cindy's world

Both my wrists are tweaked and the right side of my lower back, an injury I’ve had for weeks, is now aggravated. Now add to the casualty list my left shoulder. I know what’s better for me is to skip jujitsu today and maybe even tomorrow, and just do cardio at the gym at lunch. I thought about doing this, and then I imagined not having anything on my plate in the evenings for the next 2 days if I skip jujitsu. The extra free time scares me. I had gotten to a point where I viewed my few hours of free time not as emptiness, but welcomed relaxation and opportunity to catch up on chores. I’m not sure whether it’s that my state of mind is not there anymore and has regressed, or that I can only deal with so much free time before I feel lost, lonely and scared in the vacuum of emptiness.

Yesterday while at work, I ate 3 giant cookies (m&ms, peanut butter and chocolate chip). That was my entire edible nutriment content from waking till 4:30pm. I got home, ate some of my mom’s fried rice that she made over the weekend and had me take with me (Asian moms are so good about trying to feed their kids for the week when the kids visit on the weekend), rested a bit, then flew off to jujitsu. On the drive back from jujitsu, I called up an old friend and we met at a Thai food restaurant where I had a red bean drink (whole milk tastes like creamer!), and we shared steamed mussels and some sort of steamed Thai spring rolls. For the small volume of food I ingested, I estimate I took in 2300 calories. Good gawd! I told myself that as I’m already bloated from the In-N-Out Burger I had on Sunday, I need to take it easy on food for the remainder of the week.

So this morning when I got to work, I only ate one giant cookie. Chocolate chip.

My girl friend Erin and I met up at Glen Ivy Hot Springs this morning around 10am. Whereas I was proud of myself for getting to Corona at that hour, having finally fallen asleep this morning at past 5am, Erin had already completed like 3 errands before I saw her. We started by caking ourselves with the red mineral clay, chatting on the lounge as we dried, then like two little pots, we sat in the mud water to rinse off what we couldn’t flake off. Then we showered, I changed into my slinkier tanning bikini (earlier, had to wear a black tankini that red clay couldn’t stain), and we explored the grounds, going from pool to pool. First we dipped a toe into the sulfur-smelling outdoor mineral bath, but that was way too hot. We went instead into the adjacent lap pool to bob around as we talked about swim strokes and kicks. Next, we sat in the bubbling indoor Roman bath and enjoyed the hot spa water and jets. Then we hit the steam room. I made a very bad Holocaust-related joke when it got unbearable, and we left and padded outside to explore the nooks and crannies of the outdoor property. On the different levels and terraces, behind various foliage, we found and lounged in a warm, fizzy salt water spa and discussed the California real estate market (as compared to New York’s, Nevada’s and Arizona’s). On a terrace, we discovered and lounged in one of two generously-sized terrace spas. When we craved cooler waters, we drifted lazily on blue foam floats in the large lounge pool. When we left Glen Ivy at 5:30pm, we were pruny but our skin felt smooth and conditioned and we kept talking about how great our bodies feel and how relaxed we are. Seriously, my backaches and sore spots are gone as I sit and type here.

For dinner we hit up Kamon Restaurant in the City of Industry for sushi. As usual, the sushi chefs at the bar greeted me warmly and joked with Erin and myself as they made us great food, gave us a great discount, and complimentary baked salmon. (I tip generously there, and have been going there for awhile.) $26 + tip for sushi dinner for 2, can’t complain. We both wanted something sweet for dessert, so we went to a crepes restaurant in the Hong Kong Supermarket plaza. Horrible service. We never got the water we requested, nor the extra spoon nor napkins (the latter two I got myself from the front of the restaurant). The two crepes including tax came out to $7.04. Erin was covering dessert and she put on the table…7 dollar bills and four pennies. We skidaddled out of there. Then we chatted in my car and caught up with each other’s lives for an hour after I drove her back to her car.

I had a good time. =) And a good tan, despite the continual reapplication of sunblock.

I almost got into 2 or 3 auto accidents today. Normally I’m a very defensive driver and have avoided many accidents that I know other drivers, had they been in my place, would’ve plowed into. But today, I would “wake up” right after a near-miss, and it’s to the credit of everyone else that I haven’t added any new dings to my car.

At jujitsu earlier, I slammed hard onto the mat right into my injured right knee. Good thing I waited an extra day before coming back or that would’ve been one of those horrible semi-permanent injuries. (A heavy-set new guy didn’t know to let go of my gi when he hit the floor and yanked me down and forward and I had to fall on my knee to avoid kneeing his kidney.)

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I knew something was up the way the universe was trying to slow down my drive all day. Driving to work in the morning, I hit 36 out of 38 possible red lights. Same thing with driving home after work, and driving from home to jujitsu.

Good thing about jujitsu today (aside from the fact that the blackbelt wasn’t there), there was another older blackbelt instructor who is much more technical in his teaching. We split the class in half and one worked on throws and falls and the other worked with the new instructor on drilling blocks, kicks and hits. Yes, we got the full breakdown of each movement. I raved to the regular instructor after class about how helpful that was, and how I had no idea what I was doing until I got the basics explained to me. He seemed happy about my feedback and said he’s gonna have that instructor back for that purpose for us.

I just got eyelid surgery and had a deep Caucasian crease put in! Just kidding. Altho I am wearing my gray contacts for kicks.

I was waiting for the elevator this morning when my (Irish) judge walked down the hallway toward me to catch the elevator also. He said, “What do you weigh now? You’re wasting away!” I said, “There’s no such thing!” Some time ago another coworker (Mexican) said I was getting TOO thin. I gave the same response. “There’s no such thing!”

In Asian circles I am still considered chubby, and I personally feel I have more fat to lose because I figure anything that jiggles (except for my chest, obviously) can afford to come off. This is interesting. I have been at the point before where non-Asians consider me normal and Asians consider me chunky, which disparity I had just tossed aside as non-Asian acquaintances trying to be polite. But I’ve never been considered too thin for one side and still chubby for the other before. I’m not sure what to do. Even the women in jujitsu who lift me to prep for a throw pause and say, “Oh my gosh, you’re so light!”

Maybe this is why I get hit on by Hispanics, blacks and whites and never Asians, and also why I’m so bruised up from jujitsu.

Something is wrong. I should not be this injured after 6 sessions of jujitsu, just a week and a half into the class. At first I thought it was just me. Today I had to skip my lunch workout because my entire right side is tweaked. Right knee joint is painful, pain on the right side of my lower back, right wrist is bruised on the outside and the joint hurts, tightness on the right side of my neck. My left arm has bruising all the way from the wrist to mid-forearm, and a bruise on the inside of the left wrist. I have bruising, abrasion burns and scratches on the inside of my left shoulder from other students grabbing me too hard through the gi. All of these were from yesterday. And yesterday I was wearing the full garb so it’s not like they just went thru a t-shirt.
I went to lunch with my blackbelt coworker. We talked about my class (he’d taught martial arts before, too), and he wanted to see me demonstrate some of the blocks, hits and sweeps. “Okay, line it up,” he said.
My response was, “Huh?”
“You don’t even know how to line up? Just show me your fighting stance.”
I was lost. Didn’t know how far apart to put my feet, where my toes were to be pointing, where to place my hands, how high up, what angle, closed-fist or open-palm. My coworker was horrified. He did a tutorial for me and explained the basics, and throughout the demos I’d say, “Oh, I saw them do that.” But I didn’t know how to do it myself, when to apply it, why I would apply it. I didn’t even know what part of my hand/arm was supposed to make contact for a block. I explained we just went thru the motions by imitating someone else showing us the motion, and the instructor would walk around correcting us and kinda fine-tuning. “Hands farther out. Good. Quicker, like a snap. Good. Turn your hip more. Forward. No, forward. There.” That means nothing to a beginner! It’s not like learning to dance where the position is just for aesthetics. My coworker is scared that I’m gonna get killed because I don’t know how to do anything properly or which leg to use to sweep or why and how to manipulate the move so that I could still do a sweep if someone’s lined up with me on the opposite leg. We’re all formless masses of dough and this instructor doesn’t seem to remember how to form raw dough into a pastry, he only knows how to fine-tune, like making the edges really pretty and crispy and giving it that nice brown glaze.
My coworker told me to get out of the class now before I really injure myself. I’m not learning the basics of the techniques and I’m not being protected from someone hitting me or throwing me too hard. If I wanted to be more serious about my training, I’d have to unlearn the bad habits I pick up now from not knowing how to do it correctly from the beginning. “You can’t tell an illiterate person to just copy a sentence in calligraphy. First you have to teach them how to use a pen, and teach them the alphabet.” I should’ve picked up on this myself, the way the instructor teaches abs. It’s rather a messy teaching, so when I stepped in to lead on abs instruction, I corrected the students on proper form, ab isolation, and explained why I wanted their chin up, how high I wanted up, how they can achieve it. I’m going to talk to the instructor next week and explain this to him. He probably doesn’t even realize we’re so lost.

A friend/coworker who is a blackbelt who trained under Chuck Norris (before Chuck became a celebrity) and frequented different schools/studios to study a variety of martial arts told me today about a counter-culture of martial arts. Apparently it’s a very common thing for blackbelts to hit on and pick up on female martial arts students, and there is a market of female “blackbelt groupies.” My friend said he’s seen this in virtually all the studios he’s been in. Guys even say things like “I’m right about to get my black belt. Then I’ll be getting all these women.” And there are women in these studios who have slept with most of the blackbelts there. Ew. And here I thought that the people I’d meet in martial arts would be nice people because no one expects hot feminine women to be taking martial arts so picking up women can’t be the guys’ motivation for attending the class. Armed with this knowledge, however, I felt empowered and liberated as I drove to jujitsu. As another friend suggested, I am just gonna step back and watch the train wreck that’s about to happen between the new girl and the blackbelt.
The class was totally different for me today because of my new nonchalance. I was more easy-going, more open, and made a bunch of new friends. I think I shall go to the September convention in Arizona. In our after-class discussions today, it looks like it’s going to be a co-ed hotel room situation between me, the new girl (who I now get along with because I no longer care about the competition), an intermediate level Japanese guy named Josh (who tried to talk to me yesterday but of course my head wasn’t in it then), and another intermediate level guy named Gerardo. I had a really good time chatting and sorta hanging out w/these 2 guys today throughout class. From the bits and pieces I observed, it didn’t look like the blackbelt appreciated my new friendships. He ignored me unless he was dealing directly with me (like during grappling), and if we had to deal with each other, he’d throw liners at me like “Don’t worry, you’re safe with me.” At one point he touched the side of my neck with his fingertip and said, “Oh, you’ve got a pretty bad burn there.” I shrugged. When I got home, I looked in the mirror and the burn must’ve totally and completely healed itself. It was all pretty laughable.
Oh yeah. And I led the class again on abs, and was happy to see that the 3 new ab exercises I added in were strains to them. Brave class, tho. They are very gung-ho about a good strenous workout.

At the gym at lunch, I laid back on the bench for the lat pull-down machine to do a set of chest exercises with dumbbells. In mid-set, out of the corner of my eye I saw an older guy walk around and sit down at the perpendicular and connected machine that works calves. He had been sitting on a nearby bench taking a rest and watching me do my circuit. When I got back up to do lat pull-downs again, I noticed that he had taken the pin out of my weight stack and was using it for his calves machine! How rude! There were free weight stacks all around us connected to our machine that no one was using! I leaned left and took the pin off an unoccupied stack and put it silently into my weight. He watched me do this but didn’t say anything and continued his set. I added my irritation to my glower power from yesterday and had a super-aggressive workout. But after I stepped off the cardio machine onto the sliding scale…HOW THE HELL DID I GAIN 5 LBS THIS WEEK?! 4 days straight of jujitsu, 2 hrs each, AND I still worked out at the gym 3 days this week, and I GAINED weight?!

The glower resumes.

I knew I shouldn’t have finished that margarita. I was more vulnerable to alcohol because of the 3+ mile run I did at lunch and I didn’t eat much all day. I got a headache that I’m even now still experiencing.

I made it to class early so that I could change into workout clothes. I’ll admit that a vain part of me did want certain people to see what I look like as a girl, and altho certain people were not in the classroom when I first poked my head in wearing a short skirt and heels, I ran into certain people on my way to the restroom to change. Certain people recognized me first and greeted me and I got to show off the 2 huge bruises on my left knee and shin, which certain people helped make. Gawd, I think I just gave too much away. Mental note: don’t give certain people this blog addy.

Teaching the ab portion was fun. I only had them do 1 set (20 reps) each of like 7 ab exercises. I fully planned to hit 40 reps, but quite a few of them were gasping and struggling already. The time worked out pretty well so that I ended at 7:29 (the instructor had said these warmups stop at 7:30 sharp). The students and instructor were very complimentary, about the effectiveness of the exercises, about my explanations of what each exercise worked as I went along, about my emphasis on proper form.

Then my day went downhill from there. I had forgotten what it was like to suck at something. When I look back, there really isn’t any activity I had failed to succeed in. Some things were more effortless than others, but if I wanted to do something or learn something, it was done. And most things WERE effortless. Today, with the skin torn off my knuckles as I was thrown again and again, my seeming inability to rise to the challenge or even progress beyond the last in the class was very discouraging. The students were great; they would give me tips and teach me as I did the exercises against them so it’s not just the instructors giving the directions. However, I just felt utterly un-adept. I would blank out and not remember what I was doing; the cognitive skills were fried and of course I haven’t developed an instinct to work off of yet; I had short-term memory problems such that I could not remember what station to go to or what action is being performed or received at each station. The new girl seemed to have flown way past me (altho I did learn today that she had previously taken some form of kung-fu or something because I asked her where she got her uniform) and one-on-one with her, she threw me way more times than I would’ve preferred. I’m gonna lie to myself right here and say she had an advantage over me being like 7 inches taller than me and outweighing me.

And it bugged me to not be in the limelight of the “new girl” title anymore, too. I so enjoyed the novelty-worship the class gave me the last 3 days. I feel like she and I are too similar and she’s in my space (socially). If I got into it more than that on here people would start losing respect for me (more so than they have already anyway). I feel pathetic and yet blue. But I did try very hard to be nice to her and she was nice in return.

Yesterday evening at jujitsu, the instructor discreetly confirmed that I will go in today to do the abs drill, then when we were all doing warmups, he announced to the nearly 30-member class that there will be a “guest instructor” for an abs drill the following day and they should all be there, but they should take care not to eat beforehand or they’ll have a pizza party (vomit on the mats). That seemed to scare some people off so he said, “No, she’s not gonna be that tough. She’s a short girl [extending his arm to chest-high], she’s like my granddaughter’s height.” Our eyes met briefly and I gave him a dirty look. “She’s shorter than everybody,” he continued. One student asked, “Is it Rebecca?” “No, it’s not Rebecca,” he said. Then later, he said across the mat to his son (blackbelt assisting him in class), “Have you figured out who it is yet?” His son asked, “Is it an old student?” “No, it’s someone new. Brand spanking new.” He touted it over and over that now I’m thinking, “What if I can’t give them an effective enough workout? Or what if I’m TOO hard on them?” Ack.