cindy's world

I was approached today with an offer to join a pole dancing class. As in stripper pole, not as in Polish polkas. The friend who invited me found an instructor whose studio has 6 poles set up for 6 students in a class, and the instructor has agreed to close up the class and make it a private session if my friend could bring 5 other friends along to fill up the class. I’ve heard it’s great exercise and all, and I’ve always loved poles (I was a little monkey when I was a kid), I can climb them, manuever around them, spin from them, had spent hours of recess and lunch times in junior high flipping around on them with my friends. So it should be fun.

Well, here are the cons. I don’t like following trends, and I’m well aware that “pole dancing” is some stupid Hollywood trend thing now where stars like Terri Hatcher rave about its results on her body and psyche. I don’t like strippers, so do I want to do what they do? I don’t have a stripper pole myself, so where would I practice or use any of this, short of onstage at questionable local clubs during Amateur Night? And do I really want to spend $200 for a 10-week class that won’t amount to anything productive when I finish, i.e. I can’t be at a house party going, “Hey, put this song on, I’m gonna POLE DANCE! Right up against this rain gutter pipe!” At least with belly dancing, I can use the moves without needing major hardware.

James came by after work yesterday to return my bag o’ schtuff which was apparently burning a hole in his car trunk. I in turn threw some China souvenirs in his general direction. He was also craving Mexican food, so I suggested a nearby hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Taco Shack.

Dwaine had introduced me to Taco Shack some years ago and I always remember it, when I step in, as the place where Dwaine and his buddy engaged in a tipping war and the tips got so high that the waitresses developed an instant crush on Dwaine, so he had bragworthy service until he made the mistake of bringing me there one day, incurring the jealousy and wrath of the catty waitresses who from that moment on gave him the cold shoulder.

But they have good authentic food, so off James and I went. On the drive there, I disclosed my nervousness about our late dinner. “Why?” he asked. “Because I really don’t eat Mexican food anymore. It’s so heavy and made with lard.” He offered to eat some other genre of food, but I said we always go where I had cravings so now we’ll go where he has cravings, and I’ll try to be careful about my portions or selections.

I had a true dilemma behind the menu. While listening to the pompous bragging behind me of a guy “complaining” about all the women in his life who initially agree to keep things simple but end up begging him to take their relationship to a higher level as a brainless-sounding girl giggled her gullibility(I also remember Taco Shack as the restaurant where Dwaine once said to me, “Just once I’d like to overhear a conversation that’s half as interesting as ours.”), I felt my head fight my heart. I really wanted, craved for, the chicken mole, but it’s a full dinner that comes with tortillas, rice and beans, which I can do without but which I know I will ingest because I don’t like wasting food. (It was awful in China admitting defeat at each meal, thinking about the cliched starving children in China, paranoid of actually seeing them through the restaurant window.) But my head said to ignore the heart’s desire and go for the healthier choice, small soft tacos a la carte.

James hit on a thread of truth that I will regret the heavier meal as satisfying as it may be at the time I am shoveling it into my mouth. He recommended the soft tacos. I reluctantly consented and ordered 3 soft tacos a la carte, and thereby freed up the caloric guilt to eat the smothered cheese and chips given to us as an appetizer.

The 3 tacos were immensely and surprisingly satisfying. Plus, no guilt! My body must be craving something, however, because this morning I had a dream that I was sitting at a large round table by myself and eating chocolate and almond cookies and cakes and pastries while ignoring the little anorexic voice screaming, “Nooo! You have to stop!! What are you doing to yourself?! You’ll never be able to work this off! Never!!!”

Consistent with yesterday, my gym trainee and I are skipping the gym today as I touched base with her via email earlier and in her own words, “Every part of my body hurt. I left my purse at [a coworker’s] desk because putting it on my shoulder hurt. I couldn’t have done anything last night if the man of my dreams were to offer (who ever that is?). I think we deserve a lite lunch? If I can still walk by lunch time.” The right side of my lower back hurts from when I slept slumped over to the right sideways on my recliner all night. So we’re gonna speed-walk to a restaurant at lunch.

Gym trainee: Do you eat kiwi?
Me: I’m happy to say I have a food allergy to kiwi. I’d always hated it cuz of what it did to my tongue and the back of my throat, and in the past years discovered it’s an allergic reaction. (My parents still swear that the back of your tongue’s “supposed” to get fuzzy and tart and that it “happens to everybody” who eats kiwi.)
Gym trainee: It’s suppose to taste tart.
Me: It’s not tart at the main part of the tongue. It’s tart the way tart would be if you were injected with dots of tartness at the back of your tongue where it joins your gums, and I’ve been known to try to scrape the “fur” off the back of my throat that I swore was growing there after eating some kiwi.
Gym trainee: I know you don’t do fur 🙂 I just hate peeling the darn thing.
Me: You can cut it in half and eat out of it with a spoon. Like I do with avocados. Or you can just bite into it without peeling it if you want to see what it feels like when *I* eat a kiwi.
Gym trainee: I’ll trust you on that and continue to peel and complain about it.
Me: Sounds like a plan.

(via e-mails)

Dude, I didn’t post yesterday! 😮

My gym trainee forgot her workout clothes yesterday, so we didn’t go to the gym. She had some small purchases to make at WalMart about a mile away from work, so I suggested we walk there for exercise instead. To make up for the lack of weight-lifting, however, I did hit the gym with Mr. W, his son and nephew after work. After trudging through a 3-set circuit of decline dumbbell flies, dumbbell lunges and one-legged bent-over dumbbell rows, I got so nauseated that I didn’t even finish the last set of Romanian barbell deadlifts that I was doing and went downstairs to sit on the stationary bike instead. I pedaled pathetically slow and wondered if everyone on the elliptical trainers behind me were judging my back. I think it never turns out well if I take a nap before hitting the gym. The body’s just not turned on or something. I woke up this morning a sharp pain on my back vertebrae if I turn or tilt my head to the left. It was not easy driving to work this morning. *sigh*

The good thing is, long weekend coming up ahead to recuperate! Whoohoo!! I’m just picturing myself laying face-down on the floor for about 2 days. I can’t wait!

Vanessa’s sister, who normally leads Boot Camp, was unable to attend last nite. The girl who led it instead is a slim no-nonsense woman named Christine. She gave me food for thought.

“Rita might make it tonight,” she told Vanessa, “But she’s been saying that for the past month and she’s never come, so… But she gained a little bit of weight recently so she’s self-conscious about that. I saw her the other day and I asked, ‘Hey, how are you?’ and she said, ‘I’m fat!’ I said, ‘So what, we’re ALL fat!’ ”

That was genius. I laughed and loved it. Because no matter what we are or aren’t, no matter what we actually weigh, the plight of this generation is that we’re all fat. Our friends may not see it, our men may think we’re crazy, but it’s just that simple. “I’m fat!” “We’re ALL fat!” Whether or not we are, we are.

Today was a confusing and perturbing day. I was confused why I was so perturbed over something that wasn’t happening to me. Am I so freaking bored that I’m taking in someone else’s unfortunate drama to affect my sense of peace? Unfortunately, when bad things are happening to someone you’re in love with, telling yourself “This isn’t your problem, you’re not touched by this, it’ll handle itself with or without you” doesn’t get you very far. There’s something inside that wants to right the injustice, but I know I’m totally powerless and don’t have the option of participating in these events. Which is a good thing, the fact that I’m uninvolved in bad stuff, except for the fact that I feel so crappy about it. And then I’m back to the confusion. I was just sick about it all day today, trying not to take attitudes personally, trying to remind myself to be more giving and more understanding in this time. Still confused as to why I’d even have to tell myself that. I can walk away from it all right now and nothing would technically touch me or my life, I am that removed from it all. Technically. But I’m responding to it emotionally. Stop it.

I had a moment of relief from the stress (which isn’t even rightfully mine) between 7:30 and 9:00 when I took Vanessa up on her offer to go to Boot Camp at a local park, a circuit-training workout that’s run by her sister. It’d been offered before, but this time I went with it because I didn’t get to work out at lunch (I realized after getting into the gym locker room that I’d forgotten to bring workout pants, and I doubt the club would allow me to work out in my underwear), and I needed a distractor. The workout was so intense that I got the pre-fainting symptoms of dizziness, nausea, cold sweats, hyperventillation for a few minutes and sat out the rest of a circuit. I told myself I wasn’t properly nourished before the workout, and I was stressed all day, so I wasn’t at the top of my game. But it was disturbing that it happened. At least I caught the symptoms early and didn’t actually pass out or vomit. I was able to finish off all sets of all exercises up till then, despite seeing that some other people took breaks during sets. Yeah, when you feel like that, you really don’t care WHAT’s happening to other people in your life. Plus, some mosquitos actually stung me through my long-sleeved shirt, one on my arm, three on my back, so that occupied my attention for a few minutes, too. It was also really nice to catch up with Vanessa; I hadn’t seen her since way before my China trip.

Speaking of Vanessa, I’d once joked that the reason why my life/relationship was so peaceful was because all the drama available in the local area was being used up by Vanessa, so there was none left for me. Now that Vanessa’s life is on track, the drama has now hit someone else close to me. *sigh*

Mr. W said earlier, after a strange series of bad events that involve people marginally dealing with him, that anyone making contact with him these days are prone to attracting bad luck. Such as the guy tinting his car windows in the parking structure being harassed by the City. Such as my not having my workout pants. Well, I tend to believe that there are people/entities that look out for me, so I wasn’t too concerned. But at 6:30p, walking to my car in the parking structure after work, a car sped around a curb and unpredictably and without slowing down, turned right into my path and kept going in a speed way too fast for a parking structure. He didn’t even look and therefore didn’t see me. Some Asian guy. If I had stepped off the curb a mere 2 seconds earlier, there is no doubt that I would’ve been severely hit from my left, which would break my legs, hips, and at his speed, he wouldn’t have been able to stop from running over me so my head was likely to have been taken off, too. So to the entities protecting me, thank you. Your efforts are not unseen or unappreciated.

Turned out TurboTiger was right, the nicer hotels in China had in-house gyms. That’d be 2 out of 3 or 4 hotels we stayed at. I’d worked my ass off (well, not really, that sucker’s hanging on tight to my hip bones) before the trip in anticipation of not having access to any gym, but between the 3 workouts we had in the hotel gyms and the 2 hours of climbing the Great Wall of China and the daily walking from, to, and within sight-seeing locations, I didn’t do too badly. I think I lost weight.

PMS bloating set in within a few days of the trip, as I weighed myself obsessively in each hotel we stayed in (and then multipled the bathroom scale number by 2.2 to convert kilos to pounds). I was also nervous about the three, sometimes four meals we’d get a day. It seemed like every time we got off a bus or off a plane, we were taken to a restaurant and fed. If we were in a plane, Air China also serves full hot meals with every flight, even those only 2 hours in duration. I ate guiltily, thinking of the cliched starving kids in China, and looking out the windows for them. I did see a few begging kids, but I can’t say it wasn’t a tourist trap scam put on by their nearby and slyly-grinning parents.

After returning to California, my body started its thing on time the day after I got back, and now that I’m debloated, I seem to be a pound or two less than before I’d gone on the trip. So maybe there really IS something to that “eat six meals a day to keep your metabolism up” thing.

Just to be safe, I still hit the gym whenever I could upon my return. Monday at lunch, full workout, weights and cardio. Tuesday at lunch, we had a meeting that took half an hour away from my lunch, so I did a quick gym turnaround and ran 3 miles on the treadmill, the most effective workout I could do in the shortest amount of time. Grumpy at the loss of lunch hour, I declined showering and simply wiped off, deciding they can deal with smelling me if they’re gonna make us give up our lunchtime for a meeting. (Altho I don’t think I do smell, even after massive sweating.) Wednesday, I’d forgone the noon workout to have a birthday lunch with a coworker. Thursday/yesterday, I did weights at lunch and no cardio as I had a late start, but made up for that by going to the gym with Mr. W in the evening and doing a 65-minute run with hills on the treadmill, plus a 2-minute cooldown. Today I’m certainly going to the gym at lunch.

I’ve been munching on portions of meals here and there, whatever being full-time in trial allows time for. Half a protein bar here, some coffee with a piece of fat-free angel cake there. Leftover albondigas soup here, leftover meat loaf there.

I know if I were anyone else, I’d see results in the form of 5 lbs lost in a week. But because it’s me, I’m just treading to keep my head above water.

As the imminence of being gone for 2 weeks rolls in like a thick sea fog, I scurry around my second home, my courtroom and courthouse, making frenzied preparation. Life may be easier if I had the typical county worker mentality this week — lazy, spoiled and nonchalant, confident in the job security that a friend of my parents had once called “a metal rice bowl” in Mandarin. Instead, I am in hyper-drive. After the unusually complicated hearings this morning were held and their records and orders processed and entered, I went about the afternoon tasks I assigned myself. The dense stack of civil harassment files I received this morning must be calendared in the redbook; the Civil and Criminal computer systems must be checked for any upcoming hearings that I may have missed in my hand-calendaring; wrote a quick “Daily Tasks” list on a post-it and stuck it to the monitor to help the relief clerk out; I turned in my mileage claim (77 miles claimed) for my Hell Day a couple of weeks ago; I discussed with my supervisor and judge regarding having a consistent relief clerk in my stead here for the next 2 weeks; I did a (fruitless) hunt and investigation for 2 divorce cases that were “allegedly” assigned to me in January but which I’d never received; I set up courtroom statistics sheets for the next month so the relief clerk won’t have to dig too hard in my file drawers for those forms; I got answers on how to deal with a few “problem children” divorce cases.

I’d delved into my gym work with the same desperate conviction. Stepping up the intensity of my programs, I took my gym trainee with me as our workouts were elevated to 20 minutes of cardio and 20 minutes of heavier resistance-training on all major muscle groups every lunchtime, leaving her sore and painfully aware of the weight of her purse and of the court files on a daily basis. This we had done the past 3 weeks. I’d forgone group lunches, birthday celebrations, in favor of hitting the gym every lunch. Today was a hitch; a meeting was called at 1pm which robbed me of 30 minutes of my lunch period. I snuck out of the courtroom 15 minutes early, as soon as our last case was done, and hit the treadmill for a 3-mile run with my frenzied rushed state feeding into my energy level. I dashed into the meeting room only 3 minutes early, still sweating despite my cool shower.

Just a few more divorce cases…just a few more under my belt, and I can go home for the evening and resume my laundry and packing. Tomorrow after work, a happy hour party is being thrown at a local pub to say goodbye to 3 district attorneys, who are transferring to other courthouses. I’d decided early in the week to get my packing done throughout the week so I’d be free to attend at least for a little while, since two of the DAs are people I consider myself on extracurricularly friendly terms with. The presence of upcoming events like the meeting today and the happy hour tomorrow feel like looming deadlines to me and the pressure has had me on a sort of “panic mode” all week.

Just a few more files and I can get back to cleaning house and packing. I feel like I’m forgetting something, or will forget something. Ack, I need a vacation.

I’m a little bit nervous about the next two weeks. I’m scheduled to be in China. I’m not nervous because I think Mr. W would stand on my nerves until we break up, or because I’m afraid of catching the bird flu, or because I’m afraid the flight would crash. No. I’m nervous because there are NO 24 Hour Fitness clubs in China. I doubt the hotels we’re staying at will have gyms for the guests. Working out is just not a priority in China.

I can do some minor resistance training using my own body weight in the hotel room (crunches, push-ups, lunges, squats), but what am I to do for cardio? My mom said to not worry about the exercise factor since a lot of walking is involved in the tours. Walking for me is not cardio. I need to run at least 3 miles. I doubt I’d even break a sweat walking. Mr. W suggested running the streets in China in the evenings, but 3 miles is enough to get me lost. Maybe we can run the stairs in the hotels if we don’t get locked into the stairwells.

I don’t know why I’m stressing about this. It’s not like I didn’t take week-long or even month-long hiatuses on my own when I was feeling down or sick or just burnt out. But I am paranoid right now. I know I’m gonna be eating in China; our trip is inclusive of all meals. I feel like my weight is so precarious right now. It’s been fluctuating in the upper half of the 120s range. If it bursts into the 130s… I can already feel the tears! It was so incredibly hard to break through the plateau and get into the 120s again.

Maybe what I’ll do, is ask the tour guide where the destination is for each spot and I’ll run there and wait for the group.

Okay. I see that I have completely lost it.

I’m off to the gym.

I didn’t crawl out of bed this morning until restlessness just about killed me. When I saw the clock, I knew why. It was past 11a. Holy crap! I baked an Italian sausage breakfast casserole (ingredients: 4 slices wheat bread, 4 de-skinned Italian sausages which I sauteed without oil and drained the grease from, 5 eggs, 1 cup milk, salt and pepper, 1/3 cup mixed grated cheeses) for Mr. W, his daughter and me, and since then, haven’t done much but watch TV. I’ve discovered that if I watch a jewelry shopping channel waiting for a gorgeous natural Alexandrite ring to come up for sale, I end up munching on raw almonds, red potato chips, grapefruit, dark chocolate truffles (2), apple. Not good. But if I watch a reality show marathon of The Next Pussycat Doll and see 8 young beautiful girls work their asses off on looking hot and getting the intense choreography in order to keep from elimination, all I put in my mouth is water. And I feel just fat and ugly enough when I look at my still-pajama-clad makeup-less form in the mirror, to not put anything else down the piehole. What is wrong with me? Why am I binging like I’m PMSing? I’ve found myself these couple of days to also be short-tempered and low in tolerance just like I’m PMSing. Maybe it’s not PMS. Maybe I’m just an irrate bitch. Hmm. That’s a new perspective. Okay, fine, it’s not new.