cindy's world

Today at lunch, I learned that I can run 3 miles without socks on.

Five minutes later, I learned that I can not run 3.25 miles without socks on.

It’s really too bad, because for once I have enough energy, time, and MP3 power to hit a solid 4 miles. “Murphy’s Law,” my court reporter told me in the locker room. Oh well. At least I ran something, 3.3 miles of it, plus 0.2 miles of a cool-down walk. When I realized I had neglected to bring socks after I was parked in the gym parking lot, I contemplated turning around and returning to work, or grabbing a bite. But I had already missed yesterday’s lunchtime workout to have lunch with my coworkers, so I can’t skip any more lunchtime workouts this week. (New rule: I can only miss 1 evening [jujitsu] workout and 1 noontime workout a week.)

I limped back to work just now. I have a blister on my right foot right at the side of the arch, where these particular shoes happen to connect with my foot. *sigh*

What the heck? I wrote a whole entry and it appeared to save but then it totally disappeared! Ugh, I hate doing the same post again, it never reads quite the same. And the constant phone calls and interruptions! Grrr.

Jordan copied and posted my “Iris” entry on her blog, and I read it on there through the eyes of people who don’t know me and have never read my blog. And boy, I sound vain and conceited in the I-tie-everything-in-to-my-looks part.

People who don’t know me don’t know that I was anorexic for years in high school. It was all about trying — and failing — to get myself to look a certain way or fit into a certain size. The more I failed, the more I obsessed about getting there. Success and happiness in life became defined by losing a pound; failures in life were gaining 3 pounds. My weight was the end-all to everything. If someone was mean to me, it was because I’m fat. If someone had a crush on me, it was because I’d recently dropped a few pounds. That’s how it was in my head. Pulling on a fat roll frustrated me to the point of tears. I had started defining who I am by my appearances, whether good or bad, and not not based on who I actually was.

Of course I blame my body’s present inability to respond to diet and exercise on anorexia. I have to work 5 times as hard to get a fraction of the results. Any normal person with my workout and diet regimen would be slender, toned, with a six-pack. Instead, I sit here, a chubby girl, always battling battling battling. My metabolism’s ready to switch off at any time and turn into fat-storing mode whenever I skip a meal. It sucks. I have frustrated many a good personal trainer, who have encouraged me to get my thyroid tested (I’m borderline hypothyroidism, too.)

I think it does help to be with a man who thinks I’m beautiful whether I gain or lose 5 pounds (at least, he sounds sincere in expressing his attraction to me), and realizing that over all the obsessing about physique, I value my mind more than I do my physical appearance. Maybe I can never get down to 22% body fat. Maybe I just have to be okay with 30% body fat, as long as I’m healthy. My heart, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, everything have invariably tested in the “very good” range.

Or maybe I should just get liposuction and let my body maintain its same equilibrium now, just with 10-20 pounds less fat hanging off me.

I’ve just completed my 8th workout since Monday, I’m sore all over from running, jujitsu and weightlifting, and you know what I really, really want? A really savory pizza and Taiwanese food. Talk about unhealthy.

I wonder if I can get the combination together when I hang out with my gym trainee after work today for drinks.

Lots of stuff going on this weekend. Some weekends it’s static, and then other weekends it’s an old friend’s b-day shindig in Venice, getting to my parents’ to transfer data on the taxes I’d completed last nite for them (at past 1am!), Mr. W’s gonna install a wireless printer something-or-other for them, meeting up with Vicky for some Burke Williams massage and pampering, and hanging out with the W. I probably missed something. Oh, Bingo! And all these are happening at the same time. “Stevie Wonder” also loaned me a DVD of Iris, the Iris Murdoch story, so I’ll finally know what he’s talking about when he calls me the Asian Iris Murdoch.

I’m so glad I already cleaned my house.

I’m pretty happy with my after-work productiveness today. I left about 20 minutes early (which is 40 minutes later than most people in my job description, and 70 minutes later than some others, plus the judge worked us 15 minutes into lunch today, so don’t judge me) and gassed up my car, went home, changed the cat litter, cleaned the cat area, vacuumed the house, did the dishes, cleared out some bills, collected and took out the trash, and got to jujitsu on time.

At jujitsu, we warmed up so hard I was totally pouring sweat (maybe my metabolism was still on from my 3-mile run at lunch today which, by the way, made me sick), and then I was directed to the front of the room to lead the class on abs. And then we did — I have no idea how to spell it, but it sounds like ron-doori, which is two people facing off with their hands on each others’ gis and trying to turn the other person off-balance and induce a fall. That’s one of the things I’m worst at, I always lose the skin off my left knuckles from fabric burn, and I’m always being thrown. But with the breakdown of the moves and strategies in a drill today, something clicked in my head and I kicked ass! I think the trick is (or at least, the trick that worked for me) to turn them left and right and then pull an arm in while pushing the other arm out so that they’re going backwards, perpendicular to you, and then step quickly into them while continuing to pull the side that’s down. They fall on their side or ass every time. Anyway, I got home, showered, and I just installed TurboTax.

Right now I’m waiting for the free TurboTax State to download. If I can finish my parents’ taxes tonight, then they’ll have it ready this weekend when I visit them and they can sign it and mail it in. I really thought I’d have to ditch jujitsu tomorrow to clean up around the house and work on taxes, but now it looks like I won’t have to. Unless I decide to go to this celebration at a local pub that the DAs invited me to. I don’t even remember what they’re celebrating. I don’t think anyone’s being promoted this time. The problem is that I can’t do both. I learned early on that even one margarita before jujitsu totally dulls my reflexes and clarity of thought, even tho I have zero other symptoms doing normal stuff. I guess jujitsu is just more demanding on concentration and coordination. I guess I can go and not drink, then head over to jujitsu. Hmm.

Who knows the reference to my post title?

My childhood friend Vicky, who has always sworn to hate running, has signed up for the San Diego marathon, running for the cause of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She has a progress page that documents her runs and the amounts of her donations, how close she is to her goal. I put in $100 just now. The site takes care of the donations online, it was really easy.

You guys may have heard me talk about Grace here and there. She was one of my best friends. We met waiting for the school bus an early September morning when we were 14. She swore I gave her a dirty look that morning and that she never would’ve thought then that we’d be friends. Not only did we become friends, but that friendship stretched across great distances as she went to Berkeley for undergrad and I went to UCLA, and when she moved from there to New York to take a job offer with Merrill Lynch Risk Management (consulting, something to do with the stock market). She met Justin while training for Merrill Lynch. He was sent down from the Great Britain branch for training in the New York branch. She caught his attention when she kept dropping the ball during one of their getting-acquainted exercises in which everyone in that group sat in a circle and whomever got the ball had to say something about themselves and throw the ball to someone else. They fell in love and the plan was that she’d move to London after their wedding. “You keep moving farther and farther away,” I’d once told her. But she was so happy, and I was so happy that she was so happy. I was to be one of her bridesmaids. She never made that move to London because leukemia made her move even farther. I donated to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society then and also sponsored her when she did a walk across some bridge event for the Society, and registered as a bone marrow donor, but did little for the cause since.

I’m glad to be doing this for Vicky, and I’m glad that she’s doing this for the Society. And I’m so proud of her for completing her first 8-mile run this past weekend.

Greg had pushed me a bit to do the San Diego marathon via IM (after he invited me on here), and today I open gmail to find that my childhood friend Vicky had sent me a registration to sign up for the Los Angeles marathon. Hmm. Should I be doing marathons? Maybe training to run 23 more miles than I normally do within 3 weeks will help me drop some weight. Or drop a limb.

My mom’s stressing me out. Earlier in the week, she wrote me an email about ordinary stuff, but buried in the text was something to the effect that both she and Dad like Mr. W and have we talked about the future? Mr. W was good about it and laughed it off (we haven’t even been dating 6 months!), and today, she writes me again in an email that very sweetly reviews her family life starting from her marriage to now, and says that she got married, had a kid, put the kid thru college, helped her get into her first house, and now she’s going to prepare for retirement “and…something else.” And then she goes into how she wishes that, presumably before the “something else,” she will get to see me at my wedding and then hold her grandchild. And then in a later paragraph, she asks if I’m going to help her with her living trust.

I had never liked having to address my parents’ mortality. It used to scare me to death as a kid until I gulped and decided not to worry about such an improbability when I was in middle school. In middle school, my parents had brought home 2 blank certificate-looking wills and just had it on the wet bar so that when I came home from school at the ripe mature age of 12 or 13, I freaked out. Those forms stayed empty and undealt with for months or years until I felt better about it, and then they just disappeared.

It’s rough shouldering the responsibility of your parents as an only child. People assume that I’m spoiled by them, and to an extent, I guess I was. I did get everything without having to share. But I also got their bad moods, the butt of their bad days, all of their expectations and disappointments. The thing with being just one person is that you get both the long and the short ends of the stick. It was a selfish decision to move out of their house on my own, and very anti-traditional Asian. My mom cried nightly when I first moved out. I go home regularly and visit them on the weekends (look at that, I still call their house “home”, as tho I were in college), just like all the good little Asian kids who have moved out due to school or work, and that alleviates the guilt somewhat. But generally I shrug it all into the back of my head. The guilt that I should be taking care of them (altho they are autonomous and I’m very proud of my immigrant parents for that), that I should be more involved in their daily lives, that I should have a finger on the pulse of their health and know what’s going on and be doing things to help them improve their health. I feel guilty that the weekend visits are almost dealt with like a mandatory chore in my perceived-busy life instead of something I look forward to.

Speaking of health, my mom said in an off-hand way in an email string a couple of weeks ago that she had to go now because she had a doctor’s appointment. My mom’s always had doctors’ appointments as I was growing up. It was something I was used to and I normally wouldn’t ask much. But normally I’d get my information from her complaining about the healthcare network or the doctors’ vague reports. This time, when I responded to her email the next day asking what the appointment was for, she deliberately kept it from me, saying it’s too complicated to explain and then just changing the subject. I responded to the subject she changed it to succinctly, and then deliberately readdressed the doctor’s appointment, asking again what it was and how it went. She wrote, “nothing, just a blood test.” How is that complicated?! She’s keeping something from me. And now all this weird pressure to rush my life that she’d never done before. Either she and my dad REALLY like Mr. W, or something’s egging her on. *anxiety puke*

I compromised — I did go to the gym, but I only did a cheesy 2 mile run. I’m still tired, but I’m not near tears anymore. I hope I have enough energy to do well in jujitsu tonite and go out afterwards to have birthday drinks with Navy chick and other jujitsu folks. I heard that if you’re emotionally upset, alcohol affects you more. I guess we’ll see. Maybe after tonite I’ll be changing that answer on the survey about whether I’d ever been drunk.

I had wondered what would make my morning better than having ice cream at work. The answer came shortly thereafter.

A new clerk came in to look for my court reporter, and I pointed her toward my reporter’s office. The new clerk started to tell me about some cases she had questions on, then stopped in mid-sentence and said, “You look good! What do I need to do to look like you?” I was taken off-guard and I think I stammered something about maybe hitting a gym or something. She told me she recently started walking on a treadmill and asked what I recommended regarding improving her diet. So we talked about health and exercise for a bit. I felt a little like a hypocrite, since I had just finished eating ice cream, but what a great topper to the ice cream, huh? I don’t know how this new lady thought I’d have anything to tell her about health, so I’ll just take it as, I look like someone who’d know something about working out and eating well instead of someone who just naturally stays at a certain weight without effort.

Later, as I was walking back into the building after my lunchtime workout, a security guard noted that I’d lost more weight recently. I thanked him gratefully for noticing as I’d been trying so hard.

I was introduced to smellypoop.com, which is a real web site with poop gag products, poop research, and lots of scatology info. I read thru most of the info, and yup, all the stuff you’ve ever wanted to know about poop, and more. Emphasis on the “and more.” At some points I was fascinated in a scholarly sense, and at other points — like the part about animals and people eating poo (coprophagy, it’s got a name!) — I was just disgusted. And then I was horrified by this little tidbit of info:

“Can you get sick from eating poop?

Yes, you can definitely get sick from eating poop, even in minute quantities! Although urine emerges sterile from the body (unless the person has an infection), poop emerges loaded with bacteria and sometimes other life forms. Many diseases, including food poisoning, cholera and typhus, are spread by fecal contamination. Many parasites, such as the notorious tapeworm, can be spread through deliberate or accidental ingestion of poop.
There are some parasites, such as pinworms, who depend on people eating their own poop to keep the population up. Pinworms are small nematodes that live in the colon. The females emerge from the anus at night to lay their eggs. Their activity makes the anal area itch. The person scratches the itch (often doing so in his sleep), procuring a small amount of fecal matter and eggs under his fingernails, and then puts his fingers in his mouth. Once the eggs are consumed, the person is infected with a new generation of pinworms.
I have read that almost everyone has pinworms. Luckily, pinworms don’t do much harm. You only notice them if you have a lot of pinworms! If you want to find out if you do indeed have them, get someone to gently touch around your anal area with Scotch tape while you are sleeping. The worms will stick to the tape and you’ll be able to see them.”

What does he MEAN, “almost everyone”?! It instantly made me wonder if I have pinworms, and then I imagined finding out that I have pinworms by the, uh, scientific technique the author suggested, and then I just thought it’s better that I don’t know.

Oh yeah. I’m not at work today. Took a “mental health” day off with permission from my supervisor.