cindy's world

Our pro per (defendant insists on defending himself instead of thru an attorney) criminal trial is killing me. I want to gouge my own eyes out, which, incidentally, is what the defendant is charged with. (He gouged out the eye of another inmate in a local state mental hospital.)

And our jurors! The foreperson’s being a total witch, she’s causing problems, and she refuses to sign the request forms. She’d better not refuse to sign the verdicts!!

And she requested readback of testimony of EVERY WITNESS in the trial. What the hell was she doing when they were testifying?! The other jurors don’t want that kind of readback, but she’s just this controlling bossy cranky lady.

Everyone I’ve run into in the building (other DAs, other judges, other clerks, other bailiffs) have been sympathetically asking about our trial or saying they heard we have a nightmare case. Word gets around fast.

Today being the end of the second session of yoga, I am beginning to see why Mr. W wanted to take this class. He’s totally teacher’s pet!

The first class, when the instructor walked in and recognized him, she looked pleasantly surprised and said, “Oh! Nice to see you again!” He said, “Nice to see you, too. And this time I brought my girlfriend.” He introduced me to her. She said hello to me, and then said as she passed me to go to the other side of the room, “I just want you to know that you have a very good-looking man over there.” I smiled at her and I may have said, “Mm-hmm.” She continued, “I just wanna make sure you know that. He’s very good-looking.” This time I retorted, “Yeah, so he keeps telling me.” I heard Mr. W scoff in the back behind me.

Today, the class did a pose where you first kneel on both knees with your legs together, then sit back on your heels, thighs together. And then you fan your feet away from your body slightly so that your butt’s on the ground in between your upturned feet. And then you lean your upper body back so that your back’s on the ground and you’re looking at the bottoms of your feet on either side of your thighs if you look toward your knees. The instructor walked in front of Mr. W as he was in this compromising pose and announced that she was going to stand on his quads, and that he is going to enjoy it. So she stepped up. He said that it did feel good, and she said, “It’s delicious, isn’t it?” And then she looked down at him, smiled, and clarified, “For me.”

I can’t wait to see what she’s gonna do or say next week. I’ll keep you guys posted.

I miss jujitsu. Being thrown across the room by blackbelts and landing on my head was more comfortable than some of the stuff we did in this class. (Altho it’s not a beginning yoga class, as I found out after the last class. Mr. W had signed us up for the continuing class.) Did I tell you guys that she starts the class with a few reverberating “om”s, which the class joins in on, and then they sing some chant in Hindi?

It worked! Mr. W’s suggestion for an impromptu lunchtime picnic with a portable swinging nylon hammock, some fresh loquats and sesame candy was just what the doctor (well, Jade) recommended. Within minutes of laying in the sun on the hammock, I looked down at my skirt hemline and saw I had achieved a tan mid-thigh, so I scooted my skirt higher to try to even out the tan a bit. The sun got so friendly that we finally had to move the hammock and food into the shade. After we ate, we lay in the hammock together as Mr. W rocked us gently with his hand on the ground. Birds chirped overhead. A slight breeze caressed the back of my legs as his hand caressed…uh…a little higher than that. I kept looking at my watch because I was afraid I’d fall asleep and get back to work late.

But I feel MUCH better now.

The pressure in here is actually making me shaky. I feel like a child tiptoeing around a parent who you know is a hairline away from ripping his belt off and whipping you to welts. Anything I do or say, or anything anyone does or says, may trigger the finely-tuned trip wire and everything will blow up. I’m trying to (very quietly and gingerly) mediate the situation and defuse the bomb, but I keep hitting dead ends. Meanwhile the ticking’s getting louder…

I feel heavy and glum.

I miss the days of lightness, levity, and easy laughter.

Sometimes you go through the motions and hope your emotions follow suit. With that in mind in selecting my suit for the day, I’m in sunny yellow, florals, and white shoes that I hadn’t worn since before Labor Day. And a string of white pearls. Very Easter.

I hate it when you let someone in and they now have access to wreak havoc on your heart and mind.

I hate it. I hate this. I hate it. I hate this.

Navy Girl Vanessa had driven out to jujitsu on Monday only to find that the building was locked up and the place was like a ghost town. Spring Break, apparently. I contacted Josh and he confirmed that there’s no jujitsu at all this week.

So after work yesterday, I drove out to my cousin’s car shop and got an oil change and got my windshield wipers replaced. The original wipers that came with the car had been just smearing the rain on my windshield instead of wiping it off. My cousin also fixed my right rear tire, which I knew some time ago had been leaking air and I’d (well, Mr. W, actually) filled it with air once and it seemed fine for weeks afterwards so I forgot about it but apparently there was a big nail in it.

And then I went home and was happy to see Vanessa’s car in the garage. When I walked in, she was sitting on the couch and she looked up at me with wide sad eyes. I looked to her right and saw that she was watching the end tearjerker scene of What Dreams May Come, one of my favorite movies and one that had a large part in changing my life. We chatted a bit, drove out and had dinner at a local Mexican restaurant, had margaritas and fried ice cream at another local Mexican restaurant, and then came home and watched Somewhere in Time, another movie by the same novel writer, Richard Matheson, and the same producer, some Deutsch guy.

I’d missed having friends nearby that I could go out with. And I’m enjoying the week off from jujitsu. But I haven’t exercised since last Friday. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

This morning while getting ready for work, I remembered a phone conversation with my childhood friend Sandy when I had broken up with an ex. I was saying sadly that I miss him. She said, “You don’t miss him! You’re just bored.” I paused, considered it, and by golly, she was RIGHT. Cuz if I imagined myself out doing something, the feeling of missing him went away. That just goes to show the dangers of boredom. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, the saying goes.

This past weekend, Mr. W had restored my old computer at his house, so I printed out a short story I’d written in college for him to read. It’s the first piece of fiction he’s read of mine, and he called me just now to discuss it.

I realized I have very little memory of the story and wasn’t able to discuss it very effectively. It’s kinda embarrassing when someone else can shoot you down regarding some detail or impression of a story that you’d written yourself. But it makes me happy that he has opinions and thoughts on it at all. I think a greater compliment to a writer by far is someone closing your book and saying, “Hmm…”, as opposed to closing your book and saying, “That was nice. I enjoyed it.”

I just looked at the first page of the short story. Yoga is mentioned by one of the characters. I had never taken yoga at the point in my life when I’d written this story. Interesting. I wonder what other elements in the story I now relate to (short of the fact that the Chinese character is married to a Caucasian man, and I’m now dating one, too).

The only sensible thing I’d ever heard from “Sex and the City” is this line from Carrie’s narration: “That’s the thing about needs. Once they’re met, you don’t need them anymore.”

If only men knew that as long as they’re willing to meet some need from us, that oftentimes, their willingness is all we really need. Make the offer. Reach out the hand. You’d be surprised how reasonable we (at least the sane ones of us) are, and if it’s a burden to you, we will find an alternative, but you’ll get all the brownie points in the world for offering.

Some men draw some invisible hard line, petrified that if they appear to bend just a little, that their very masculinity will be threatened and a woman will walk all over him. You don’t have to roll the red carpet out in front of a woman, but if you picked a reasonable, loving woman, she will meet your kindness with like kindness, fairness with like fairness. On the other hand, if you “put your foot down” (I hate that phrase, it’s such a laughable attempt at overcompensating and he may as well stamp his foot and insist that he has a large penis) and refuse to work with us just “on principle,” you may find that we’re hurt and will fight back “on principle.”

Real men aren’t the ones who refuse to compromise or even talk about our concerns. Real men don’t say “it’s my way or the highway, I’m the man.” Real men aren’t scared to deal with things face-forward, and they address problems on the problem’s own merit, and dispel issues by resolving them in the real world. Real men understand that sometimes to win the war, you must lose the battle. And that if you lose this battle, we’ll give you the next one, and suddenly, there are a lot less battles to fight.

I had posted a comment on another blog, likening the Japanese shabu shabu to the Chinese hot pot, and received a response from Wilco claiming that shabu shabu is “totally different” from hot pot. So today, Mr. W and I had lunch at House of Shabu Shabu in Irvine.

Shabu shabu is a much more organized meal than the chaotic everything-goes hot pot. The concept is the same: pot of boiling water/broth in front of you, you order plates of raw vegetables and thinly sliced meat, which you boil in the liquid and then take out, dip in seasoned sauces, and eat. Shabu shabu, however, differs in precisely the reasons that I don’t like hot pot. There’s a delicious ponzu sauce for the meats and a separate sauce for the vegetables. I don’t like how the hot pot sauce makes everything taste the same, and “the same” isn’t even as good as the flavors of the shabu shabu sauces. This shabu shabu place also comes with a bowl of rice and some udon with noodle sauce that you eat in the end with the broth (which should be flavored by all the stuff you dump in there when you’re done with the meat and veggie consumption).

I will definitely eat shabu shabu again. And I still don’t like hot pot.