalescent thoughts, my ever-changing opinions, my constant analysis and self-analysis. Without that as the nourishing soil, the roots of my physical identity will not have any substance to grip, and the flower of my person will stop burgeoning and wither away in the cruelty of the external (natural) forces.

For Iris, the inability to form her thoughts into solid shapes and express them in cohesive words while still having the awareness to see her mental shortcomings must have at once been terrifying and hope-draining. To have the glimmer of initial thought extinguish before your very eyes as you reach out and grasp for it, when you’re accustomed to nurturing and fanning the flames…it’s like Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon;” it’s like, in paraphrasing Iris’s words, powerlessly sailing into darkness. After an exam during the early stages of her disease, Iris tells the doctor that when she loses a thought or gets lost, sometimes it terrifies her, and then, sometimes it doesn’t. And she doesn’t know which is worse because not being scared of it must mean that it’s winning. To which the doctor responded tactlessly (my opinion), “It will win.”

If present life on this planet is how we define ourselves, to be aware of our own mortality and to see the imminent approach of death is probably one of the most frightening things imaginable. If thought and language is how Iris defines herself, to be aware of her swift loss of the ability to think and express herself in language must be equally frightful.

There are glimpses into Iris’s early life and her, in my opinion, irresponsible hedonistic lifestyle that made me say sulkily at one point in the movie, “I don’t wanna be the Asian Irish Murdoch. Iris sucks,” which got Mr. W laughing extensively at me. But the movie, based on a book written by her husband, focuses more on their relationship in the beginning and in the end and about what happened to them, than about who Iris was. (I assume she’s deceased.) I’ve always been a believer that one’s identity does not necessarily revolve around what one does, so maybe I’m like her in mind, just not as good as justifying behavior that doesn’t adhere to a strong moral center.

And that brings up another frequent thought I entertain. Do I have the moral history I have because I am a good person with good adhesion to a good strong moral center? Or have I been good simply because the opportunities for bad have not presented themselves?

I need a break from this stuff. We’re off to a costume shop to feed our more frivolous side. Levity, here I come! *sliding out from beneath the dense cloud*

Yay! Steamed mini pork buns, green onion cake, soy bean dish, and hot & sour soup at Supreme Dragon, 4pm, as my only meal of the day.

We missed Bingo as the computer-related business took longer than expected at my parents’. So we just hung out with them for a few hours afterwards watching real survivor stories on the Explorer or Discover station or whatever it was.

We were supposed to meet my parents for dinner at Supreme Dragon, but they had called me an hour before meeting time to tell me they won’t be able to make it because they were with some friends at Sports Chalet, which is totally out of the way for them. “I wonder what my parents could want at Sports Chalet,” I said to Mr. W upon hanging up the phone with my mom. When we walked in my parents’ front door, the first thing I saw on the stairs was a Sports Chalet license plate frame that says, “I’D RATHER BE RUNNING.” “Neither of you run!” I said, laughing at my parents. “We got that for you, it was free at Sports Chalet” they said. Oh. “Thanks! Lemme take off my $30 UCLA Alumni license plate frame and put this on.” I guess I’m gonna put it on the front license plate. My mom showed me another Sports Chalet license plate frame that says “I’D RATHER BE SHOPPING.” My mom said she got that for her friend. I said, “Is that why you guys went to Sports Chalet? To get free license plate frames?” “No, I also got this free,” my dad said, holding up a 2006 fishing guide. My parents are SO Asian.

I’ve just completed my 8th workout since Monday, I’m sore all over from running, jujitsu and weightlifting, and you know what I really, really want? A really savory pizza and Taiwanese food. Talk about unhealthy.

I wonder if I can get the combination together when I hang out with my gym trainee after work today for drinks.

Lots of stuff going on this weekend. Some weekends it’s static, and then other weekends it’s an old friend’s b-day shindig in Venice, getting to my parents’ to transfer data on the taxes I’d completed last nite for them (at past 1am!), Mr. W’s gonna install a wireless printer something-or-other for them, meeting up with Vicky for some Burke Williams massage and pampering, and hanging out with the W. I probably missed something. Oh, Bingo! And all these are happening at the same time. “Stevie Wonder” also loaned me a DVD of Iris, the Iris Murdoch story, so I’ll finally know what he’s talking about when he calls me the Asian Iris Murdoch.

I’m so glad I already cleaned my house.

Me: So I’m gonna get my hair chopped this weekend.
Mr. W: Oh! You should make an appointment now! Go call them now so they have room for you this weekend.
Me: I can’t, I left [the stylist’s] card in my car.
Mr. W: Shit!

This is the man who almost dumped me when his daughter wanted her long hair in an updo for a dance with tendrils hanging down the back and I suggested she can just trim a few tendrils and curl them at the back of her head, and he freaked out at any mention of “cut” and his daughter’s hair in the same sentence.

I was truly torn yesterday at the close of the business day about whether I should go to the DAs’ thing, or to jujitsu, or do some hybrid of both (for which I’d have to sacrifice alcohol with the DAs). The timing would be pretty tight because I’d have to leave the DAs in about an hour to make it to jujitsu. And then the answer came when a coworker, the one who took care of fuzzy wuzzy Dodo bear (a.k.a. the cat with the cone) the week I was on the cruise, came and asked for a favor. Her car was still in the shop, and she needed a ride home, and her home is less than a mile from my home. I grasped that as divine intervention, and left for home with her. I got to see her new townhouse and meet her adopted pregnant kitty, a very pretty and petite silver tabby whom I became fast friends with, and we hung out about half an hour until I left to go home and change for jujitsu.

I was so glad I went! Our instructor shut the door and gave us a “secret blackbelt workout.” Every school has their secret moves passed down only to the serious, very advanced students (and in some beliefs, only to the first-born son of the instructor), and we got to play with 3 of these moves. Pretty lethal stuff. I also told the instructor that just that day, my turn for picking vacation time came up and to my shock, the 1st week of November was available (which I immediately snatched), which means I can join the class for the week-long jujitsu training in Hawaii this year! Our school originated from Hawaii, so he’s still got connections there with some of the other instructors who were students back when he was. We’re going to have a clinic for 3 of the 7 days to work out, learn Hawaiian massage, and Hawaiian stick fighting. The other 4 days are ours to goof off and explore, plus there’s a banquet somewhere in the middle with an authentic Hawaiian luau (not the commercial stuff they give tourists, but a real, private one). They’re hooking us up with a beachside hotel and a good rate on flights. Unfortunately, it turns out when my instructor said “the first week of November,” he didn’t mean the first calendar week. He meant the first 7 days of November, which begins on a Wednesday, and my vacation days go by calendar weeks and I don’t have the 2nd week off from work. Once we figured that out, he immediately called Hawaii and changed the banquet from Sunday to Saturday so I can still attend and they’re going to shift the workouts some to accomodate me. I’m grateful they’ll do that, so I’m thinking of flying in early (since I have the whole week off) and doing my own thing first, then ending the vacation with the training, whereas the other students are going to begin their vacation with training and end on goofing off. He even made arrangements with the other Hawaii-based instructor to pick me up at the aiport. “So you have to wear a shirt that says ‘Cindy,’ he joked. “You got any of those?” I said, “That’s my whole wardrobe!”

I’ve never been to Hawaii. I can’t wait!

There are days I’m too tired or lazy to go to jujitsu, but there is not one time when I made myself go that I was not laughing and really glad that I was there.