cindy's world

My entire staff is taking over for a busy criminal calendar courtroom today and tomorrow, since that entire staff is on vacation (except the bailiff, who’s here with my bailiff running the guys who are in custody). Mr. W had a lunch shabang that he’d invited me to twice before, and I’d been unsure but I turned it down now that I’m so busy and I may have to work thru lunch. I figured that if I can get enough work done before lunch, I’d join my coworkers for their usual Tuesday lunch out. A retired coworker who drives down weekly for this lunch had emailed everyone to say that she would come out to meet us, and I wrote back that if I’m not too busy, I’d meet them. Before lunch, I got a call from Mr. W asking if I’d be able to join him and his lunch crew. I said no, we were still on the record. But some time went by and I had made some progress, so I walked out to meet my coworkers. They weren’t out there. I called the retired coworker and she said, “You didn’t get my email?” Turned out she’d written me back to cancel lunch due to many people’s unavailability for lunch today, and I didn’t get the email cuz I was so busy in here that I didn’t see it. I didn’t bring my workout bag to go to the gym, either. So I just came back inside to work and blog thru lunch. Yay, fun.

On the brighter side of things, yesterday evening’s run felt good. I’m getting more optimistic about my ability to run the Disneyland half. On the darker side of things, the sun was bright and beaming at 7am this morning, so if it stays like this till the run, I’d be miserable running in direct sunlight.

This is the official course info for the Disneyland Half-Marathon.

Course Map – drawn in the way that only Disney can
Course Description – so inspiring I wanna get out right now and train

CrAzY, isn’t it? Didja notice we get to run THRU Disneyland, California Adventure, AND Angel Stadium on the field rounding home plate?! Whoaaaa… I feel like I should bring my camera on the run with me.

Also, people can live-track a runner online and know exactly where he/she is on the track real-time! AND, you can set it up so that you get a text message or email every time your runner hits a marker. Technology these days, I tell ya…

My gym trainee is on vacation from work all this week. I’ve seized upon the opportunity to work out really, really hard at lunch, supersetting as many things as possible and not stopping in between sets. I’m upset that I can’t lose 5 lbs to get back int0 the 120s again, and in chatting with Vanessa’s boyfriend over the weekend, he suggested that the intensity of my workouts must’ve changed. He’s totally right. I started training my coworker in September, and that was when the weight gain started. I went from being able to fit in 7 exercises (3 sets each) at lunch to 3-4 exercises, because I have to watch her form and work in with her. She’s shown great results; I got mushy. Yesterday I did 6 exercises and today I did 5, amping up the intensity by not taking breaks and doing heavier weights. But I still haven’t returned to jujitsu. Now I’m scared to. I’ll likely get my clock cleaned all over the mat.

Well, on the brighter side of things exercise class-wise, I’m pretty sure yoga ended altho we didn’t attend the last 2 or 3 classes (Mr. W realized that the way the crazy yoga lady forced the poses was killing his back, on top of making me nauseated), and bellydancing is going to begin the day before my birthday on the 28th. I just need to remember to enroll. Haha. Vanessa already mailed in her application and fee. I think taking a whole new exercise class each year right before my birthday is a good thing. Last year it was jujitsu.

“This isn’t just about the marathon,” Vicky said, “it really applies to any major accomplishment in your life.” Forwarded to me from Vicky:

Excerpt from Marathoning for Mortals, by John “The Penguin” Bingham and Jenny Hadfield.

The Rest of Your Life

The finish line is not the end. The finish line is the beginning. Standing at the starting line gives you permission to hope. Taking the time to train, putting in the mileage, making the changes in your life, and taking the risks has given you consent to hope for the best in yourself. The miracle is not that you finished, but that you had the courage to start.
Crossing the starting line also gives you permission to dream. You can dream about the perfect day, the perfect race, and the perfect experience. It may not happen that way, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dream about it. Crossing the starting line may be an act of courage, but crossing the finish line is an act of faith. And faith is one of the most powerful emotions you can experience.
Faith is what keeps us going when nothing else will. Faith is the emotion that conquers fear. Faith is the emotion that will give you victory over your past, the demons in your soul, and all of those voices that tell you what you can and cannot do and can and cannot be.
If standing at the starting line gives you permission to dream, crossing the finish line gives you permission to plan. Crossing the finish line gives you permission to plan for your next success, to plan for the realization of your next dream. The last step of the race is the first step of the rest of your life.
What you do now is up to you. You’ve seen what you can do. If you’ve stuck with the training program, you’ve seen yourself filled with joy and blinded by frustration. You’ve overcome your fears. You’ve been humbled by both the strength and fragility of your body. You’ve found what you thought were your limits and gone beyond them.
You’ve also learned that what stops most of us from achieving our dreams as athletes and as people are the confines of our imaginations. We can never be more than we imagine we can be. And as long as we restrict ourselves by our imaginations, we forever bind ourselves to our past and blind ourselves to our futures.
Your limits lie behind you now. With that one final step across the finish line, you liberated yourself from everything you ever thought you knew about yourself. You have taken the very first step on the course to your destiny.

I’m gonna take belly dancing on Thursdays beginning in a few weeks. That’ll replace yoga (which Mr. W says he’s starting to hate). There are a few coworkers that took it together this past session and one of them has been on me about joining in. Vanessa and I have been saying we want to do that anyway. I hope Vanessa is able to make Thursdays with us, that’d be really fun! By next month, it’s gonna be weights, running, jujitsu and bellydancing. Don’t you guys wish you live closer to me? You could come, too! (I have no idea whom I’m talking to. *looking around* Uh…Jordan! *pointing*)

Speaking of running, I did 4 miles at lunch today. The heat almost lifted me away like a dirigible. My trainee did over 2 miles next to me. She’s now able to sustain a 5-min run. That’s really impressive.

Oh yeah. This Sunday, I was in the emergency room at like midnight and the nurse took my blood pressure. He said, “Your heart’s really good! You work out? Run a lot?” I looked over at the machine. My pulse was 55, which is lower than I’d ever seen it, it’s usually in the high 60s to low 70s. Unfortunately, my diastolic (or systolic, which ever one means the higher number) blood pressure was 134 or 136, I can’t remember which, and I asked him isn’t that kinda high? He said for my age, “high” would be 140. I said, “Isn’t it getting kinda close to that?” He said dismissively, “Eh, you’ve been up all night.”

Speaking of exercise and goals and stuff, I hear Hawaii is a great place to take surfing lessons; the water’s warm, the instructors give discounts to women, you’re learning with other beginners so you don’t have to feel stupid… so I may be crossing something new off my old goals list after all come October/November.

The first thing Mr. W and I did this morning was run about 4 miles and then walk another mile to complete a 5-mile course. I just got back into running again this week, and this is my 3rd run. I’m optimistic about completing 12 miles (no stopping) before the half-marathon. I just gotta figure out when, between jujitsu, work and my weekends, I would have time to train. I suppose if I drag Mr. W with me, I can train with some company on the weekends for long runs.

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.

Me: I’m gonna do the first annual Disneyland half-marathon in September!
Court reporter: That sounds fun! Do you get to run through the actual Disneyland park?
Me: Yeah! [reading aloud the description of where the run goes through] You guys want to do it?
Court reporter: Maybe! I’ll look up the information online when I get home.
Judge: Whoa. I think I’ll retire by then.
Me: But it’s The Happiest Race on Earth!
Judge: What race would that be?!
Me: … Good point.

But then, the two of them have already done multiple marathons (with really good times!) and the only races I’ve done are 5Ks. I was training for the Huntington Beach Half-Marathon as my first race when I got injured, and never got up that mileage again. Now’s a good time to kick up the dust again.

Last week in jujitsu, the instructor said, “What’s that guy’s name who did the round table for those knights?”
“King Arthur?” one of the students ventured.
“No, the carpenter. What’s his name again? I think he was a knight, too.”
Nobody knew. I briefly thought of Jesus.
“Sir Cumference,” he said. (say it out loud)
***
While hanging out with friends watching the UCLA/Alabama game on Saturday nite, Vicky called me and invited me to join her in the Inaugural Half-Marathon to be hosted at Disneyland in September. I guess Disneyland’s going to close down the park and we’re actually going to run through Disneyland. HOW COOL IS THAT?! We’re just doing a half-marathon, so training up to 14 miles by September is totally do-able. Spots are filling up very quickly, so I told her to sign me up. $85, which is even more expensive than a full marathon in Los Angeles. But, it’s Disneyland, for gosh sakes! And it’s the FIRST run there, ever! I’ll be a part of Disney history! Maybe we can play in the park after we’re done running.
***
Speaking of the Los Angeles Marathon, which took place in downtown Los Angeles yesterday, apparently 2 runners died and one is in critical condition in the hospital. I don’t know anything about the one in the hospital, but the two deaths are both Los Angeles Police Department officers. Ack! One had a heart attack on mile 3 of the 26-mile run, and the other had a heart attack just 2 miles shy of finishing the run. It’s an unfortunate loss to the department and to law enforcement in general, but one of the first things that went thru my mind when I heard about this on the news was that I can just hear the Compton or Los Angeles criminals now: “Okay, so you take this gun and stand by the door and keep watch and I’ll give all the commands to empty the cash register. If you see LAPD, just holler and we’ll run.” “Where do we run to, man?” “It don’t matter, just keep running until the cop has a heart attack and dies. Shouldn’t take long.” And it certainly doesn’t help with the stereotype that cops are out of shape and subsist entirely on free donuts.
***
Later: I did some research on the 2006 Inaugural Disneyland Half-Marathon Weekend. Here’s what it says about the route:

The course for this fantastic event will take runners from Disney’s California Adventureâ„¢ park, celebrating California’s storied past and exciting future, to the Disneyland® park, to explore the fantastic “lands” of nostalgia, color and delight. Then it is on to the scenic streets of Anaheim, past Arrowhead Pond, along the Santa Ana Trail, around Angel Stadium, and finally back through Disney’s California Adventureâ„¢ park for an exciting finish of the Happiest Race on Earth!