cindy's world

Yesterday after work, I stopped by home, ate a big bowl of my mom’s homemade stir-fried rice noodles while watching a couple episodes of “Friends” on satellite TV, vacuumed during the commercials. Then I washed my face, got changed for jujitsu, and took off.

Jujitsu was not overcrowded for that class for once. Instead of the regular 30 or so students, we only had 15, so there was room on the mat to do stuff. A student jokingly asked me whether a red mark on my neck was a hickey. Of course it wasn’t, but now it drew some attention. A few minutes later, the young instructor pointed out a hickey on the accuser’s neck and said, “What’s THIS? And you’re making fun of Cindy!” She laughed and said, “Oh, I forgot about that! Damn.” We finished off the class with some free sparring, which I’ve always enjoyed. I got some good pointers from another student and got quite a few hits in against my opponents.

After we (Vanessa and I) got home, I changed the cat litter and started laundry. Then we took a shower (no, not together), got comfy and turned the big screen on the KABC show “What About Brian” at 10pm at college roommie Diana’s recommendation. I was disappointed to see the actor who played “Kevin” (I think that’s the character’s name) on “7th Heaven” on that show instead of a cute guy that Diana promised me. I hope that’s not who she was referring to. We then changed the channel to the WE! network and watched “Honey, We’re Killing the Kids,” which is a reality-based show where a nutritionist evaluates a household’s lifestyle and puts the data into a computerized program which shows the parents simulated time-lapse photography of the kids from their present age to age 40 if they continue living as they do. In 3 weeks, the family makes lifetyle, diet and exercise changes and they are re-evaluated and the program does the sequence of photos again to see how the kids would be different in the future if they keep up with the improvements. This we watched with the lights out and a bunch of lit votive candles in colored glass cups that I placed on the TV and around the living room. We also lit aromatherapy scented candles and gels heated over a tea light. The place was very girl-ized and very pretty. Then we called it a night and I took the clothes out of the dryer and brought them upstairs to fold and put away while watching the 11:30p episode of “Friends.” I fell asleep with the TV on and a sugared vanilla scented candle lit that Grace gave me some birthdays ago, and when I woke up this morning, the wax had melted and resolidified on my dresser. I plucked the wax off and resolved to burn it in a half-empty tealight cup or something so it doesn’t go to waste.

I methodically kept my brain devoid of analytical thought in my productive evening. I probably appear manic, but short of taking psychotropic drugs that dull my affect so that I just don’t care anymore, controlling the roots of the thoughts is all I can do. I suppose I could can the thought ability as well, but I don’t want to dope myself up. I don’t want to cushion myself with chemicals to keep from feeling the lows because I won’t feel the highs, either. I wonder how long I need to keep this up before it’s adopted and I’ve rewired myself back to normalcy, or if it’s even possible to recover from this miswiring. The problem with caring is that you’re gonna feel so you’re gonna hurt. The problem with not caring is that you don’t feel anything and you detach from everyone. I wish I could figure out how to keep the highs but cushion myself against the lows.

Today I felt so good at not feeling depressed that I probably went a little too high and got delirious. But just for a brief moment. And then I slowly sank back down a bit. I’m probably somewhere in the middle, or just a bit below the middle right now. Maybe I am manic-depressive. I’m just a wildly swinging person trying to figure out how to get logic to dictate my emotions, and hoping that by controlling the stimuli coming in, that the exposed oversensitive nerves will heal over and give normal levels of sensation again.

We are now on our 10th consecutive week of trial (many different trials, civil and criminal, all back-to-back). The new trial we’re doing which came in yesterday brought in a DA whom I’m on friendly terms with. Today, he asked during break, “So how’s Cindy’s World?” “It’s all right,” I said. He said he’s told a few people about this blog and referred them to it because he thinks it’s so cool that I do this; to have it set up online and to put myself out there daily. He said he’d want to do something like this, but he doesn’t have the balls (his words). I said it’s not a matter of having the guts to write publicly as much as needing it for therapy. He said still, it’s all honest and candid, and he admires that I can expose myself like this.

The compliments made me feel good, because even tho he didn’t compliment my writing (haha), he complimented my character. A small portion of it, at least. He hasn’t seen the blog in the past few months so he has no idea how much more candid and soul-baring and lick-my-bleeding-heart it’s been. And I don’t have the heart to tell him the dark turn this site has taken as of late.

Sometimes I’m so focused on people who are thorns in my life that I don’t see the ones who are the roses. There are a couple of thorns, sure. But there are dozens and dozens of roses of all different colors and sizes in all aspects of my life. Even a furry black and white one at home who greets me by the door when I come home.

At jujitsu yesterday, Vanessa asked, “Did you hear Dodo this morning?” I sure did. He wasn’t doing his polite greeting “meow.” He was doing his loud, deep echoing “WAUL! WAAAAAAAUUUULLL!!” I had a hard time getting up yesterday morning and laid in bed 45 minutes after my alarm went off. Dodo walked in and out of my room caterwauling at me every so often. I know he was telling me to get out of bed. Turned out he was doing the same to Vanessa, who was also later than usual. We laughed when we exchanged stories and figured out that my cat was really saying, “What the hell! Where is everybody! Get up already!” He now waits in the middle of the upstairs hallway between my room and Vanessa’s room as we get ready in the mornings, just so he’s fair. He used to wait in my bathroom as I put on my face, or just outside my bathroom and bedroom doors, and walk me downstairs and he’ll have breakfast as I pat him goodbye and leave. Now, he waits for both of us and walks us both down and sends us off separately. What a sweetie.

I keep seeing Navy Girl Vanessa’s Cheesecake Factory take-home clear pastic container in the fridge with a small chunk of cheesecake in it. It’s from our take-home Cheesecake Factory dinner the first night Vanessa moved in. She bought us each a slice of Godiva chocolate cheesecake, each in its own plastic container. The first week and a half or so, every time I opened the fridge I thought, “For someone who asked me how I could possibly only eat half of it and stop when it’s sooo good, she sure couldn’t bring herself to finish this.” Then the following week and a half, I just got used to seeing it there. Today in jujitsu, I brought it up to her and asked, “That cheesecake in the fridge isn’t from the first night, is it?” I know she’d taken her boyfriend to Cheesecake Factory after she’d gone with me and introduced him to the restaurant and to the Godiva chocolate cheesecake, so maybe it’s a slice from a later time. She looked at me and said, “That’s yours!” Huh?! “Yeah,” she continued, “I brought mine to work and finished it the next day at lunch!” I suddenly vaguely recalled eating the cheesecake the day after the dinner, and somehow finding the self-control to not finish the whole thing. And then it was my turn to carry Vanessa across the mat on my back, bounce her on my back and throw her.

When we got back home, she was hanging out in her room petting my cat and talking on the phone with her boyfriend. I walked in with the container in one hand and a fork in the other, and said with my mouth full, “It’s chewier, but still pretty good.”

So the moral of this story is, go to the Cheesecake Factory and get yourself a slice of Godiva chocolate cheesecake already! It’ll make you happy AND get you over your depression. I know I’ve written about this before.

You wanna know why people fall into depression? Or rather, let themselves get depressed instead of pulling out? Because it’s easier. There’s something that clicks in the mind where you just want to feel sorry for yourself and you want to curl up and be defeated, because you’re tired from the fighting and it’s too hard to resist. You don’t see the point of fighting it, and the thought of faking a smile or acting social when you don’t feel social just takes too much energy and effort. The face is too heavy to lift. The drooped mouth, heavy cheeks, tired eyes.

And if you’ve been depressed before, you’re already tired from the last fight, so it’s easier to fall into it again since you’ve been there before. It’s familiar. The last time you just curled up and leaned over in the dark by yourself, so this time when you get that same hopeless feeling where everything just seems so large and overwhelming and you feel powerless, you automatically draw into emotional fetal position again, getting ready for the lean and for the drowning.

Okay, that’s the best way I can describe it right now. So for those of you who think depression is a weakness, it is. But not in the way you assume.

P.S. A photographer friend is emailing me and made a joke about how I can buy his book. I wrote back, “What’s your book about? How to take pictures?” He wrote, “Yeah right, something like that. ‘How to take pictures of your inner feelings.’ ” My response, which he didn’t understand, was, “Gee. Are there any bubbling murky slimy tar pits I can take a picture of right now?”

Why am I documenting this? Like it’d help with the field of psychology or something? Who wants to read THIS shit?!

When I was in high school, this guy I was friends with (and whom I had a big crush on who ended up breaking my heart for a friend, but that’s a whole other Oprah) said to me that he wished some big emotional disaster would befall him so that he could get depressed. I asked why he would want to go through that. He said, “Because. Being depressed is so artistic.” I thought it was an asinine thing to say back then. But I know that he’s right in theory. Sometimes to drown in emotion is the muse people need to write amazing poetry or music, or to draw passionate images. Creativity (or creation, rather) is often the only outlet that keeps me sane.

The irony, of course, is that when I was really young, I would watch soap operas or TV shows like “Beverly Hills, 90210” and wish my life were more interesting like that. I would watch boy/girl drama unfold with my friends and I’d follow the events and all the he-said, she-saids, sometimes even participate in someone else’s issues, with fascination and envy. I would read about characters in books or watch actors on TV being so stressed when they had to choose between multiple suitors. And I remember actually thinking, “That’s so cool! I wish I had a bunch of boys who liked me. I wouldn’t be stressed, I’d be excited!” But that was before the days of actually dating someone and having other men knocking on my door to give lavish arguments about why I should date them instead. That was before the choices of men got complicated beyond a simple and obvious “this one’s better because he’s a nice guy, and that other guy’s a big jerk.” Somehow, in my youthful, naive wishes for excitement and drama, I got just what I wished for and then I couldn’t stop the flood. And now, I’m flood-damaged and am conditioned to react to drama even tho the drama isn’t like it was.
Hell, sometimes I’m not even sure the drama is existent. But it all feels acutely real, now. My brain has been rewired. Call it post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Oh, those sweet, sweet naive days when I had no idea what a blessing it was that boys were too shallow to like me. My mom had told me, when I was a junior in high school, not to worry about the boys in school who don’t like me back. She said that there ARE guys who like girls like me, I’ll meet them eventually, and that these high school boys just aren’t suitable. She said to just be patient. I cried to Grace on the phone after finding out another one of my crushes that I had thought was going somewhere, met my friend and decided to pursue her instead. Same old story back then. She told me that boys can’t appreciate me yet, and that one day, they will. They just need to grow up first.

I think that’s why I’ve always enjoyed going up north to visit college roommie Diana and her friends so much. It’s a mixed-gender group that is just happy-go-lucky and not incestuous. We hang out, goof off, have silly battles of wits, do active stuff, and I think we really do trust each other. We trust that we’re all good people who’ve proven to be good shoulders to cry on or good sounding boards to troubleshoot with. Gosh, and I’ve only known some of them for 11 months so far. But it reminds me of high school. I’ve had a back-stabbing friend, too, but when the group hung out in high school, the chemistry was fun and simple, just like hanging out with the Northern Cal people.

I do miss high school. Wow, it’s been 12 years. Maybe in another 2 years, I’ll miss college in the same way.

Yeah, I’m okay, thanks for asking.

Sometimes being writing-oriented means that I notice a particular feeling, psychological process or event, and a mental narration starts reeling. Sometimes I write this narration down in a poem to capture the moment. It’s a snapshot of an extreme time of awareness. Since I started blogging, I write poetry less (it takes longer) and post in prose instead. I’m sure a lot of people have these moments, but most shake it off and let it pass and be forgotten. I surrender to it and let it overtake me. And then I want to describe it and document it.

This time the seed was to describe a moment, presumably the latest of many such moments when one person in a couple is made aware that the honeymoon is over for the other person, for not for the first person. When he doesn’t bother to call or show up on time because he’s hanging out with his friends; when he rolls his eyes at you while you’re in tears; when he yells at you during a discussion even though you’re calm; when you’ve asked him to do something several times to alleviate some discomfort on your part and he doesn’t do it and doesn’t acknowledge your discomfort; when he has gone from not getting enough of you to not caring whether you’re around and making plans that exclude you; when you touch him suggestively and he suddenly remembers he needs to return a phone call and gets up to do it; when he’s given 2 tickets to some event and invites a friend instead of you. Somehow you haven’t moved and yet everything has changed around you.

Nothing has happened, he didn’t turn into an ass, and yet you’re left hurt and bewildered, and other people don’t understand why. You’re not crazy. You’re likely just a romantic who’s with someone who’s, well, not.

Sometimes her eyes are wide not from surprise, but from sadness. The face is fallen, and she looks up to keep the tear from dropping. She remembers how things were, and she knows the difference all too well between then and now. She remembers the way he couldn’t keep his hands off her. She remembers the way his eyes used to appreciate her. She remembers when she used to be the sunlight on his day. Now, she makes no difference. He pulls away and leaves her, distracted by a cornucopia of other things. She knows her touch is ineffectual, her pleading look is left unread. She sits alone in darkness, feeling the cold air swirl to replace the warmth he left behind. To anyone else, him included, nothing is wrong. No one remembers like her to notice the slip, the slide downwards. She’s sorry that she notices, but she’s scared to let the memories go. It’s not about living in the past, back when she felt important and meaningful. It’s about the fear of acquiescing to mediocrity when she knows better how it could be, how it once was. Love always seems to be the quest to find what was lost.

Sometimes what people are so quick to call insecurity isn’t being needlessly paranoid of losing someone because you fear you aren’t good enough to keep that person. Sometimes what it really is, is knowing that you’ve lost your favor with someone who hasn’t lost his hold on you.

I had a gut overreaction on a small issue today. After some time has passed and I was able to calm down somewhat to evaluate the situation, I realized that the appropriate level of response to what happened should’ve been an eyeroll or an eyebrow raise. Instead, I felt the blood drain from my face, my stomach dropped and lurched inward nauseatingly and my throat and chest tightened. My obvious upset in turn made the other person defensive and he raised his voice and declared that I have no right to have a problem with this, which made things worse.

I was too upset to go to the gym at lunch, so instead I went to lunch with my gym trainee and we talked it out over some Mexican food and margaritas. She feels that no one is perfect and the fact that I’m aware of my strong overreaction is a good thing. She said we all have things that we work on about ourselves, it’s good we aren’t people who can’t admit that they have a problem. She also feels that my panic attack gut reaction is a trained response resulting from the damage left by the last relationship. Basically, my body responded to a really small thing the way it responded to huge terrible things in the last relationship. Two totally different stimuli levels between now and then drew the same heightened level of negative physiological response.

This scares the shit out of me, because if I can’t cushion myself against external stimuli better, I’m gonna be on the same roller coaster ride that I was in and nearly didn’t survive the last time. I can’t deal with that again. I don’t want to be sad and sick all the time, always at the verge of nausea and tears. I honestly don’t know if my overreactions now are a direct result of past damage, which means that with time and distance I’ll get better (hopefully), or if this is just me, just this big ball of hypersensitive drama. I’m afraid it’d be the latter one.

I talked about this with Mr. W, who feels that any response a human has to external stimuli are learned, if not from past similar situations in relationships, then from some childhood trauma when our personalities were still being formed. This gets me off the hook somewhat in the sense that I can say, “It was because my parents abandoned me when I was younger, it’s not my fault.” But it doesn’t get me off the hook in that I need to normalize my emotional responses so that I can have good relationships again.

I also don’t want to give people the excuse of, “If we made her upset, it’s not our fault. She’s just crazy and she knows that. She just trips out.”

Today, college roommie Diana told me about a mathematical formula for determining the minimum guideline age of someone to date: half your age + 7 years.

29/2 = 15
15 + 7 = 22 year-olds
She uses this to justify dating 24 year-olds. Hypothetically dating, not that she IS dating any 24 year-olds. Yet. 😉

To turn this formula around, let’s see what the maximum age I can date is.
x/2 + 7 = 29
x/2 = 22
x = 44

Okay, I’m good.

The criminal trial we currently have in our courtroom involves one count of possession of marijuana for sale. The defense attorney had heard that I was recently in Jamaica and he joked that I should be a juror in this case since I’d just been around drugs. I told him that altho other people on the cruise have talked about being offered marijuana while we were docked in Jamaica, I wasn’t and that even tho everyone says how accessible drugs are to anyone, I’ve never been offered any and have no idea where to get them. (No one believes me, by the way.) I’ve never seen anyone do drugs, either. No one I know does drugs that I know of. The defense attorney said that drug dealers know to avoid me because I look conservative and academic, and they’d be afraid that I’m an informant. Eh??? An informant for the police? I thought about it and could actually see myself refusing an offer of drugs, turning around then calling the police on my cell and telling them that some dude just tried to sell me drugs. In real life I’d likely just politely refuse and walk away.

And then the DA (another young Asian female) and I got into a conversation about how we had never seen drugs prior to working for the courts and we’d never been offered drugs. She said she attended UC Berkeley for 4 years, where liberalism is supposed to run rampant, and she’d still never been offered drugs.

“Why, are you guys offended?” asked the defense attorney.

What, we look uptight?