cindy's world

Happy Monday! This is from an email forward I received today.

~ * ~
Last week was my birthday and I didn’t feel very well waking up on that morning.

I went downstairs for breakfast hoping my wife would be pleasant and say, “Happy Birthday!”, and possibly have a small present for me.

As it turned out, she barely said good morning, let alone “Happy Birthday.”

I thought… Well, that’s marriage for you, but the kids…. They will remember.

My kids came bounding down stairs to breakfast and didn’t say a word. So when I left for the office, I felt pretty low and somewhat despondent.

As I walked into my office, my secretary Ann said, “Good Morning Boss, and by the way Happy Birthday!” It felt a little better that at least someone had remembered.

I worked until one o’clock, when Ann knocked on my door and said, “You know, it’s such a beautiful day outside, and it is your birthday, what do you say we go out to lunch, just you and me.”
I said, “Thanks, Ann, that’s the greatest thing I’ve heard all day. Let’s go!”

We went to lunch. But we didn’t go where we normally would go. She chose instead a quiet bistro with a private table. We had two martinis each and I enjoyed the meal tremendously.

On the way back to the office, Ann said do, “You know, it’s such a beautiful day… We don’t need to go straight back to the office, do we?”

I responded, “I guess not. What do you have in mind?”

She said, “Let’s drop by my apartment, it’s just around the corner.”

After arriving at her apartment, Ann turned to me and said, “Boss, if you don’t mind, I’m going to step into the bedroom for just a moment. I’ll be right back.”

“Ok,” I nervously replied.

She went into the bedroom and, after a couple of minutes, she came out carrying a huge birthday cake, followed by my wife, my kids, and dozens of my friends and co-workers, all singing “Happy Birthday.”

And I just sat there…

On the couch…

Naked.

CAUTION: This post contains workplace unfriendly material. DO NOT…I repeat…*DO NOT* click on the “more” below when you’re at work, or in front of your parents, or your children, or other people who may be offended or embarrassed by human nudity. In fact, if you’re related to me or Mr. W, don’t open this further. And if you don’t want to see nekkid men and/or TMI stuff, don’t click on the “more.” You know what? Just close your browser right now. Thanks.

You guys know that I got Mr. W a 3-year prepaid gym membership for Christmas. You know that he started working out with me every lunchtime and sometimes after work and on weekends, and that he’s become even more fanatic about the gym than me. He didn’t have any personal training, except for a few tutorials from me, and then he’s gone and run with it. Here are some “before” photos from last year, and “after” photos I took this weekend, which I’m really proud of, not only because he’s done an amazing thing for himself, his health and longevity, but because I am an amazing photographer. Uh-huh. That’s right, I take credit for this.

Again, DON’T click on the “more” below if you’re at work or could possibly get in trouble for viewing non-PG images. I’m serious.

(more…)

The purpose of this post is two-fold. First, because I got a new Billabong swimsuit that I really like on Saturday. (Mr. W decided that it was my fault we don’t go to his jacuzzi more because I don’t have a bathing suit at his house, so he “decided” unilaterally that we were going to go out and buy one, pronto.) Second, because you guys asked for photos after reading this recent post. So here you go. Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.

This is the swimsuit worn the way I like.

This is the swimsuit worn the way Mr. W likes.

Side view of, um, swimsuit.

Another side view that better shows off the, um, suit.

Rear-ish view.

Unfortunately, I’m already starting to bloat up again. 🙁 That didn’t last long. But fortunately, the sliding weights scale at the gym Saturday night (after a grueling 3-hour workout, at the end of which I ran a mile just to kill time as I waited for Mr. W and his buddy to pretty themselves up. I’d never run just to kill time before.) put me still in the mid-120s. Yay!

I know it’s a negative Asian stereotype to say we squat, but here are some photos I discovered in Mr. W’s laptop alone…

At a park local to my work, one lunchtime, July 2006:

In San Simeon, July 2006:

Around San Simeon Pines Lodge, July 2006:

more beachside later that day:

At the Huntington Library & Botanical Gardens, hunting for turtles, October 2006:

In Hawaii, a cliffhanger squat from behind, November 2006:

WHY are there so many photos of me squatting?!
At least I’m not *really* squatting here:

Here’s what I look like when I’m NOT squatting:

Just thought this was funny cuz Mr. W handed a guy (brotha’ from Philly, early 20s, on vacay in Oahu) the camera so he can take a photo of US in front of Diamondhead. Here’s what he took:

You all know about my hidden captions, right?

Vanessa had written a post entitled “Lucid Dreams,” and through my comments on there, I was told that lucid dreams are not common and that I’m “special,” which suddenly made my own experiences more interesting to me, so I decided to blog about that.

Lucid Dream (as defined by Wikipedia): Lucid dreaming (lucid from Latin, lux “light”) is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming, resulting in a much clearer experience and sometimes enabling direct control over the content of the dream, a realistic world that is to some degree in the control of the dreamer. The complete experience from start to finish is called a lucid dream. Stephen LaBerge, a popular author and experimenter on the subject, has defined it as “dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming.”
LaBerge and his associates have called people who purposely explore the possibilities of lucid dreaming oneironauts (literally from the Greek ονειροναύτες, meaning “dream sailors”).

In 5th grade, I participated in a program called GATE (Gifted And Talented Education), which in one lesson taught us that most or all blind people dream in color, whereas only a percentage of normal-sighted people dream in color. Fascinated, I decided to check my own dream that night. In a dream, I found myself alone in the house I lived in at the time. Remembering the fact I wanted to explore, Dream Cindy walked down the hall to the living room wood coffee table. It was dark in the dream, nighttime, and I couldn’t see very much. I put my hands down on the surface of the coffee table and leaned my face down really close to its surface, trying to see whether the wood grain was in color or black and white. I could not tell, but I didn’t know whether things were colorless because it was dark, or because I was dreaming in black and white. Frustrated, I woke up.

The answer came later as I became nearsighted at the end of junior high. The more my eyeglass prescription increased (hence the worse my eyesight), the more frequently in color I dreamt. I think now, I dream almost exclusively in color.

I’ve had other lucid dreams, mostly in childhood or the early teen days, in which I didn’t like the dream I was in, or I didn’t like the way events were leading in the dream such that the dream was fast becoming a nightmare, so I’ve changed the sequence of events in the dream or lifted myself out of that dream environment into a different dream environment, or simply told myself to wake up out of it. But it seemed that as I did that more and more, I was soon less able to distinguish whether something was a dream. I found myself actually in the dream wondering if I am dreaming. Sometimes I would want to do something in a dream, but then I’d second-guess myself and think, “What if this isn’t a dream, and I end up doing some irreparable damage?” (This quandary was commonly in the form of *really* wanting to kiss some hot celebrity boy who was coming on to me.) And I would err on the side of caution and act conservatively in the dream, turn him down, tell him our worlds could never permanently merge, and then I’d wake up, realize it was all a dream and be pissed that I wasn’t more adventurous. So I developed a rule of thumb. “This is a dream,” I’d tell myself in the dream, “If I can’t remember how I got here, to this point. If I was just plopped into this situation and have no recollection of the process of getting here, then I’m dreaming.” Cuz in real life, I always have clear memories of so-and-so picked me up at my house, we drove down this street, came by this restaurant, and that’s how I’m here chatting and having a burrito. In a dream, you’re just there having the burrito suddenly when the last thing you remember is that you were hanging upside-down from some apple tree petting a sheep. That rule of thumb worked for awhile, and then my dream self started developing fake memories. Dream Cindy would sit there and consider how she got to that situation, to test for memories, and then snapshots of “memories” would appear, and she’d go, “Oh yeah!” when those things never happened to begin with, or they were intermingled with real memories from the day before. And I’d be fooled again.

I think the new rule of thumb should be, “When in doubt, you’re dreaming.” Cuz when I’m awake I never actually wonder if I’m really dreaming.

I heard the murmurings of something that sounded like the word “holiday” today, so I begged for clarification.

I have next Friday off! It’s Caesar Chavez Day! Yay! *rub rub* (It’s also commonly known by non-County workers as, “What the hell is that?! Are you guys just making up holidays to take off?!”)

This morning as I got dressed, I looked in the mirror and saw…flat tummy, the outline of abs, smooth toned skin, muscle indentations on my lower back/upper buttocks, my body looked carved! Of course I got all excited and turned all sorts of angles to see myself nekkid, thinking, “The weight’s coming off, the weight’s coming off! Finally!” I weighed myself, and I’m down 4.5 lbs from the weight gain I had while I was sick and unable to go to the gym a few weeks ago.

And then, I thought about what time of month this is and realized this is just my Skinny Week. The week after my period. I start debloating the last day of my period, it takes a few days until I’m fully my “normal” weight, and then a few days later I’m gaining weight again as my body bloats in preparation for the next period. I’m fully bloated the week before my period as that’s PMS Week, and then I’m bloated throughout the period, and then after the period, I slowly start debloating again. So I’m “normal” only 1 week out of 4 in the month. By the end of this weekend I’ll again be saddened at what appears to be a weight gain and the disappearance of all the tone. *sigh*

My court reporter joked that I should schedule all social activities for my Skinny Week, i.e. parties, outings, swimming, weddings, vacations. I really should! If only this week were more predictable on when in the month it falls.

Oh, the woes of being a girl.

I should take some photos of myself while I’m “skinny” today, tho.

On my walk to get the mail this morning, my stream of consciousness thoughts led me to a memory of a story a teacher told us (her class) in Chinese School when I was in elementary school.

Chinese School is an extracurricular program run by a Chinese association to provide classes in the Mandarin language to any child who is interested in (or forced to) learn reading and writing in Mandarin Chinese, with some mild cultural exposure in the form of field trips and class lessons. During the school year these classes are on Saturdays, and in the summers classes are held in the mornings and there is an optional afternoon session children can be enrolled in that’s more physical and less classroom, e.g. swimming classes and Chinese arts and crafts, and performance. The classes are taught by Chinese volunteers, perhaps parents, perhaps teachers in their old hometowns in Taiwan or China. Either way, I don’t think these teachers are credentialized.

Like many Americanized Chinese kids, I was sent to these classes for years, primarily for day care purposes I suspect. And like the other kids, I retained very little of what I’d learned. (You should see it, we’re banned from speaking English in the classrooms, so it’s all quiet, and as soon as the bell rings, everyone explodes into English conversations that we’d been holding in.) But one thing I did walk away with, apparently, is this “fable.”

There was a little boy who was loved very much by his mother. She loved him so much that she let him do whatever he wanted. If he saw a toy his neighbor had and wanted it, he would take it and his mother would laugh at his cleverness. When he got older, he went from taking candy and toys that didn’t belong to him, to taking larger possessions from adults, such as watches and books. His mother supported him and praised him through all of this. One day, the boy stole a purse from a woman on the street. The woman screamed, and to shut her up, he killed her by hitting her on her head with a big stick. A policeman was nearby, and the boy was caught and arrested. Soon, the boy was in jail awaiting execution. The mother came to visit the boy in jail. “Oh, my good boy!” she cried. “How could this have happened? How could they do this to you?!”
The son asked, “Am I still your good boy?”
His mother replied, “Of course, you have always been and will always be my good angel boy.”
The boy asked, “Can I make one request of you, then?”
“Of course, anything,” his mother answered.
“Can I be your good little boy again like I was when I was smaller, and suck from your breast?”

~ Let me break from the story reverie for a moment. At this point in the storytelling, I am almost as uncomfortable as I was when I was, oh, EIGHT years old listening to this for the first time IN CLASS with about thirty other students ranging from ages seven to ten. I had a sense that this isn’t appropriate, and as I squirmed uncomfortably, I saw other students looking at each other, and some boys sunk into their seats. Back to the story. ~

The mother answered, “Of course you may!” and pulled the front of her shirt up and pulled a breast from her bra. She stuck her breast in through the bars.

~ Squirm, squirm! Some kids blush and look down at the tops of their desks. ~

The boy grabbed hold of his mother’s nipple

~ Yes, she said NIPPLE in Chinese, “nai toe”. Gaaaack!!! ~

with his mouth and suckled. He suckled for awhile, he sucked and sucked, and then all of a sudden, with a lot of strength, he clamped down and bit his mother’s nipple right off!

~ Methinks she enjoyed telling the sucking part a little too much, but it did have the proper effect, the second part was totally unexpected and there were audible gasps from the kids. ~

So now the mother was bleeding, and she held her injured breast

~ The teacher was actually pantomining clutching one breast with her hand in front of the class at this point. ~

and she asked her son, “What did you do? Why did you bite me?” And you know what the son said?
He said, “I bit you because this is all your fault. The only time I was a good boy was when I was an infant and still sucking at your breast. After that, I was never good, and you allowed me to be bad, and now I am to be executed.”

~ At this point, we were confused because as good little Chinese kids, we were taught to always respect our elders, so the son blaming his own bad actions on his mother seemed further proof of how bad he was. That must be the moral. ~

And was he right?

~ Some kids in the class shake their heads and utter “no”, the answer we thought she wanted, but most of the kids just stared at her wide-eyed, apparently in traumatic shock. She saw fit to confuse us more. ~

Of course he was right. It WAS all his mother’s fault, for not teaching him right from wrong. That’s the moral of this story.

I think my parents should get their money back for all they’d spent for me to attend Chinese School. What do you guys think?

My previous post, Barbershop Duet, touched on a chord with Bat because he saw my question to Mr. W asking whether he’d still be attracted to me if I shaved my head as one of those girlie “trap” questions. His girlfriend, Flat Coke & Flies, reveals in the comment section of that post that Bat refuses to answer questions that he perceives to be “trap” questions that lead to fights. Her perspective is that sometimes it’s just a hypothetical question. Here’s my take on questions like that.

Bat, I hear you, I understand what you’re saying, but see, here’s the difference. When I ask a question like that, it’s just a random quirky question in which the answer doesn’t matter. The question itself is a joke. The thought of me with a shaved head is stupid and ridiculous, and it (hopefully) wouldn’t happen. It’s like when I asked, “If I grew a third breast in the middle of my chest, would you see me as a freak or as a gifted woman?” (I don’t even remember Mr. W’s answer. He may not have answered, he was too busy fantasizing.) He knows it really doesn’t matter HOW he answers the question.

I don’t really ask what I call “girl questions,” which I define as a question in which there is one “right” answer and one “wrong” answer and the “wrong” answer would piss us off and create a fight even tho the question itself doesn’t matter to begin with, i.e. it has no consequence to the relationship. If there’s a possible answer to a question that would make me upset, I wouldn’t ask it. If I ask something, then I’ve already considered the possible answers and would be okay with any answer. For example, I’m not gonna ask “Does this dress make me look fat?” if I would be devastated if he said “Yes.” But if I need a real answer because I’m on the fence about a dress before I spend money on it, and he tells me “Yeah, it does make your ass look wide,” I WANT to know that so I would put the dress back.

So to summarize, questions that are not important to the relationship but have an acceptable and UNacceptable answer, I don’t ask. It’s asking for trouble, it’s like testing your man when your man has a 50% chance of failing the test. If I ask something, it’s because all of the answers are acceptable. (This is NOT the same as asking a question for which you hope for a “right” answer, that IS important to the relationship, such as “Do you think we can afford to have another child right now?” and “Will you marry me?”.)

I now need to qualify the girl questions. Girl questions are asked not because girls want to pick a fight, because as much as it’s convenient for guys to assume we LIKE fighting, that’s simply not the case. Girls ask girl questions because they figure it’s such a “gimme” to the “right” answer that it’d make them feel good. They want to hear, “No, you’re not fat.” “Of course I love you.” “Of course you’re the hottest lay I’ve ever had in my life.” This is a big billboard that the girl needs more positive reinforcement in the relationship, i.e. they need something from YOU, the man, to make them feel good because they’re not feeling so great right now for whatever reason.

In the last relationship, I didn’t ask girl questions because I couldn’t bear the impact of a “wrong” answer, so I just avoided them altogether. In my current relationship, I don’t ask girl questions because I don’t question where Mr. W’s head is in this relationship, so I don’t need the reassurance that girl questions are designed to give.

I can tell, too, that Mr. W used to get girl questions from other people, cuz his old response was just like what Flat Coke says Bat’s response is. “I’m not going to answer a hypothetical that’s never going to happen. I refuse to participate in this question.” Now he answers cuz he knows it’s okay, I’m just being goofy, and it’s not going to lead to a fight. And that’s as much to his credit for making me feel secure, as it is to me for not habitually asking girl questions.

** Addendum: I just went back and read the previous post. I figured it went without saying, but then realized it doesn’t go without saying because not everyone who may come across my blog knows me. The conversation described was entirely playful. The post is written tongue-in-cheek. If you had been in the room with us, you would’ve heard the silliness in my tone, and heard us laugh in between his answers.

** Addendum #2: Here is a related post about picking your battles, and about “girl questions”‘ role in that.

After work on Monday evening, I watched Mr. W cut his own hair with an electric hair trimmer razor thingie. He cuts his son’s hair with that trimmer, too, but had always turned down my half-joking request for him to cut my hair, claiming he didn’t know how to work with long hair. “If I had a boy-cut, would you cut my hair with that thing?” I asked him now.
Between the buzzing of the trimmer, he said, “Yes.”
I leaned farther out against the chairback I was resting my chin and hands on, crouched on the seat facing backwards like a little dog looking out a window. “Would you still be attracted to me if I had a boy-cut?”
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. “Yes.”
I peered at him, watching him stroke the blade methodically from the base of his skull up the back of his head. “Are you lying?” I asked.
Bzzzz. Bzzzz. “Yes.”
The chair creaked. I watched him work, observed his concentration as he examined his head from all angles between a hand-held mirror and the wall mirror that covered his bathroom closet doors. His eyes never left his reflections, which from my angle looked like a startling row of Mr. W Rockettes reflected over and over between two large opposing wall mirrors. The opposite mirror farther away from the light source reflected a darker Mr. W, so that the row of boyfriends seemed an M.C. Escher rendering of opposing and alternating pale and tan Mr. Ws.
“But what if it’s not my fault that I don’t have hair? What if I’m a cancer patient and the chemo made me lose my hair?” It didn’t seem very fair in my hypothetical that I’d have to endure cancer, its harsh treatments, and the loss of my boyfriend’s attraction to me.
I received a quick side glance. “If you had cancer and got chemo treatments, then we’d both have our heads shaved. And I’d still be attracted to you.”
For awhile, nothing in the room could be heard except the buzzing of the hair clipper and the distant churning of laundry whirling in the washing machine — the only signs of ordinariness in the extraordinary conversation I was having. His last words shimmered between us in the air in a way that was less surreal than the meaning of the words itself. I was no longer there. I was now back years and years ago, reading a newspaper article about the NFL football player who shaved his head in solidarity with his wife, who was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer at the time. I heard my past self say wistfully, “Do guys like this really exist?”

Have patience, I wanted to tell her. They do. They really do.