cindy's world

I’m in Vegas doing the same Thanksgiving I’ve done in the past 2 years. Mr. W’s brother came to Thanksgiving dinner this time with the XBox360 game “Rock Band” in tow. Remember how hooked I got on “Guitar Hero” last year? Well, this is two guitars (one bass guitar), a microphone for karaoke AND a drum set. The drums even have a foot pedal. Man, this game is harder! It demands more precision on when you hit the notes on the guitar parts; a millisecond off and you don’t get the point. The drums are tricky because you have to hit in the center of each drum and there are 4 drums, plus foot, and you’ve got 2 hands and 2 drumsticks. I’ve always secretly thought I could be a drummer cuz I have rhythm, and it turns out that’s not nearly enough for this game. Oh well. Needless to say, the house was noisy that night.

The day after Thanksgiving (Friday), I was enjoying a leftover turkey leg, and commenting on how meat just tastes better on a stick. It’s good fun to pull chunks of turkey off a bone to eat. And then I had an idea. Christmas should be on a stick! We can have candlesticks lit, roast marshmallows on a stick in the fireplace or a firepit, have candied apples on a stick, eat shish-kabobs, popsicles, lollipops, celebrate our savior-on-a-stick (I know, eternal hellfire). Even the Christmas tree: needles on a stick. Maybe I can expand on the stick thing and pour leftover candied apple caramel on myself and make things stick to me. I can refuse to stick to a diet but yap at everyone else’s diets like I had a stick up my butt. And when I get attacked for that, I’d have to stick up for myself all by myself. The stress would make me lose weight and get sick all over again, and I’d become a stick figure.

Stick holidays. Could happen.

The last few posts of my blog have sounded like pages from a big grievance log you’d find in the property of some bitter geriatric patient in a hospice, so I figured I wouldn’t post an update on my eye issue. I was surprised to see comments on the last post with actual concern for my health, so now I decided to talk about my condition again. If you don’t want to read about that, you don’t have to; it’s a free blog.

Yesterday, I went into my primary care physician’s office again (can’t see an opthalmologist unless he writes me a referral), and they checked my vision (fine) and my cornea (fine). By the way, they check the cornea by dropping in a flourescent dye and then looking for differently-colored areas in the eye with a special blacklight. If I ever had doubt that my eyes were connected to my sinuses, I don’t anymore, as my right nostril was leaking bright yellow highlighter fluid for the next half hour. The doctor prescribed an eyedrop called “Sulfacetamide Sodium” to instill 4 times a day in the affected eye. He said it was either a bacterial or a viral infection in the eye, more likely bacterial, and probably secondary to the sinus/upper respiratory infection I have going on which was secondary to the original flu bug.

I put the drops in the right eye, and then by yesterday evening, the same beginning stages of the infection started occurring in my left eye. Great. I have no immune system. I totally thought the crazy fever I endured last Thursday night would’ve made me completely sterile, but apparently, it just somehow attracted more bacteria do to the monster mash in my body. I asked myself in passing, “Why am I so immuno-compromised?” and it briefly occurred to me that maybe I have HIV or something. But no way, I had a full physical with all standard STD testing when I had my pap smear a few months ago and they would’ve told me something like THAT.

So I was looking forward to feeling better for Thanksgiving, taking my oral antibiotics, dropping the stinging eye crap in both eyes, listening to my doctor’s advice to not wear contacts or eye makeup for week or so. I look and sound and feel like shit, but it’s temporary, right?

And then my ex, the optometrist, called. Basically, he said, the eye drops are some weak antiquated antibiotic that isn’t going to work. The bacterial resistence to it is very high and if I don’t nip this eye thing, it’ll spread to my other eye (which it has) and then the bacteria, which has already claimed my lungs and sinuses and eyes, will next claim my inner ears in an inner ear infection. My inner ears HAVE been itching and sometimes a hard cough makes it feel like I’m scratching them. I wanted to cry right there which, as the ex explained, is all that the eyedrops I have in hand do anyway — sting you and make you cry so that your tears flush out the bad stuff. So now he’s going to fax over a prescription for an eyedrop called Zymar and instructed me to take it to my regular health care’s walk-in hours and ask them to rewrite the prescription on their end so that my insurance would cover it.

*hacking coughing fit*

I haven’t made it back to work yet. Watching TV and doing laundry last nite, my right eye kept getting blurry. I finally went to examine it in the bathroom mirror, and I had sticky little clumps floating around my contacts. After removing the whitish clumps, they kept returning and increasing. Great, if I’m getting an eye infection, maybe the Amoxicillin would take care of it. So I popped two and went to bed. This morning, the right eye was sealed shut by the clumps. When I finally managed to open the eye, my eyelids remained red and swollen, and still is. So of course I freaked and called my doctor for another appointment later today at 2pm. I can just see his face. “You’re back already? What now?” Dude, look at my EYE!

Is this gonna ruin Thanksgiving?

Childhood friend Sandy and I were discussing how men go quiet when you call them on something that they messed up on, and then you find yourself hurt AND talking to yourself. Her analysis was too funny not to share:

sandy: sometimes they’re quiet .. because they’re not nearly as quick in response as us..
sandy: they’re really thinking…
sandy: it’s not obvious to them…
sandy: it’s … “uh oh.. i fucked up”… “what should/could i say now?”
sandy: hence quiet.. while we’re like.. i can’t believe “YOU” have nothing to say..
sandy: and we come up with a whole bunch of things..
sandy: they they feel even stupider…
sandy: so they’re quiet again… now they have 2 thoughts to process.. not just one

Right upon waking this morning, I had a hacking coughing fit. My mouth tasted really funny in a gross way as soon as I hacked, so on the next coughing fit I spat into the sink and blew my nose and examined the tissue. I was coughing up semi-coagulated greenish mucus globules. I hadn’t decided whether to take the day off work yet, so I figured I’d call my supervisors and see what the chances are of getting a relief clerk to babysit my jury today, and if they told me there was no coverage and that I couldn’t take the day off, then I’d just go in. My tonsils are still swollen and painful and now I was coughing and my lungs were covulsing, but my body isn’t in pain anymore like it used to be. Having spent 45 minutes unsuccessful in reaching any of my 3 supervisors, I called my court reporter to tell her I may not be coming in, and she said I sounded horrible and asked about my symptoms. Upon hearing about the green phlegm, she said that it’s likely to be an infection and that I need to see a doctor. Eventually I reached a supervisor who freaked out when I told him I had a fever for a week and an extreme fever on Thursday and he told me I had, HAD to stay home and see the doctor. The earliest same-day appointment I could get was 5pm, so I went in.

BTW, my pretty purple Sesame Street digital thermometer won’t work, and I’ve only used it once, when I bought it for my ailment in February. I think it’s out of battery, but I can’t tell how to open up the little thing and replace the battery. What a waste of money.

So it turns out I STILL have a low-grade fever (100 deg) but it’s so low compared to what it had been that I can’t even feel it. The doctor said what I had started off as a viral infection, like a cold, but that it’s now likely to have evolved into a secondary bacterial sinus infection, but it’s a bit too early for him to tell for sure whether it’s a sinus infection or whether it’s me overcoming the initial viral attack. To be on the safe side, he prescribed me a 10-day dose of antibiotics, Amoxicillin, anyway. I asked if it would be okay if I waited a few days to take the pills cuz if I just get better, then it’s just the virus, but if I get worse, then I guess I have a sinus infection. He said that’d be okay, but he didn’t see the harm in taking the antibiotics anyway.

The harm, which I didn’t tell him, is that the last time I took Amoxicillin, it didn’t cure what it was supposed to, but killed all the “good” bacteria in my body and I ended up with a yeast infection. EW. So I had to use over-the-counter yeast infection medication on top of another drug to take care of the initial infection. And then to rebalance my body, I took a bunch of probiotic supplements to put the necessary symbiotic bacterias back in my intestines and other areas. I’d just like to avoid all that.

After some won ton soup and moo shoo gai pan and rice I got at a local Chinese food restaurant on my way home from the doctor, I sat and stared at the Amoxicillin bottle, poured out all the pills, looked at them, put them back in, read the enclosed information sheet, opened the bottle, closed it again, and decided to hold off. Once I start, I’d have to take 40 pills, 4 a day. I don’t want to be popping pills all during Thanksgiving break. Hopefully it’s just a virus, even tho the secondary infection thing happened to me February, too.

P.S. My 1st fortune cookie said: “A romantic interlude is in your future.” Pssh, doubtful.
P.P.S. My 2nd fortune cookie said: “Judge one not by his charms, but by his qualities.” I’ll keep that in mind if I come across a charming man I find myself judging.

I’ve been up since like 3am watching “A Shot at Love” on MTV. I woke up to the show on the living room couch and the station kept playing back-to-back episodes of the reality series, and its current drama at the Tila Tequila mansion. For those of you who’ve never heard of the show, Tila Tequila is a Vietnamese model/actress (?) who just came out of the closet as bisexual and is doing a “The Bachelorette”-style elimination dating series but with equal numbers of male and female suitors. Yeah, it surprised me, too, that I’m watching it. Since I’d first found the show some weeks ago, I have become of aware of some friends’ serious dislike for Tila Tequila and/or the show, and now that I’m seeing it again, I find myself thinking, “They’re right, her face isn’t all that attractive.” But if I had her figure, minus the fake boobs, I’d be showing it off, too. Plus she has a good hair stylist. And I’m in awe at her mansion. The show presents it as HER house, and if she really does own it, whoa…

I think the reason I kept watching the series this morning, though, is because 1) there are suitors who so get on my nerves that I’m rooting AGAINST them and I keep waiting to watch them get voted off; and 2) my sleeping pattern is so jacked up right now that I wake up every morning between 2am and 4am and remain wide awake thereafter, hacking and coughing and trying to swallow past the painful swollen tonsils in my throat.

This catfight is the end of the last episode on this morning. BTW, I rooted against Vanessa (the curly-haired brunette in the polka dots).

Obviously Mr. W’s thinking and the way he handled things at Cirque didn’t and doesn’t sit well with me. So I’ve been analyzing him and his actions in some still-unsuccessful attempt to force things to make sense, as if a Looney Tunes light bulb would suddenly light on top of my head and all the pieces would fit properly again and we’d be back to the happy picture we were just days ago.

So far I’ve had two theories going…
1) He doesn’t understand and therefore doesn’t respond to cultural social cues.
He did say on more than one occasion that he’s “antisocial” because he doesn’t know how to act in a public environment and prefers to be “a loner” and is a “social retard.” So maybe he didn’t get just HOW some guy confronting a strange girl with “is that a PROBLEM?” or pointing at the girl while saying “shut up” repeatedly is offensive, so he didn’t respond the way everyone else instantly did upon reading about it. In other words, others may see the actions and hear the words and say, “Them’s fightin’ words!” whereas he just sees them as neutral responses from some guy. He also doesn’t understand how shushing your girl is condescending in general, and when that shushing is done in front of strangers who are verbally attacking her when she’s just holding her own, it becomes — yes, I’ll say it — a public betrayal. (I just got a mental picture of him rolling his eyes at the dramatic way I characterized it.)

This theory was making sense, until I asked him some questions about it in a roundabout way yesterday when he called me after work to ask me to go over for the weekend. Turned out, he DOES know when a stranger may be silently, on body language alone, challenging him to a fight, stuff like that. But he says those societal cues are stupid and if some guy eyed him down trying to trigger a fight, he’d just ignore the guy and break eye contact. He said it’s stupid to go along with some stranger’s challenge because he broke a guy’s nose at a bar once and has since regretted it. Except when he’s at work, he says, and people challenge him or get difficult and bickerish, he’d verbally and sternly nip it in the bud right away and if the challenger refuses to be nipped, “then I’d jack him up.” Okay, so he DOES know, and he IS willing to get on the defensive to a challenger. Then why doesn’t he do it to protect ME? Which brings me to theory #2:

2) He has to do it so much at work as part of his job in a type of work environment that’s aggressive and bickerish, where he may constantly have his authority challenged, that he’s just sick of having to put out fires when he’s NOT at work. So he’d prefer to sink into the extreme side of complacent and low-key when he’s among strangers outside of his job.

I guess I can see #2 making sense. But I haven’t had the opportunity to run #2 by him so I don’t know for sure. Even if I did run #2 by him, he likely wouldn’t know cuz he doesn’t analyze himself or his actions much, and okay, NOBODY analyzes people like ME unless they’re getting paid or are writing research papers.

When I was running #1 by him on the phone last nite, altho he played along for a little bit, he did get irritated again because he said he didn’t want to go over the Cirque episode yet again. I told him I’m not trying to rehash, I’m just trying to understand elements of his behaviors. He said fine, if I really want to talk about that, then “we can talk about it tomorrow.” So to thank him for agreeing to open up the discussion forum, I finally agreed to see “Beowulf” in 3-D with him at the Imax this morning. He’s been on my ass to see it with him for awhile, and I’d refused to because I don’t want a cent of my hard-earned money to go toward supporting the posterchild for dysfunction, angelina jolie.

So anyway, this morning, we dropped my car off at the dealer for an oil change (I’m used to my cousin, a Honda specialist, doing the oil changes for my Accord for $24. So when I picked up my Lexus at the dealership an hour ago and $170+ later, I decided to never get servicing done at the dealer again. Now I know, and at least I got a free carwash out of it.), had breakfast at an early-opening sportsbar/restaurant, watched “Beowulf,” went to Costco so he could buy groceries, came back, watched “1407” on DVD, I picked up my car, and he still didn’t bring up talking, and I was sullen the whole day. I found myself wondering, “Am I just deliberately hanging onto this anger? And if I am, then why am I? Why can’t I just see it as, he did something that pissed me off, he didn’t piss me off on purpose and was trying to do what he felt was the right thing, I let him have it about how crappily I felt he handled the situation, and he has since then agreed to ‘try to consider my feelings over his training and instinct’ the next time, so what else am I to expect? What else is there to talk about?” Should I just let it go at this point? Oh, I forgot to mention, that earlier he tried to drag me into his bed to nap with him, and I asked if he was really sleepy, he said yes. I got up and said I’d let him sleep, and then he offered, “Fine. Talk.” I said I learned never to have “a talk” with a man when he’s either hungry or sleepy, and that being said, I left him to his nap and came up here to blog.

Man, it’s too bad you guys don’t read my blog much on the weekends. *waiting by the computer for comments*

P.S. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a little crazy, thanks for indulging me. But I am nowhere near as crazy as I or another girl out there could be…

I woke up at Mr. W’s house (on his living room couch) this morning and on my way to the bathroom, passed by his laptop sitting open on the dining room table. I did what I do a lot during idle times — clicked open Internet Explorer, where his Windows Vista automatically opens 3 home pages, the first being Google, the 2nd being some local news/weather/email page from his internet provider, and the third being this blog. I moved the mouse up to click on the tab for this blog…and it wasn’t there. He’d taken my blog off of his Windows. I was instantly offended and angry. It rang like a little boy’s tantrum, petty and annoying for effect. Except I knew him better than that; he doesn’t do the theatric drama queen thing; if he deleted it, it was because he truly had a desire not to see it and not because he was hoping I’d discover that and be hurt. Still, I gave him the benefit of the doubt — maybe Vista, which has proven unstable on his laptop, screwed up and when he had a chance to fix it later, it’d be restored? An hour or so passed during which he DID realize a problem with his laptop and took it into his bedroom to connect to an ethernet cable to fix, and after he was done, I looked again. No Cindy’s World. Just the first two tabs. He was nearby in the restroom area, and I asked, “Are you just never going to read my blog again?”
He instantly darkened crankily. “I don’t know.” I got off his computer and he said, “You can still go on your site.”
“You deleted the tab,” I said.
“You can go on there how you normally go. Just type in the address.”
“You apparently don’t want my blog on your computer, so I’m not going to access it from your computer.”
“You can still get on your blog on my computer, whenever you want. I just don’t want to read it right now.”
“No thanks, it’s your computer and I’ll respect it.” (Right now, I’m blogging from upstairs on my own desktop that he restored. He’s napping downstairs in his bedroom.)

Throughout the day of movie-watching, errand-running and him acting as normal as ever, affectionate even (which I didn’t reciprocate, saying I’m sick and likely contagious, walking with my hands in my pockets as he simply put his arm around my back), I started thinking about this. Is it REALLY something that should offend me? It IS his computer, he can set up his tabs however he’d like; he’s not saying “Don’t you dare open that stupid blog around me or on my shit, I don’t ever want to see or hear of it.” And is it REALLY any more petty than the fact that I hadn’t worn his ring since this happened (except for dinner with Lily and Arnold Wednesday night, cuz they hadn’t seen the ring yet nor heard of the engagement, and I rarely see them)? Besides, it’s not like he’s lying to me about the blog saying he doesn’t know why it’s gone or saying he took it off to keep prying eyes from it or something. He took it off cuz he didn’t want to read it anymore. Right now. Whatever that means.

When we had our forced talk after work on Thursday, he’d made angry reference to the Cirque post and how everyone supported me because of my skewed way of presenting the facts as if a stranger turned and was rude to me without any prompting by me (which I didn’t feel I did; I wrote of how the jerk responded to my “I don’t know why they have to sit apart” and my “What an ass.”), and how people online would support me blindly no matter what just cuz they’re online friends. So I know he’s read THAT post and its comments. But the kind of questions he asked about my day or what-not thereafter told me that he read nothing after that post, and likely deleted the tab immediately following his reading of that post on Wednesday, which is why he had no idea I was sick. I think back to how he acted last week, still dutifully visiting me for 15 minutes or so before leaving for home after work those days after he was so angry he deleted my blog, and I’m surprised he never said anything about it. If I hadn’t ambushed him to talk on Wednesday to which he responded angrily, “I think you’ve had enough talking about it with people on your blog,” he would’ve never brought up his displeasure about the post, either. That’s amazing restraint.

Anyway, my long-winded point is, if he’s not reading this anymore, at least I know I have the opportunity to vent candidly. At least “right now.” Whatever that means.

Last nite, I put on a thick bathrobe, covered myself with a blanket, and watched “2 and a Half Men” on TV while eating some of my mom’s homemade wontons that I boiled in chicken broth. My face and body were hot, but my limbs were freezing. Shortly thereafter I fell asleep on the couch. The sleep was fitful and for some hours I was very aware and uncomfortable at just how high my body was burning. I don’t think I’ve ever felt my temperature go up that high before, and I briefly thought about going upstairs to get my thermometer but couldn’t regain full consciousness/control to do so. It seemed I could feel every joint and organ, and they were not happy. It also felt like my tonsils had swollen into golfballs and were hanging down pulling my throat closed. It was almost impossible to swallow. For some hours, I seemed to be vaguely aware of a man with me, and he had some kind of problem, some source of stress, I THINK it was finance or real-estate related, something about his kids, too, but I couldn’t get it together enough to help him even though I wanted to and could feel his stress. Then around 2am, my body temperature dropped closer to normal and I went upstairs to bed.

After dreams of being unable to make it to work, I awoke with just a low-grade fever (which I still have right now). I’m warm, but it wasn’t like hellfire-bbq-warm like last nite. I may take a half-day today after my jurors start deliberating.

After work yesterday, Mr. W and I had a talk against his will about our recent strife. By talk, I mean it was hybrid argument, crying (me), jaw-dropping, hugging, more crying (me). He’d originally wanted to take me for some hot-and-sour soup since I was dying from my ailment and hadn’t eaten all day, and altho I turned him down, when he walked me to my car I ambushed him with “Are we ever gonna talk about this?”

The jaw-dropping part was his take on what happened that night. To him, I initiated the altercation when I talked/complained about the people in front of us in an “above-normal loud” voice to goad them into a response, and that “it was reasonable” that the guy turned around and shot me his comment. I was abhorred he thought the guy’s reaction was “reasonable,” and he clarified that he didn’t say the GUY was reasonable, but that it was reasonable to expect a person to turn around and say something if he overheard something he found offensive. (I think the guy WAY overreacted, personally, which in my opinion is what actually started the problems. I feel the guy was deliberately confrontational.) Mr. W also said the guy had “a right” to turn around and tell me to shut up because I cussed him out. I again said I did not cuss him out nor did I even talk to him directly at that point. Mr. W “remembers” that I was shooting words or comments or something at the guy the whole time the guy was telling me to shut up, which is another thing that dropped my jaw because I KNOW I didn’t say anything at that point, the two men were the only ones talking. I asked Mr. W to tell me what he heard me say, and he had nothing. I told Mr. W I felt it was an attack on my character that he felt I went around trying to goad strangers into altercations.
I think as to how we saw what happened that night, it would never mesh and we would always have opposite opinions. It may have to be one of those “agree to disagree” points.

As to Mr. W’s reaction that night, what he did, this is the mental process he went thru, as he explained to me. He said that he acted on “training and instinct,” which told him that the goal here is to “diffuse the situation before it escalates further.” His gut analysis is that for the situation to be over, the guy and I have to stop talking to each other (not that I was talking to him to begin with), so he was faced with 2 options: get the guy to shut up, or get me to shut up. The guy is a stranger to him, so Mr. W can’t predict nor control the guy’s reaction if he asserted some sort of attempt to shut the guy up. He thought if he told the guy to “shut up and turn around”, the guy may stand up and now want a physical confrontation, which doesn’t bring Mr. W to his ultimate goal of diffusing the situation. But I was not a stranger and he felt he had control and influence over me, so the best route to him at this point was to shut ME up. He didn’t and doesn’t feel that the method of shutting me up with his shushes and whispers of “stop it, watch the show” was disrespectful to me and was in complete shock at how offensively I took his apparently effective tactic to end the situation.
So I said that in matters of human emotions and bonds, the “rules” of training don’t apply. It’s not a situation with a black and white method to apply based on a work-related training handbook. There were feelings and loyalties involved. He said he wasn’t thinking about how it’d “look” to strangers or to me if he did this or that, because the goal to him was not about appearance or whom he stands behind, but in the act of ending a situation. As far as boyfriend-rules or social-rules, he claims to be socially ignorant and thus only relies on his “training and instinct” and that those things are hard if not impossible to change. He said if the guy had gotten up and become a physical threat, he would’ve stepped in to defend me physically, but that he didn’t feel I was in actual danger or in need of help so punching the guy out at that point was unnecessary and ideally to be avoided. It is also Mr. W’s opinion that in de-escalating the situation the way he did, he WAS protecting me by removing me from a situation before it got more volatile.
His offer of compromise, given almost with gritted teeth as he feels he did nothing wrong that night given his logic behind the whole thing, was that he would TRY to consider my feelings or potential emotions before he acts based on “training and instinct” next time.

I don’t know what to think. But I am glad he explained all this to me even tho he didn’t even want to address it to begin with.