cindy's world

#1 My mom used to tell me, as an incentive to lose weight as a pre-teen, that if I needed emergency heart surgery or something like that, if I were thin the doctors could just cut right in and fix me up. But if I were fat, they’d have to cut through all these layers of fat and move them aside before they could get to the heart of the matter (pun intended), thereby causing potentially life-threatening delays. So this had me thinking… if I were obese and the doctor has to cut through fat in the surgery anyway, does he or would he just cut off the fat rolls and discard them? Cuz then, free lipo! Kill two birds with one stone! Or would he charge to cut the fat out? I suppose if it were that easy, all these heart patients who undergo surgery wouldn’t have to go thru the “You must lose weight to keep your heart well, we barely saved you this time. You need to change your lifestyle” doctor-patient lectures.

#2 Why would someone willingly drive a convertible really fast with the top down through wooded areas like the car commercials show? Wouldn’t you get bugs splattered on your face the way they splatter on your car? And what if you have a passenger and you’re trying to talk to him/her and you have to yell really loud to compensate for the wind noise, and cuz your mouth is open, you SWALLOW a bug?

I found out last nite that I really, really like belly dancing with a veil. She taught us 4 simple veil moves: a high and low “teardrop”, the “Roman cape,” “butterfly wings” and “around the world.” I like the “around the world” because it’s a two-handed swirl of a 3-yard veil around the body. The veil Vanessa got me and refused to let me reimburse her for is of a black chiffon-like fabric with black sequin detailing around the trims and around patterned crocheted hearts. Very cute. We also found out, much to our disappointment, that yesterday was the last belly dancing class for the “semester.” “Then why only start the veilwork today?” I said, bummed. Vanessa said it must be to tantalize us into signing up again next “semester.”

Another bummer yesterday was what happened to Vanessa after belly dancing last nite. She was driving home and was hit by another car. The guy who hit her was drunk, and altho they both got out of their vehicles, he refused to exchange information with her after telling her he is not insured and he does not have a driver’s license. And then he took off! I was so pissed when I heard her voice mail. She’s okay, but how many reasons does this guy have to NOT be on the road?! She did call the cops, tho, and apparently she just followed the guy to his house which was a block and a half away. Genius drunk people.

I got a taste of a bad telemarketing job today. I had to call 15 jurors while we’re in session and whisper, like a creep, to them that altho they’d been ordered back for 1:30p this afternoon, we’re now postponing their group to 9:15a tomorrow morning. Those whom I didn’t reach in person I kept calling alternate numbers I have for them and leaving messages and voice mails everywhere I could. I had called them all yesterday already to postpone their appearance from 10:15a this morning to 1:30p this afternoon. I’m probably going to get a bill at the end of the month from my managers asking why there’s incessant phone calls going out from my line these couple of days. Oh well, that’s what happens when we have a dual jury for a trial and one jury’s picked WAY fast and the other is going WAY slowly.

On the brighter side of things, Vanessa ordered and received (per her voice mail to me left last nite) two belly dancing veils from Ebay. She said in her message that they look awesome. Our instructor had advised us to bring in twin-bed-size sheets or blankets for our veil work this evening. Now we get to learn how to dance with a veil while using actual veils! Yay!

This morning at 5:30 a.m. I got up and dragged Mr. W on a run. 4 miles down, 10 more to go. *faint* True to tradition, every time I add a mile, I get a new blister. That’s only 1o more blisters by mid-September. *faint*

I’m still in the busy criminal court today. I have to say, it certainly does make me feel productive. I didn’t work thru lunch again, tho. I went and ran a 5K with hills, because I wouldn’t be able to run after work. I’m going to Vanessa’s place after work to meet her new kittens, and she emailed me that she’d already told the kitties that their Auntie Cindy is coming to visit them and they’re looking forward to it. I gotta see them before they get too big. After visiting kitties, we’re going to belly dancing.

Sometimes I really like my life. =)

Now back to work.

To end a sort of a crappy weekend, I had a crappy night’s sleep last night. I hadn’t been sleeping well, so I’d resort to vegging in front of the TV until it lulled me into sleep by controlling my thought patterns (or turning it off). Last nite, I laid there for awhile, uncomfortable, unable to sleep, thoughts reeling. I think I thought that I thought myself out of a knot, so feeling better (or so I thought), I got out of bed to watch some late-nite sit-coms. It did put me into a pretty comfortable sleep. Waking up around 3:30a.m., I teetered back into the bedroom to continue sleeping. That did not happen. I laid there, physically and mentally uncomfortable. Every time I would start to drift into unconsciousness, the pit of my stomach would lurch into what felt like the beginning of an anxiety attack. There was something in my mind that was scared to let me go to sleep, I was afraid of losing something. I thought of my cool sateen sheets in my bed at home, my cat sleeping on the floor next to my bed. Wishing I could beam myself there, I contemplated the etiquette of getting up in the wee hours of the morning to go home. This went on until 5a.m., when I burst out of bed, collected my crap, and walked out the door. Then thinking about Mr. W awakening to find that I’d disappeared, I went back into bedroom to tell him goodbye. He was still sleeping soundly. 3 grown people could’ve fit in between me and him on the bed all night, so he was oblivious to what I had gone and was going through. I kissed him on the cheek and said I was going home, and he sat up abruptly, looking really perturbed. I tried to get him to go back to sleep, saying it was early, the pillow is “that” (point) way, do I need to tuck him in? Finally, in a very cranky manner, he said, “Fine. Whatever. Goodbye,” and plopped back down. I drove home in the early morning darkness, trying to push away the sinking feeling in my chest and lower stomach cramps so painful I was afraid all the paramedics would find in my car would be blood and guts as my body turned itself inside-out.

I went over to Mr. W’s yesterday because he offered to run 3 miles with me in the evening. It wasn’t as comfortable of a run, I felt a tension on my right hamstring that led up to the right side of my lower back. After the run, I just thought, “Uh-oh.”

I talked to Vicky this morning, and having run the Rock n Roll Marathon in San Diego a few months ago, she suggested I needed to run in a hat and shorts. Running in direct sunlight is a real issue to me, I usually run in the late evening to avoid sunlight. Disneyland’s half marathon starts at 6:30 a.m., and let’s just say I miraculously pick up and maintain for 14 miles my old pace of a 10-minute mile with straight running. It’d be just before 9 a.m. when I’m done, which, if present weather holds up, would be a billion degrees in direct sunlight. Glug. I don’t like running in a hat because sweat tends to collect at the brim and the trapped heat and steam bothers me. I don’t like running in shorts because they ride up. And I need new shoes and MP3 music before then to run in the “full outfit” a la dress rehearsal.

Belly dancing got sexy tonite! She started the class with the usual technique-intensive, fast-paced stuff, but ended the class with a routine of lots of slow gyrations, sweeping arm movements, “snake arms,” “tulip hands,” body undulations, “alligator jaws.” I’m gonna try to remember the routine and do it right now in front of my wall mirrors. There are no mirrors in class, and I wonder if I look as good as the instructor did doing these movements. BRB…

Okay. Why do I look like Tai Chi when I’m doing this?! I gotta do this sometime in a tight tanktop and an Indian skirt instead of in the fitted black T and black dance pants that I’m in right now.

I worked late yesterday, left at about 6:30p. Since I would’ve missed half of jujitsu by then, I went to Mr. W’s and coerced him to take a 3-mile run with me. It felt really good for me, altho he was in pain. What a trooper. For me, it was a nice, comfortable run and I could’ve gone farther. That makes me feel a bit more comfortable about the upcoming half-marathon. I need to get a good MP3 player that’ll play for 2.5 hours straight.

Probably because of that run, I was happy and inspired and was wired even today. At lunch today, I worked the gym hard with my trainee. She’d been expressing some discontent about having plateaued in her weight loss, so we did a 4-exercise freeweight circuit with no rest in between sets (diagonal bicep curls to tricep extensions to lunges to shoulder presses, X3) and finished off with some assisted pull-ups.

Tonight: belly dancing! After I run over to a coworker’s house to feed her kittens. She was suddenly hospitalized yesterday morning and she lives a few blocks from me, and how can I let kitties go hungry?!

There are few things in my routine life grosser than having to man-handle sweaty men. There’s a relatively new guy in my jujitsu class who a blackbelt I was next to in line speculated led “mostly a sedentary life” and therefore has no stamina, coordination or core strength (stability). This guy was so wet that he left puddles on the mat after he landed during take-downs. Some take-downs tonight required my having to put my open hand on his cheek and hair to push his head around and down. I’d be wiping and wiping my hands on my gi afterwards and still be unsuccessful in drying them off.

The instructor again approached me about competing. After my refusal for this summer’s competition, he’d passed the torch to another girl. Now he walked over and put some slight pressure in getting me to compete for next year. “You look good, you fall well, I think you could do really well out there,” he said. I was still hesitant, but really, it’s been a long time since I brought home a medal or trophy of any sort. I really oughta do it.

In bellydancing last night, our instructor put in a DVD of professional dancers, so that we could see what we’re working toward. Murmurs arose from the students recognizing certain moves, such as the famed Figure Eight and what our instructor calls a hip M&M. Apparently shimmying — very important in bellydancing. I guess I gotta figure that one out, then. Some of the girls were excited at seeing the DVD. What I primarily got out of it is, Gawd, I need liposuction.

I’ve been down about my body these last few days. I’d like to think I’m just bloated from the 4 slices of Domino’s Pizza I had Tuesday night after having cut excess sodium and all fast food out of my diet for almost a year. But what it really is, is probably age-related weight gain. *Sigh* When people talk of regrets they have in life, I tend to think I don’t really have any. Sure, there were some horrid, evil things that have happened to me, but some good always came out of having to live through those experiences. Now, however, I find I do have a regret. I wish I’d known more about the human body and nutrition in high school to have not been anorexic. Starving myself didn’t make me skinny. I was average-sized. And now, due to the metabolism I screwed up in my teens, my body stores fat as easily as others pee, and burns fat as reluctantly as gas station CEOs are willing to give up their current $10 billion profit margin. (Did you guys hear about that? They’re gouging us for gas claiming oil costs are higher so they have to raise their prices; in the last quarter they’ve raised prices 12%, and their profits went up 12%, which means their costs have stayed the same. Their profit this last quarter was over $10 billion dollars. I was upset watching this on the news this morning.) I basically have no control over my fat rolls. They come and go completely on their own volition. In the past I’ve woken up to find that a lot of fat seemingly dissolved, but most of the time they’ve come back without a change in my eating or exercise patterns. Working out like mad brings no response from my body. It is so frustrating to have no control over my fat and I can only imagine that people look at me, tsk, and speculate why and how I’ve let myself go.