cindy's world

A coworker found out some stuff yesterday that his live-in girlfriend had done on Monday, he was furious, and last nite went home and broke up with her. Just like that. Canceled their upcoming vacation cruise and flight and everything at nearly a $1300 loss. Today, he is fully functional, and when we search his face carefully and ask how he is, he says with no more than a rueful smile that it’s done, it’s over. He’d already taken her key and garage door opener back, she’d taken her stuff out of his place and left. Knowing her, she took the day off from work and is going thru emotional hell at her parents’ house.

I’ve always been astounded by and yet envious of people who can end a major relationship in their life and yet appear to shrug it off and move on immediately. How do they do that? I used to watch the characters on “Friends” break up with people with a hug and an “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” “I’m sorry, too” exchange and they’d walk right back into the apartment, the other Friends would come give the breaker-upper a hug and a sympathetic rub on the back, and they’d move on to the next thing, just like that. I used to think, “That’s cuz it’s just a TV show, they only have 20 minutes to tell their story, they’re not gonna spend the entire episode on one cast member’s misery,” but then there really are people in the real world like that. The only time I’d been so emotionally nonchalant about a breakup was when I didn’t have much emotionally invested in the relationship to begin with.

Are men just not emotionally vested? It does seem that during times of physical separation, we tend to miss them a hell of a lot more than they’d even think of us.

Mr. W just emailed me a photo of me taken on Saturday that he’d manipulated. The photo was taken when the photographer was behind me, then she called my name and I turned to look over my right shoulder, and that’s when the camera snapped. Mr. W cropped the photo so that it’s my head down to part of my shoulders and back, and then he did some special effect on it that made it look like abstract green, yellow and black bold strokes comprise the photo. I don’t like how I look in that photo, even before he artsified it. My bailiff agreed, after looking over my shoulder, that it was not a good picture of me and it looks like I have a big jaw. I have other problems with this picture that I’m too embarassed to say on here. Mr. W, however, loves this photo. In his words, it’s “a photo [he] absolutely love[s].” And it’s now the wallpaper background on his gigantic-screened new laptop. Which he brings everywhere with him. Including work. Great.

I remember that Grace’s high school boyfriend Edgar (still one of my good friends now) took a close-up photo of her face that she hated. She was laying down on a couch or a bed or something and laughing, and the angle of the camera to her face made her have a massive double-chin. And Grace was skinny; she was always a size 0/1. She did not ordinarily have a double-chin. I’ve seen the photo and I had to agree with her that it is the most unflattering shot of her, ever. EVER. But she couldn’t get Edgar to get rid of it. He loved that photo, even had it framed and set it up next to his bed. “She looks so cute!” he’d said.

I don’t know. Maybe these men love us with or without external flaws, and don’t see us with the vanity-aimed eyes through which we view ourselves. Maybe they don’t even see the flaws we see. Or maybe they love our flaws — big jaws, double-chins, and all — because these flaws are part of the appearance they have learned to love in looking at their significant others.

And they say men are visual.

OMG, I feel SO GOOD now that those posts have been purged out of me! I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. I’m even light-headed right now. I can breathe!

Sometimes the weekend comes and goes, and if I don’t blog about it, I don’t blog about it. But I’d been meaning to memorialize this weekend because it was special to me in a few ways.

On Friday evening, I touched base with Navy Girl Vanessa as I drove home, and learned that she and her boyfriend (whom I had heard a lot about, but not yet met) were at Jamba Juice across the street from the Brea Mall. I got home, changed, and met them there. Then the three of us went to Brea Mall to buy our jujitsu friend Gloria a bday present for her party on Saturday. Since Vanessa paid for the present (a compilation of really cool massage oils, scented candles and lotions from Bath & Body Works), I paid for dinner to pay her back. We had a nice meal and laughter-drenched conversation at a Japanese restaurant close to the mall. Then we came back to my house and hung out in Vanessa’s room where we talked about roommates, cats, the history of religion and of the US as it concerns the middle east, and yes, I was schooled. Vanessa’s boyfriend is a well-informed guy. They left at about 1:30 a.m., right after Vanessa presented me with a 4-pack of Happy Bunny ankle socks. I laughed and said I love Happy Bunny! So now, underneath my black outfit and inside my black ankle boots, I’m wearing pink and turquoise socks that depict Happy Bunny saying, “Like I need YOUR approval.”

Saturday was a friend’s birthday party. Actually, it’s more Mr. W’s friend than my friend, altho I know her too and have met her even before Mr. W and I started dating. It was a beautiful day in Huntington Beach at her house with lots of people there, most of whom I’ve met before at other get-togethers, and a lot of whom I really like. I had a great heart-to-heart bonding conversation with an old friend and her husband. And even if there are troubles on my mind, nothing melts me and puts a smile on my face as surely as when Mr. W sat behind me on the raised stone BBQ pit I was using as a seat and put his arms around me and his face next to mine. There are 6-7 sequential photos of us taken at this time. I’d like to print them out and put them in a long frame that holds several photos so it looks like a filmstrip.

Sunday, my childhood friend Sandy brought her Costco date (she popped his Costco cherry that day so he could buy an Ipod Nano at a great Costco price) to Mr. W’s house and, as Costco date played XBox shooting games, the 3 of us set up our 3 laptops and networked, completing Sandy’s Raytheon project with Mr. W’s expertise in various programs that she and I don’t have and don’t know how to use.
At some point of this process, Mr. W’s daughter popped into the kitchen and complained about being hungry. So as Mr. W was finishing up the project with Sandy, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to take the daughter to grab dinner. I walked into her room and said, “We’re all gonna go eat Indian food for dinner.” She looked concerned. “But I’m not gonna subject you to that,” I continued. “Oh good,” she said, relieved. “So while they’re finishing up, I’m gonna take you where you want to get dinner, and we’ll just bring that back for you.” She choose McDonald’s, and we chatted all the way there, and all the way back, as she told me about her most recent social dilemma at school. And then the 4 grownups headed to a local Indian food restaurant.
The first and last time I tried Indian food was in high school. I was the officer of “International Club,” a social club aimed at exploring cultural diversity and awareness. The first year I was officer, we had a monthly social that would be organized by club members of a particular ethnic background. The month it was India, we watched a portion of a popular Indian soap opera, got a presentation and fashion show on Indian garb and jewelry, and of course, had their homemade Indian food. No one who attended the social that I know of could bring themselves to give Indian food a second chance. I verified this with Grace 10 years after the event. Nevertheless, I’d been saying that I’m willing to reopen my palette. Mr. W was also unenthused about eating Indian food, but agreed to give it another go, provided we find people to come with us who knew how to order. Turned out, Costco date and Sandy loved Indian food. And we had a great time, and yes, great food! I’m so glad we tried that again.

When I got home yesterday, I watered the cat, started dinner and went upstairs to change into my flannel PJs, came back down, lit some candles, ate dinner as I watched TBS’s 3 back-to-back “Friends” episodes, then fell asleep as I expected to. At some point, I woke up in pitch darkness except for the glow cast by the TV. I had no idea what time it was, and I got up on one elbow and turned my left wrist toward the TV to see my watch. It was 11:15p. I thought I heard a voice directly to my left in the kitchen, but looking there, not only could I not see anything as I was bathed in the glare of the TV light, but I had fallen asleep in my contacts which then dried up in my eyes, so now things were not just contrasted, but blurry. I looked forward again toward the stairs. There seemed to be an orange glow coming from upstairs. I wondered if Vanessa had come home and walked by me completely unobserved. Or maybe the glow is from the streetlamp pouring into the side window of my hallway. I finally decided to get up and turn on the torchiere lamp. Vanessa was indeed smiling at me drinking water in the kitchen. “When’d you get home?” I asked her.
“Oh, not that long, about an hour ago.”
“How long’ve you been standing there?”
“Not that long, just taking my herbal supplements and meds. Want some water?”
I realized I did not drink a drop of water all day. “Yeah, thanks,” I said, and she brought me a tall glass. Since I was laying down on the couch, she sat Indian-style to my left and petted my cat as he walked up to greet her. “I’m all messed up,” I whined.
“Wanna talk about it?”
So we did, briefly, and half-watched “Friends” and “Will & Grace” as those shows flickered by on the big screen. At some point, she got up to use the restroom, and I fell asleep again. When I awoke at 4:30 a.m., I was again curled up in darkness save for the patterned lights strewn from the TV. Vanessa had blown out my candles and turned off the lamp, but left the TV on “in case [I] need the background noise to sleep,” as she’d told me the last time I fell asleep in front of the TV and awoke to find the candles extinguished and the lights off.
I looked behind me and saw that Dodo was also asleep, curled lightly sideways with the upper half of his body on his catnip scratching pad and the lower half on the carpet. I turned off the TV, walked upstairs, and laid down in my bed. I don’t know what it is about my bed that is so extremely comforting. I slept until 7a when my alarm went off, but drifted in and out of sleep instead of getting up.
I guess I thought that getting enough rest would reset myself mentally and physically, and instead, I was craving even more sleep. I examined the rounded puffy bags under my eyes as I squeezed the toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I’m not sure if I’m under-rested or over-rested, but something did bring me to a realization as I drove to work.

It’s not the bad things that are done to me or happen to me that bring on the depression. What really shakes my ground is the losing, or the loss, of faith in where I am in life. I want to be committed to where I am, but if things happen to make me doubt my present choice, the fact that I know I have the power to change my path and yet not knowing whether I’m meant to change it, that brings on a conflict of emotion vs. intellect, heart vs. head. I don’t like big choices like this. I don’t even like small choices, like does this object of clothing go into the delicate, regular, or heavy duty pile of the light or dark loads? That’s the prime reason I hate doing laundry. I’m also not keene on huge lifestyle changes. So when I get pieces of information that tell me a choice I’ve made in the past may no longer be the right choice for me in the present or future, now I’m panicking. And stalling only makes things worse as I’m conscious of the fact that the longer I drag things out, the more the alternative opportunities slip away.

I guess I’d always known this on some level, but I usually don’t address it and don’t give the thoughts much exploration. Maybe the extra sleep gave me the ability to deal with that global aspect.

Over the weekend, I sat quietly on the balcony and watched as a little hummingbird tried to land on a metal rod that the hummingbird feeder was suspended from. The imitation twig rod is about a half-inch in diameter, and I think it’s made of black iron. It’s attached to a hinge that’s bolted to a vertical support beam, and it reaches upward at approximately a 60-degree diagonal angle from the post and from the top is a loop that the feeder is hung on. The little hummingbird, probably thinking it’s landing on a tree limb, tried to stop on the rod but couldn’t stop flapping its wings because he couldn’t stabilize himself on the rod; he kept sliding down. So he’d flap and struggle to go up a bit, and as soon as its skinny little feet landed on the rod, he’d start sliding downward toward the hinge. He tried and tried for maybe 30 seconds, flapping and shuffling his feet trying to move upwards, but always sliding back, until he gave up and flitted off to investigate the feeder itself.

I think my mood as of late has been like the hummingbird. Left alone, I slip downwards. I need constant flapping and struggling to stay in the same place, otherwise the natural law of gravity, or perhaps Newton’s law of motion, would take over. It’s tiring, especially when the flapping isn’t solely up to me. It’s crazy how something small could totally make my mood. If only they knew how easy and effortless it is.

Happy May Day, people. On the drive to work this morning, a listener called the radio station and asked the on-air personalities what they think of “Mexican Day today.” He was referring to the planned walk-out Mexicans here are doing today for demonstrations and rallying downtown in protest to our present immigration laws and policies. The caller said he was “100% Mexican,” and that he’s in support of their demonstration, but feels that to make a real impact on the importance of Mexican immigrants in the nation, they shouldn’t just do the walk-out for a day; they should do it for weeks, or a month. The DJs said that if people demonstrating stay out for a week, they could lose their jobs, and the kids who walk out of school to support the demonstration long-term would be losing out on their education. The caller said, “But when you want something done, you need to be ready for the consequences. I say we get all us together and VOTE –” The DJs said, “But most of these people demonstrating can’t vote because they’re illegal, that’s what they’re rallying about –” The caller jumped in with, “Well, if it were up to me, I’d walk out there, have my Uzi and I’d point that around –” and the DJs cut him off there and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Now what’s THAT gonna prove for you? Now if it were idiot walk-out day, I’d be on board for that!”

I’m exhausted, I can’t focus my eyes, and I couldn’t call in sick today because administration’s policy is that anyone not appearing at work today without a doctor’s documentation to verify actual ailment would be assumed to be acting in solidarity with the Mexican ditch effort and we’d be considered absent without permission/pay.

Stupid.