cindy's world

After the Boot Camp race, Mr. W and I joined Vanessa and Jay at a nearby shopping outlet and had lunch, swapping stories and licking our flesh wounds. On top of bruises on both knees and down both shins, I was missing two strips of skin down the length of my left shin. I’d been dubious when Vanessa told me to wear pants, especially when I was in duo-layered jogging pants watching all these women walking around in cute tiny running shorts before the race. I pointed that out, and Vanessa whispered, “You’ll thank me later.” My GOD was she right. She said one girl was crying toward the end of the race, but I didn’t see her. Jay was amused at the guys who powered through the beginning of the race, showing off, as those were the same men who were hyperventillating and dying after the first obstacle, having run out of juice.

We did a little shopping, and Mr. W bought 3 tubs of protein powder at a VitaminWorld outlet. Jay bought a bottle of calcium supplements because the topic of milk products came up over lunch and he expressed emphatic distaste for milk, cheese, etc. and Mr. W said, “Really? Then where do you get your calcium from?” Jay had shrugged, and I told him that Asian (me) and black (him) people are genetically predisposed to osteoperosis, and it’s easier to pop a pill a day to stave off a later problem, than to have to take precribed medication or be hospitalized for brittle bones and broken hips later on in life. I’m a strong believer that it’s easier, more painless and cost-effective to prevent a problem than to have to fix a problem later on. So at VitaminWorld, Jay (with some more prompting from me) bought the bottle of calcium tabs.
When Mr. W and I were driving home, there was a bit of silence in the car, and Mr. W suddenly chuckled and said, “I wonder if Jay felt pressured to buy the calcium.”
“What?”
“I mean, he didn’t seem like he really wanted to get calcium until you said all that stuff outside the store.”
“I don’t CARE,” I said flatly. “I absolutely believe that he needs to be taking those calcium supplements and whether he felt pressure or not, I still think I may have saved him some big grief in the future. Besides, he can always NOT take them, and it only costs him like $6 bucks.” My dad’s a new osteoperosis victim and is taking prescribed medication for it. The medication is causing havoc on his liver and now he’s dealing with a liver issue on top of all this other problems, and trying to figure out how to balance medications so that he can get the effectiveness of one without counteracting with the side effects of another, and hoping the side effects of one or the other isn’t going to kill him instead. Being lactose intolerant like most Asians, I bet my dad wishes he’d just taken a calcium tablet once or twice a day in his youth.

But maybe that WAS too imposing of me for Jay, I mean, I HAD just met the guy for the first time that day… But he makes Vanessa happy, so he needs to stick around for as long as possible to keep doing that for my friend who is so loyal she didn’t leave me behind in the dust during a hard race when she was clearly physically able to have recovered and shaved minutes off her time had she just thought of herself before thinking of me.

The Marine Corps Boot Camp Challenge Obstacle Course kicked my ass. I was going to do a blog post where the title is “Marine Corps Boot Camp Challenge” and the body of the post is “I don’t want to talk about it.” That’s it. But Vicky told me to blog my experience because in the very least, I did it, I finished the course, and how many people could say that? “Uh, like a thousand this year,” I told her. =P Mr. W pointed out that of the thousand, there were many who finished after me, and even some who had to be taken care of by the paramedics on-site.

This was the worst race I’d ever run. I’ve felt bad in my own practice runs in the past, but I was never this far off the game in an actual race before, and that includes the Disneyland Half-Marathon that I ran without training for in which I developed a blood blister under a toenail and eventually ended up losing that nail. THIS race, I had to run while my period was going on. THIS race, I was anemic AND out-of-practice for after a week doing nothing in Hawaii. If you’re a distance runner you know about the first minutes of feeling like crap during a run, and then establishing and maintaining your rhythm where your body works efficiently with your breathing and you feel like you can run forever. I never got there in this race. After the first eighth of a mile, you hit three consecutive hay stacks you’re supposed to leap over as drill instructors yell at you to move it you lazy slow maggot. Mile two, you hit the obstacle courses all the way until you have about a half mile left of the race. The first obstacle was a series of hurdles, made of thick round logs and at a height of about my chin level, so I had to hurl myself over the top with one leg, swing my other leg over in a pirhouette and twirl off the log onto the next log, for about 5 consecutive logs. And then there were the over-under-over-under obstacles, and tunnel crawls. There’d be a 6-foot stack of logs you had to go over, then upon landing after jumping off, you run 5 feet to crawl under a cargo net as instructors scream at you to hurry up on the other side with encouraging words like, “Well you aren’t FIRST, let’s just put it THAT WAY! That’s great, just HOLD UP EVERYBODY ELSE! THAT’s a good strategy! When I talk to you I need to see your MOUTH OPEN IN A RESPONSE! It’s SIR YES SIR!” They pretty much didn’t pick on me, but one did yell at Vanessa, “TODAY, ladies, TODAY! Get OVER it, TODAY!” and with her Navy military training, she yelled back, “SIR, TODAY, SIR!” as I rolled my eyes at the drill instructor. Good thing he didn’t see me, I could only imagine what he would’ve said to me, considering this other time when one was yelling at another girl, Vanessa smiled and the DI caught her and ran next to her, yelling, “What are you smiling at? DO YOU FIND THIS FUNNY?!” “Sir, no, sir!”

It was a very, very humbling experience. I had an incapacitating pain in the midst of the course that felt like sharp cramps on either side of my stomach, and a few steps farther, the pain permeated my body and I felt it through to my back. I was afraid my kidneys were going to burst. All my organs were twisting inside of me. I had to slow to a walk as I gasped. Vanessa never left me. I remembered back to the beginning of the race, when we were standing by the start line after all the individual men had started and we were waiting for the individual women to start 15 minutes later. She turned to me and said, “If I die out there for ANY reason, keep going.” I’d told her, “If I die for any reason out there, call 9-1-1!” Little did I know how close I’d come, or so it felt.

Oh yeah. Fox holes. Deep holes in the ground, about 3 feet deep, 5 feet wide, you simply jump in and then jump back out the other side of and then continue on the course. There were water hoses and sprays, but no mud in the fox holes. The freakin easiest thing on the whole course was the pushup stations. You do 10 boy pushups (on toes) or 20 girl pushups (on knees). All the women around me did boy pushups cuz who wants to waste time doing 20 when you can do 10 and move on?

Vanessa’s boyfriend Jay and Mr. W kicked ass. They crossed the finish line together in about 25, 26 minutes. Vanessa mentally prepared me for a sprint-ending with “You ready? You ready?”, which we did and we turned the corner and burst through the finish line at full-on sprint when the clock read 45 minutes, so taking into account the 15-minute delay at the beginning of the race as they held all the individual women back to give the men a 15-minute lead, Vanessa and I did the 5K course in 30 minutes. Ouch.

I never did see Dwaine, tho, and as of right now, he’s still missing. I’ve left him a ton of voice mails on his phone and did not get a callback all weekend. =P

The confirmation e-mail sent by the Marine Corp for Saturday’s run has this paragraph in it:

‘THE COURSE: 3-mile run with obstacles throughout. Run is mostly flat. The obstacles range from hay bales to fox holes, to walls and tunnels with 60 drill instructors “encouraging” you along the course. View course map at www.bootcampchallenge.com.’

I find it funny that the word “encouraging” is in quotes, cuz Vanesssa said that she watched a drill sergeant run alongside a tired man last year at this event and scream in his ear, “You gonna let a woman beat you? What’s wrong with you? Where are your balls! Come on, you pussy! Run!” I’m gonna see if I can get more men yelled at this year by passing them. Hee hee.

“What’s a fox hole?” I asked my judge, former Navy.
“It’s a deep hole in the ground that soldiers dig to stay in when they’re out on the field,” my judge explained.
“Like a ditch?”
“No, a ditch is long. A fox hole fits one to four people.”
“Oh. There are foxholes on our obstacle course. I wonder what they’ll have us do with them, just jump in and jump out?”
“Well,” he said with a glint in his eye and an amused smile, “If it’s an event put on by the Marines, it will probably be a mud-filled fox hole.”
“It IS a Marine thing!” I wailed.

What do I wear?!

Remember the Marine Corps Boot Camp Challenge? It’s this Saturday morning. Here’s what we have been doing the last few days leading up to the event.

ME
Having spent the past week in Hawaii not hitting the gym, I cranked it up this week. During my lunchtime workouts, I’ve increased the weights (slightly) to strengthen myself, been incorporating runs and sprints into my warmups and cooldowns, doing “real” pushups in my circuits. I did the heavier legs stuff earlier on and then tapered off so that I wouldn’t be sore the day of the run.

MR. W
He did an early morning 4-mile run over the weekend to acclimate to the running conditions on the day of the race, and is hitting the gym again after his week off in Hawaii with me. He’d planned on doing some evening runs during the week.

VANESSA
She IMed with me on Wednesday:
me: So are you taking [your new boyfriend] to SD for the run?
Vanessa: He is going to do it to
me: as an individual or as a group?
Vanessa: ind
me: we’re all individuals.
Vanessa: he found out it was at the Recruit Depot and signed up
me: that’s what happened w/[Mr. W].
Vanessa: lol Marines!
me: that’s cool. I’m excited.
Vanessa: I’m excited too
me: when are you guys leaving for SD?
Vanessa: I dunno
me: are you staying down there?
Vanessa: He lives in San Clement so it’s close by
me: oh.
Vanessa: Maybe 6:45
Vanessa: i started going to the gym during my lunch breaks on M, W, F. I just started this week
me: oh, good for you.
Vanessa: Thanks!

I happen to know for a fact that her “date” (i.e. the new boyfriend, congrats, Vanessa!) for the event has been hitting the gym pretty hardcore lately, too.

DWAINE
we e-mailed Wednesday:
Me: Are ya ready? It’s this Saturday! 😀 Do you have a bunch of coworkers coming along?
Dwaine: I haven’t even thought about it. I haven’t run since the Mud Run. I probably shouldn’t finish this beer in my hand as part of my training.
Me: oh, finish it. It’s only wednesday. 🙂 (BTW, the angel on my other shoulder tells me to tell you that if you drop the beer, you’d be sober enough to work out tonite in preparation. It’s already Wednesday!)
Dwaine: tell the Angel on your shoulder that “I can quit when I went to!”
Me: “went to,” eh? Looks like you’re already one past quittin’ time. 😉
Dwaine: &*$@#!!!

Tomorrow at this time I’ll be camping out with the jujitsu clan plus Mr. W at San Onofre beach near San Diego. The trip was meant to be a 40-mile bike ride from Angel Stadium in Anaheim down to the beach campsite, a nice leisurely roll along Pacific Coast Highway, but Mr. W was convinced our delicate untrained heinies wouldn’t withstand the soreness of being on a bike seat for that long. Besides, all the both of us have are mountain bikes, and not distance cruisers. Maybe I’ll invest in a cruising bike for the future. I would really love to get into riding.

So instead, Mr. W and I will drive down to the two reserved campsites and set up tents and stuff, and wait for the bikers to get there. So far I believe there are 6 or so riders and the rest of us are driving. Everyone will camp there overnight, tell campfire tales, play games, hang out, then play on the beach all the next day. One jujitsu instructor, a Santa Ana police officer, is bringing extra boards and providing surf lessons! I may get to cross one more thing off The List, albeit very belatedly! I am VERY excited. Maybe I’ll know enough about surfing to do some more of it when I’m at the Big Island of Hawaii next month for Wilco (Mike) and Christi’s wedding! (Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on. haha.)

One thing I’m not particularly excited about, is that I may have to go to a nude beach while we’re at San Onofre this weekend. Mr. W found out there’s a nude beach in San Onofre, and despite the organizer of the event’s insistence that the nude beach is nowhere near where we’re gonna be, Mr. W considers it “close enough” to hunt out and participate in the threadbare activities of. I’ve been told by more than a few people that the participants in this flesh fest are nothing to look at; they’re typically saggy, wrinkled and aged mostly male, mostly hairy body parts. Online information forwarded to me by Mr. W provides statistics that 80% of the nude beach attendees actually go nude, so I’m going to be part of the 20%. I compromised with Mr. W by saying that if he absolutely HAD to go (which appears to be the case), then fine, I’ll go along but I’m not participating. He’s okay with that, since he claims the only reason he wants to go, is not to gawk at the dongstorm, but simply to be nekkid outdoors without being arrested. I’m sure knowing that he’ll be the hottest nude guy there helps make the situation more enticing for him. As for my entertainment, I plan to mitigate the fact that I have to be there, by searching out Navy Seal trainees doing their training exercises nearby. Thanks, Navy Girl Vanessa, for alerting me to their existence there. I packed binoculars.

And P.S…. Stop trying to change him. It doesn’t matter what his hurtful behaviors are. He hasn’t changed YET despite seeing how he hurts you, what makes you think he will just cuz you nag him? It doesn’t matter whether he changes or not. Just let him, and all his issues, be somebody else’s problem, cuz YOU are gonna be the one that was smart enough to get out.

I have a few girlfriends who are going through rough hell in their relationships. I see myself in them, the active analysis of their relationships, of what it all means, what it all COULD mean, and it makes me concerned because I see this line of thinking as the smart girl’s attempts to rationalize herself into staying in something that is hurting her every day.

When I say I see myself in that behavior, I mean to refer to my old self. I’ve been there, where the other half, by simply existing in my life and being himself with all his hurtful behaviors, killed a little of my spirit every day and every morning when I woke up, as soon as I remembered who/where I was, I was sad again. There was always that lump in my throat, the consternation on my forehead, the painful rock in my stomach. I lost so much weight despite not having the energy to do anything, not even work out. When I finally freed myself of that, EVERYTHING was wonderful. The colors were more vibrant, the birds sang just to me, I noticed every beautiful detail around me (like the sparrows’ fuzzy chests as they twirled on their tummies in the dirt), and they all delighted me, made me want to laugh out loud.

I want to tell these beautiful women, make them see, that they’re working so hard to make excuses to justify a selfish guy’s behavior, and you know how much the guy cares? He doesn’t even bother to justify his OWN behavior, much less modify it despite how he sees it’s killing his girlfriend, and the WOMEN are doing all the work in saying, “Oh, it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have ticked him off, I know how he likes his slippers warmed up and fetched as soon as he comes in the door, and I took too long.” “It’s just me being unfair. I knew when I got in that he liked his women and booze. As long as I make myself okay with it, we’ll be fine.” WTF?! And the guy is happily doing his own thing, prancing out the door to do whatever he wants with whomever he wants, too easily ignoring the crying woman on the floor he leaves behind.

Girls, not every man is like that. And you are about to be so happy, you just need to take the first difficult steps on your own and it’ll be so much easier the farther you walk. Stop injecting the false hope and nonexistent kudos with “I think he’s getting it, he didn’t hit me as hard yesterday as he normally does, so it’s getting better, right?” I’m not being literal on the quotes, but you know what I’m getting at, because you women are smart. Now be smart on your OWN behalves.

One thing that screwed me when I considered getting out before, was that I’d think about being “alone” and how “alone” might be worse than staying with crap. To that I now say, “An empty house is better than a house with bad tenants.” Besides, you have to be “alone” first to move on and be whole again, figure out what makes you happy, do it as much as you damn well please. Then when you heal and come out of this emotional mud, your future boyfriend waiting at the other side of the muck will be very happy you left something that wasn’t right for you because now the future boyfriend gets his turn to be with you.

1.) It’s not you, it’s HIM.
2.) Stop making excuses for him.
3.) Yes, it’s hard, and yes, it gets easier.
4.) Walking away from him is walking toward reclaiming your life, your happiness and your future.
5.) It’s about to get SO GOOD.

Unless, of course, it IS you, but my girls who are going thru this and have gone thru this (and you know who you are cuz all of the above are things I’ve already told you), if it IS you I’ll tell you so. Haha.

Today, the preliminary numbers have been crunched. Dwaine has given us his magical number-crunching program that he’d written on Microsoft Excel. Scenarios and possibilities have been discussed both with my parents, and later with Dwaine, and probabilities will be tightened in the next few days. Dwaine is a creative financing WIZARD when it comes to real property and the mortgaging biz, it was exhilarating to watch him toss concepts, numbers, and new ideas. Everything looks promising, and I’m getting excited.

On July 20, Mr. W gave me a Pristine Heart by the Lakhi Group.

Mr. W, his son and I tried to catch the 9:30p showing of The Simpsons Movie earlier, but the tickets were sold out. I thought of college roommie Diana, who watched the premiere of the movie as a company-wide activity with her law firm, and I lamented the day I decided not to go to law school. What I do not lament, however, is the fateful day in 8th grade when I decided to take German as my foreign language, because that got me and Dwaine in the same class for the next 5 years, where we became friends. After a brief financial discussion over the phone with Dwaine earlier today, we decided to meet up tomorrow so that he could crunch some numbers for me. The goal: sell my current home, throw the money into investment property that I will live in for now and rent out later for supplemental income.

Whereas the original plan when I bought the house was to live in it until I decided to put down more permanent roots in a more palatable part of town and at that time rent out the first house, I had been growing increasingly discontent with my association’s lack of competency in handling financial matters. So the new plan is just like the old plan but with the added step of upgrading the future rental property. I figure if I buy a townhouse near a major university, I will always have renters, and assuming these renters are students, it would be a high turnover rate so that I can keep increasing rent to just below the growing cost of dorming. If I have a bad tenant, it’d only be for a year or so. Short-term-wise, I can avoid being taxed on the profit I make on selling the current home by reinvesting it into another primary residence, so I just have to live in the new place for the minimum required amount of time. And then I move on with my life and get a new place if I want to, renting out the school-side property. I’m looking at the new developments in Irvine, near University of California, Irvine. Orange County is quickly growing as Southern California’s version of Silicon Valley, so property there is bound to increase in value. Plus, with foreclosures at an all-time high, Dwaine is going to look into foreclosure and short-sale properties for a steal.

I don’t expect to have the kind of miracle housing experience I had with the first purchase, but I may be able to keep the same profit margin renting out the new place as I would in renting out the current place. When I bought the place I live in now, it was right before the housing market went crazy, so the price was already reasonable. And then, because the seller was desperate to sell (their new house had to close and their buyer for their current house, the house I got, fell out of Escrow and abandoned the purchase) during the Christmas holidays when no one was looking for housing, my realtor gave them a lowball offer which they countered and we came to a very nice compromise for me. I got decent interest rates at 6.75% for a 30-year fixed mortgage, and two years later, the housing market skyrocketed, interest rates dropped, and I refinanced at 4.875% for a 15-year fixed mortgage paying only $200 more a month than the original 30-year. People hated me enviously. But the situation now is a little different — interest rates are higher which means the housing market is about to take a fairly significant dip. I want to sell now while the market’s still high on my house and I can make triple what I originally paid for the place, and if it means I need to hold off just a tad for housing to drop so that I can buy the next one for cheap, then so be it. I can move back in temporary with my parents, or even with Mr. W. It is scary to step out of the property game altogether, though — a lot of people sold their houses when demand was high a few years ago, thinking that at any time, the housing prices will drop back to “normal” and they can take all their newfound money from the sale of their house and put it into a much bigger house. Well, that hasn’t happened and years have gone by and some people are still renting, which to me is just throwing money out the window. So I am facing that kind of a risk if I don’t do a simultaneous sale-purchase. Not that I’ve ruled that out, either. It all depends on what the numbers tell me tomorrow.

That’s why I’m glad I chose to take German way back in ’90. Cuz 17 years later, I am overwhelmingly grateful for my connections. “See, where would you be if you’d chosen to take Spanish?” Dwaine said on the phone earlier.

After skipping the noon workout on Friday (I went with Mr. W’s coworkers to lunch as they wanted to treat him for his upcoming bday), eating the rare lunch and rich dinner out, having lunch out again today (P.F. Chang’s China Bistro), and making myself a grilled chicken quesadilla for dinner tonite, there are few things more guilt-quenching than feeling rivulets of sweat trickle down my lower back and between my breasts, dissipating into the elastic bands of the bottom of my sports bra and the waistband of my shorts, after a 3+ mile run as I sit here and type this.

And bunnies! I saw lots and lots of white cotton-tailed bunnies bouncing and pouncing and prancing on the rolling hills of the park we ran through! The hills were alive with the movement of bunnies! “Bunnies!” I said delightedly to Mr. W on the run, “What do you think they’re all doing out here?”
He said dully without looking around, “Breeding like rabbits.”
I examined the bunnies that darted off as we ran by, trying to catch some of them in x-rated bunny-style action. No luck. “Bunnies!” I said excitedly again. Aside from the sound of heavy rhythmic breathing, I got nothing back from Mr. W. “You don’t seem as impressed with the bunnies as I am,” I observed.
“I ain’t impressed with shit right now. I’m in pain,” he spat.
Footfalls in the silence. Pitter patter of our feet. “Bunnies,” I said quietly to myself.