cindy's world

Does anyone else find it a bit absurd that in last night’s season 5 finale of “American Idol”, the show received just under 64 million votes for who should be America’s next reality-show-made singing star, which is a bigger voting participation than any presidential election in this country? Do we as a country care who wins a telecast singing contest more than we care who’s representing the nation to the world? (I was gonna write “running the nation” but I’m not sure that’d be an entirely accurate characterization, but I’m not gonna go there.)

Dwaine is holding me personally accountable to him to report back to him my research in switching career paths. Man, the excuses were plenty for not jobhunting earlier. “I’m gonna keep this job for the steady pay and benefits while I write.” “I’m trying to decide whether to go to law school by exposing myself to the battlefield.” “The job market is unstable right now, and if I work for a private company, I’ll probably be laid off.” “I have a mortgage to think about, I need the steady paycheck.” But he’s right, I’m ambitious by nature and I just got lost in where to set my next goal and have become frustrated from my lack of direction. Just taking a small step in the direction of my dream like looking online for information makes me feel good, like a small weight’s been lifted from my shoulders. The guilt of complacency is now eased somewhat. It truly is a luxury that I’m not in a rush and that my financial burdens are tiny, thanks to lucky timing and cautious care early and throughout.

Anyway, I looked online and turns out my problem is that I don’t know what search words to put in. People want technical writers, underwriters. The closest I can get to is copywriting, which is confined at an office and I don’t think I’m into doing that again. Small advertising companies tend to not hire enough people so they deadline like mad to overwork their few exhausted underpaid employees. I think what I really want is just freelance work, which means I may as well start writing on my own time on my own topics wherever I want to bring my laptop and send stuff out.

Even writing that feels good.

Between the two phone conversations I had with my friend Dwaine (whom I’ve known since junior high) today, we talked in depth for 2.5 hours. We don’t talk often, but when we do it’s major catch-up and we’re on the phone forever. He’s a bit tough on me sometimes, but that’s okay, I believe him when he tells me that he just wants to see me happy, that my happiness is what he truly desires for me. With the assistance of his tough love, I realized something potentially monumental. He’s damn right that I’m generally unhappy right now. But here’s the twist: what I think I’m unhappy about is not what I’m actually unhappy about, but rather the symptom of a more deeply-rooted discontent on a larger scale that is so huge that I’d formerly just pushed it back, pushed it back, not dealt with it even in thought. Every time it began to rear its head in my mind, I’d hammer it down out of sight like those plastic gophers you slam with a padded mallet at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

My life is not fulfilling. My life is stagnant. It is in the exact same place today as it was when I was 23, 24. That was the last major thing I did for myself — I bought real estate. It may have been a great accomplishment in my early 20s, but now that I’m approaching 30, everyone else has caught up and surpassed me, and what does it really matter that I’ve had this house for this long already? Only that the years on the mortgage are less. My low expectations for myself when I was in high school was “college, then job, then marriage and kids.” Well, the marriage and kids ain’t jumpin on silver platters and sliding themselves over to me, so here’s the real ideal: a career that I’m passionate about, that truly taps my talents and benefits others. Nothing neutral like the job I have now, which position is by law required to be exactly that — neutral. I want to make my mark and I want to contribute. My want my handprint on Planet Earth to truly matter and mean something to the future inhabitants of this planet. I want to write. I have been writing since I was 6 in the nonsensical limitations of a language I was just learning and forcing to fit around the shapes of my limitless imagination. I’ve been fooling myself when I’d tell myself, “My life is great, it’s low-maintenance, I can do and can afford to do whatever I want, it’s stable, it’s great, it’s everyone’s envy.” That is not me. I don’t like complacency. I got lazy somehow, or maybe I lost direction. This was supposed to be a temporary job while I figured out what to do next. I’m restless and antsy as a hermit crab (I AM a Cancer, ya know) in a shell that I know I’ve already outgrown. I also fooled myself when I said this job is gonna be the low-maintenance, easy money, great benefits provider as I do what I really want to do, which is produce The Great Asian American Novel. Have I written one short story since I’ve been hired on in 1999? No. The thing that fuels my poetry is the need to write for emotional therapy, and I’ve published one poem since I’ve been out of school. Who am I?!

Who I want to be is someone proud of her career because she knows it’s a good fit. Creative advertising, copywriting, writing a regular column or contributing wide-range articles and features to different publications, commercials, TV shows, counseling/advice columns, short stories, novels. That’s me. Anyone who has known me awhile knows that’s me. Since day 1 of my hire in the job I have now, I have been told by peers, supervisors, managers, that I’m too good for this job and they don’t know what I’m doing here, and now what they’re saying is that they’re surprised I’m still here and I need to get out and do better for myself, because I can. I love most of the people I work with and respect them immensely, and I in no way think I’m better than they are and therefore need to get out of “the rat race,” as one retired coworker had always put it. But I don’t think this job is a fit that maximizes on my fortes.

And perhaps I obsess over minute details of a bland life as a distraction so that I could continue to blind myself to my lazy complacency. Perhaps I nit-pick and overdramatize on non-problems because there is nothing else to feel anything about. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, right? I focus on stupid shit because I can’t step up to the big shit.

Everywhere I look around me, people are coming into their own. Diana, the young lawyer just tapping into her potency in an area that’s new but that she’d always felt an internal gravitation toward. Vicky, the doctor pharmacist with her interest in medicine and talent toward sense and order. Karen, who just passed the bar exam (congrats!). Other ex-classmates of college, in prestigious positions that inspire them to rise to new heights and challenges. A security guard buddy downstairs who just passed the sheriff’s department exam and is finally on his way to realizing his current goal of becoming a deputy sheriff. Brad, who just bought a new house. Dwaine, in his recently-purchased new house, in a relatively new career in which he’s climbing the success ladder so fast he’s skipping rungs, with eyes still on totally different and higher ladders in the near future. The list is endless. Even other women who are newly engaged or planning their weddings, they are on their way to their own dreams. Each time I hear of wonderful news of people around me, I’m happy for them while pushing away a feeling in myself that can only be described as feeling left behind. And I have never been left behind before. I led the pack. I used to always have a next goal. Get the class, get the grade, get the college applications nice and juicy, get into the college I want, get the grades there, get the job, get the house, get the financial security. Now that I’m there, I’ve stopped reaching because I’ve stopped dreaming.

When I turn on my cell phone, you know what it says? It says “Peace is being calm in your heart.” It used to say “NEVER stop daydreaming.” When I was in elementary school, every open house in school my parents went to, the teacher would say what a well-behaved kid I was, if only I could curb my bad habit of “daydreaming too much.” First grade, second grade, third grade, all the same thing. In indignance a few years ago, I celebrated dreaming. And now, focus on the dreams have been replaced with focus on emotional recovery from the recent trauma. I began this blog in therapy, hoping that I could achieve inner peace and stability again. I think it’s time to start dreaming again.

I had an amazing, long and therapeutic conversation last nite with Vanessa’s boyfriend over dinner (the three of us went to Bobby McGee’s in Brea), and the best thing I’m taking away from that conversation is that as much as I feel that I’m emotionally tangled right now, I need to give myself a break because traumatic things have lasting effects and it really wasn’t that long ago, and I am progressing in my recovery very nicely. And that I should not let “should” be my guideline. Just because I or anyone else feels I “should” be over certain things by now or “should not” let other things bother me, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the fact that I am still not over certain things, other things are residual effects of past trauma, and certain things will still bother me. And all that’s okay, it’s not a failure. Also, that I’m a good person because I know “the value of a soul.” I didn’t sell out for a title. I have looked at something and said, “Gee, that’s a really nice thing, and I’d really like to have it, but not for the price of my self-respect and my soul. So I am walking away.” The way her boyfriend put it, having a nice car, security, money, material things provided for you may be nice, but at what price? Once you have agreed to an unkosher bargain, no amount of jewelry, money, possessions can ever fill the void that bartering your self-worth away will create. And one day, everyone who shortcuts it by selling out will realize they are miserable and maybe be enlightened enough to figure out why. I, on the other hand, trusted my gut and sidestepped the brokerage. If a particular material thing is that desirable to me, I will earn it myself and acquire it the right way. Altho all 3 of us were a bit stressed going into dinner, we all walked out feeling much better emotionally.

I didn’t take any photos this weekend. It turned out that we didn’t do any sight-seeing. On Saturday, we had a very nice breakfast out on the patio deck of the tennis club resort we were staying at, then went back to the room. As Mr. W took a nap, I went to the lobby and got on their computer to research local movies. 100-degree weather is not one to randomly wander around in and keel over from heat exhaustion. The adult pool was full as we were leaving breakfast already. I found a theatre half a mile away from our resort that was showing DaVinci Code, so I went back to the room, killed some time and then we walked by foot to the theatre. This was a great idea, since Palm Springs was pretty uncrowded so we weren’t in a line hundreds of people deep trying to see this movie (as we would have been back home), AND the theatre was large with reclining leather seats and armrests that you can lift out of the way and tuck between the seat backs. And, all movies before 6pm (I think) were only $6! The movie was pretty good. I don’t know why the reviews have been lukewarm. It stayed true to Dan Brown’s novel except on a few minor points of deviation which I agreed with. For example, the casting of Tom Hanks as the hero Robert Langdonwas odd because the character in the novel was described as young and muscle-clad, which Tom Hanks no longer is, if he ever was. So they killed the inkling of romance that the novel hinted at in the end between Robert Langdon and the young French officer Sophie Neveu.

As an aside, on the drive to work today, I found out why the reviews were so mixed. A radio personality on a local hip hop radio station did movie reviews, and if his IQ were higher than the number of appendages on his body, he wouldn’t have hated the movie so much. His complaints, after he attempted 6-7 times to even pronounce DaVinci Code correctly: “This is why I don’t go to church! It was sooo boring! There were some kids playing in the aisle, and I wanted to go play with the kids, I was so bored. There was too much talk in the movie. And there were subtitles! When I go to the movies, I don’t wanna read! But in one scene there’s subtitles when they’re speaking another language, and then in the next scene, the same characters are speaking English again. I’m like, Why can’t you just speak English through the entire movie, then? Why you gotta speak in another language and make us read subtitles? And there was this dude who was all pale, brotha needed a TAN or something, but in every other scene he’s standing there naked in front of a cross and you see his back and his ass, and he’s torturing himself! I don’t know what the hell was up with that, he needed to go out and get a tan! I don’t understand why Tom Hanks was out by himself at Biblical times, all by himself, just this one American. I don’t know what he was doing there. And there were symbols everywhere, there were symbols on the floor, on the wall, on the ceilings, all this code and symbols and stuff. I didn’t like it AT ALL.” I’m not even going to bother getting into how RETARDED this guy is, but you’ll all know if you watch the movie or have read the book.

So anyway, we were walking back to the resort from the movie theatre when we passed by a ticket store for a traveling show called “Cirque Dreams.” Mr. W is really into Cirque du Soleil stuff, so I got us tickets, even tho it’s not a Cirque du Soleil production. I thought it was gonna be a bite off of Cirque du Soleil, but it was great! Altho it’s less theatrical than Soleil shows, I think the acrobatics and stunts in this group was better, riskier, more advanced than Cirque du Soleil. Plus, this troupe was more male-dominated, which fit in with the sexual orientation makeup of current Palm Springs well, and men are just stronger and can do more stuff than women. We caught their last show, they’re now traveling out of state.

Sunday, since we had just a good experience with DaVinci Code, we walked to the same theatre to catch Over the Hedge. That movie got a few chuckles out of me. It was clever and funny and witty, with some big names on the cast (Bruce Willis, Wanda Sykes, Avril Lavigne off the top of my head). It still maintained the feel-good moral-learned end of any movie aimed at kids. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that the plot wasn’t darker.

It was weird to leave such bright and sunny weather that required misters to spray off of restaurant ceilings onto the poor parched sidewalk-trudging pedestrians, and drive into cold overcast Los Angeles threatening to rain.

Our room balconies (one off the bedroom, another off the living room) opens into the rocky cliffs of a mountain. We’re awaiting the breakfast thing to open and I found free internet access off of 2 computers in the lobby. Hi, people! It’s hot and muggy here. I get to sit around in flip flops and a tanktop. I hear LA is cold and rainy. Sorry! =D
I have no idea what we’re gonna do today. But I slept well last nite. Lotsa dreams and stuff.
I just looked out the glass wall next to me toward the rocky cliffside and can see the top half of a translucent moon. I’ve gotta take that photo! Be back, hopefully, w/photos.

I’m working through lunch to get my work done so I can leave early today. Mr. W and I are going to Palm Springs for the weekend! It was such an impromptu thing that I still need to rush home and pack before we sit with the other pissed off people trying to get their cars to go east-bound. I’m bringing my own camera this time. Last year when we went, I figured I didn’t need a camera since he was bringing his, and during a hike we both ran back and forth and climbed up and down borrowing and handing back his camera as our artsy fartsy sides saw scene after scene of potentially great photo material. It’s supposed to be overcast and rainy this weekend at home, so we’ll see how it is in the near-desert. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see some property out there I could buy for seasonal rentals, give myself another tax deduction and alternate income.

I just deleted 149 spam messages and trackbacks. I thought I disabled trackbacks! 149!!! I should make a list of all the companies and hotels (yes, like 40 today from HOTELS now) that have spammed my blog and never, ever patronize them.

Children of the 80s may remember an old commercial with the jingle “I wanna be like Mike” sung in children’s voices. I can’t remember what commercial it was…milk comes to mind for some reason. Or, like, Flintstone vitamins or something. Maybe it’s for a growth ad. And I’m not even sure which Mike they’re referring to. Michael Jordan, maybe?

Anyway, my point is, ever since Mike set up the numeric verification to comment on my site, I have not had ONE spam comment! I came back from lunch and my inbox was exactly as I’d left it! YAY! Mike is neat-o!

I just deleted 120+ spam links made on my comments since last night and as I was doing that, more came in! TWO JUST CAME IN AS I WAS TYPING THAT SENTENCE! This is ridiculous. Mike! MIIIIIIIIKE!

But on the happier front, I’m delighted to report that last nite, I did indeed get all my 4 wishes in my prayer.
[another spam comment comes in here] A friend called me back, I got lots of supportive talks and hugs and inappropriate comments in jujitsu, Mr. W even called me at 10p, an hour after his usual bedtime, and didn’t seem to have a reason for calling (I was SHOCKED to get a call from him) and Vanessa was home when I got home so we got to hang out until I fell asleep in front of the TV and decided to go up to bed. Oh, and I also changed my bedsheets to my soothing mint-colored summer sateen, so that may have something to do with the fact that I feel less gnawing in my guts today. It’s too bad [another spam comment comes in here] that moments [another spam comment comes in here] of internal peace like this are so limited these days. I’m tired from always being at the edge of depression and having to grit my teeth through the nausea [another spam comment comes in here] [another spam comment comes in here] in order to fight myself out of it. [5 more spam comments come in here!! The spam filter’s not catching even 10% of them!]

MIKE!!!!!!!