cindy's world

It’s funny where inspiration comes from. Dwaine met a girl on Valentine’s Day and decided to go old-school wooing style and was going to make her a mixed tape. An actual mixed cassette tape, reminiscent of the 80s and 90s when we grew up and would make mixed tapes on the regular, for ourselves and to show our love for the lucky recipient(s). So I brought him my compact boombox which played CD, radio and cassettes. He’d have to convert his mp3s into an audio format, burn his song selections onto a CD, then play that CD on the boombox while pushing “record” on the cassette. That’s how you get backwards-compatible technology. While I was there on furlough Wednesday working on this project with him (among other stuff), he showed me online photos of this girl. Yesterday, I took a peek online at this girl’s photo album. And then I texted him.
“[Girl]’s profile isn’t private, so I took a peek at her old pix. She is sooooo your type!”
He responded, “LOL…yeah, she seems fun and silly.”
I wrote, “& she looks like she works out. Sorry, I gotta ask…are her boobs real?!”
He responded, “YES! She enjoys working out and they are real! :-D”
I wrote, “omg. omg. U ARE SO LUCKY!!!” and then quickly texted again, “I mean, SHE is so lucky. Yeah.”

Yesterday, I thought about this pretty girl who “ENJOYS WORKING OUT.” I used to enjoy working out. Now I’m a slob at it. I’ve been to the gym like twice in the past 2 months. So I went to the gym at lunch and pushed and pushed and pushed and had a painful but complete workout which left me shaking afterwards for hours. I’m in pain today, but I’m going back to the gym again…RIGHT NOW.

“Bat” and Jordan are coming on Friday and I’ve got all kinds of things planned for the weekend, so I’m terribly excited about that. It also gives me a “clean up the house” deadline of Thursday. I was already doing laundry on Monday with my clothes in various piles on the spare room bed categorized by color and severity of agitation they’d get in the washer. By Tuesday, I had my “delicates” hanging on a drying rack in the spare room, with some remaining piles of clothes to be laundered still on the bed. I knew I was going to lose Wednesday night to do what I had to because Mr. W made our tax appointment super-early for Wednesday after work, so I also needed to get my tax documents in order on Tuesday evening. I could do that while laundry is going, no problem, except that since it was so early, I hadn’t received any tax documents in the mail from my banks and mortgages, yet. I’d managed to pull some 1099s from online, and just needed my mortgage statement for my old house. I couldn’t pull that from online since I don’t have an online account with that lender who had recently bought over my loan from my original lender. So I was a little stressed about that. On the drive home Tuesday, while I had all this on my mind, Mr. W said that his son had decided to come over that night and stay over. “Maybe he’ll already be there when we get home, and then we can all go out for dinner!” he said. I immediately thought of the lingerie hanging on the drying rack in the spare room (where Son normally stays when he’s over) and the piles of dirty laundry on what would be his bed. Crap!! All my financial stuff is also kept in that room, so I’ll have to pull all that out of there FAST to get out of Son’s way. I hoped Son wouldn’t already be there, cuz I don’t want him to walk into a room with embarrassing laundry all over the place and then my having to kick him out of the room so I can pull receipts and statements. So…things to do ASAP:
* finish laundry
* pull tax stuff
* see if the mortgage statement miraculously made it into our mail box; if not, then get on mortgage lender’s website and make a new account so that I can download the statement immediately

It also occurred to me, as I’m thinking of all this, that I’ll have to wait until Son leaves to clean up the guest room and bathroom, launder the bedsheets, etc, and I can’t do it Wednesday because of the tax appointment, so I’d have to do it Thursday. So Thursday, I gotta clean the house and guest rooms, get fresh sheets put on, find time for a haircut, AND oh, crap, Mr. W’s daughter needs black work clothes for a new job she got as a singing hostess at an upscale restaurant. She needs this before the weekend, and I’m busy all Friday with my out-of-towners, so that only leaves Thursday, too. I felt the stress mounting with all these impending deadlines, and a rare headache started creeping in. That car ride home seemed interminable. I have things to DO, man!!
“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to go out for dinner with you guys,” I told Mr. W. “I have too much crap to do.”

When we got home, Son wasn’t there yet, so I immediately went to work putting stuff on my drying rack away. On one trip downstairs, I noticed Mr. W by the front door, hand on the doorknob. He said to Daughter, “You ready?”
I asked, “Where’re you guys going?”
He said, “To dinner. Wanna come?”
I said, “I can’t. I’ve got too much stuff to do before [Son] gets here.”
So they left, and as Mr. W didn’t extend an offer to bring me back dinner, I figured I’ll just find something really quick and simple to eat while I’m at home. It started as a productive evening; I put in a new load of clothes and moved the remaining load to our bedroom, then boiled some instant Ramen on the stove and added yolkless Eggbeaters and baby spinach. While that was cooking, I pulled tax documents from the spare room upstairs so I could be out of Son’s way ASAP when he got there. I ate the ramen straight from the pot as I worked on the tax documents. Then I got online to register for a new account with my mortgage lender bank since indeed, my mortgage tax statement was not in the mail. At the final step, I was eager to get into my account and download the last missing item for the tax appointment the next evening. Instead, I was aghast when I read on the monitor, “Your password will be mailed to you within 5-7 business days. You may then come back to this website, put in your login, and enter that password to access your account online.” I don’t have FIVE TO SEVEN BUSINESS DAYS!!!

An unfeminine word escaped my lips. The headache was greater, and I felt sick. I was feeling sick pretty soon after I ate the ramen, but it was more than just a nuisance now. It was incapacitating. By this point Mr. W and Daughter had come home from dinner, and I showed him the message on the screen. He said the same unclassy word, and was upset about my inability to be prepared for the tax appointment the next day. I teetered upstairs and fell over sideways on the bed, hoping to ride out the sickness within a few minutes. An hour went by. Another hour. I told myself I’d be up to move my laundry from the washer to dryer once the clock reached 8:15p. Everything hurt at 8:15 and I was severely nauseated, so I stayed in the same prostrate position. (I couldn’t tell if the body pain was sickness-induced, or due to the 4-mile hilly run I took Daughter on the day before, or maybe it was the heavy weightlifting I did at the gym at lunch.) I heard Son arrive. Soon Mr. W came to see what had happened to me. I mumbled that I needed to get downstairs and see about my clothes in the washer, but that I couldn’t move. He asked if they just had to go into the dryer, and I said I’m not sure, I’d have to see what the clothes were because some may have to be air-dried on the drying rack. He left. I receded from reality again, and was soon after aware of the sounds of the washer and drying going downstairs, so I knew that Mr. W had put in additional laundry, which meant he took mine out of the washer and likely put the load in the dryer. I forced myself up to go downstairs, opened the dryer and pulled the damp, hot clothes out of there, closed the dryer, and went back upstairs to put them all on the drying rack. Mr. W said something about how they’re not dry yet, and I responded that if this particular load dried in the dryer at the setting he had, all the clothes would shrink. I arranged the wet mass on the drying rack, and then went in the bathroom and threw up.
Half an hour later, I threw up again.
Fucking ramen. I figured I’d been eating so well now for so long that my body totally rejected the preservatives, chemicals, sodium and MSG in the instant ramen, which I’d always known is one of the worst things one could eat, but there was one package left and SOMEONE had to eat it so it doesn’t go to waste. It was soooo not worth it.

The next day, despite not sleeping well at all, I forced myself to go to work, knowing I was going to abandon my judge on Friday to pick up Jordan at the airport, and we’re in trial so he’s very anxious about my not being there. He even offered his WIFE to pick Jordan up so that I didn’t have to take the day off, but of course I couldn’t let her do that. I threw up at home before we left, and felt so much better after doing so that I figured I was fine for the rest of the day, but was wrong and threw up again at work. I’ve never vomited 4 times like that in memory. Fucking ramen. I couldn’t believe I still had ramen to throw up after 14 hours; my body was obviously not letting any of it go down. I pensively sipped at only a mug of cool tea all day on Wednesday. Mr. W ended up trading our tax appointment with one of his friends, who had a March appointment, so at least that pressure was gone.
Around lunchtime, I’d totally forgotten it was yoga/pilates day at work, which I normally participate in, but I couldn’t do it. I instead crawled into the jury room to nap at lunchtime, and dry heaved a little upon waking, but didn’t vomit again. I could just feel the pregnancy rumors starting at work.

I did get better throughout the day, enough to try a small bowl of plain miso soup for dinner, and altho my stomach protested a little with a small stab of pain, it didn’t come back up, so that’s a good sign. Mr. W and I also went to some clothing stores and got Daughter her work clothes on our way home yesterday, and shopping is much faster without her, so that’s out of the way. She was happy with our purchases. This morning, I was dying of thirst and weak from malnutrition, so I sucked up two cups of soy milk for breakfast. My stomach protested a little, but insignificantly, so now I’m having more tea at work. I’m slowly expanding my food capacity again. Today, Daughter and I will go get haircuts after work and she needs her work shoes and I wanted to get her running shoes, so maybe that can all be done in one shot. Then Mr. W will help me clean the house. It’ll be okay, I tell myself.

I vowed to never eat instant ramen again.

… I got a great reminder of just why yesterday.

Anny had made plans to see the 7:15p Imax 3-D screening of “Avatar” yesterday at the Irvine Spectrum, and it was an enjoyable movie the first time (regular screen, 3-D), so I tagged along, bringing Mr. W and his daughter. Mr. W and I got there first and bought advance tickets, then we had delicious crepes and coffee as we passed the time. Ann then arrived and we got to hang out for the first time in awhile, and we walked around poking into random stores as we chatted, waiting for the movie to start. (Mr. W was generously holding our place in line as he waited for his daughter to arrive.) There was a great sale at Hollister, I was happy to see that the maternity clothing look in women’s fashion appears to be on its way out, but the tops are still super-long. All the shirts would look like dresses on me. Daughter showed up as we returned to the theatre, and we all started the movie in a great mood, marveling at the gigantic screen. The movie was ridiculously crowded. We had one empty seat to our left, and before the show started, that seat was filled. Since the screen is so large, the state-of-the-art theatre had seatbacks that reclined slightly so people can see the whole screen without having to crane their necks to look up.

Halfway through the movie I was ripped out of my Pandora-flying reverie by a pulling against the back of my seat. I waited for whomever was behind me to settle down, except it never really happened. Throughout the rest of the movie, my seatback was pushed, kicked, bumped, moved. And then when I tried to get myself back into my original position of a slight recline, I realized the person behind me had locked up against the back of my seat to where the back absolutely was forced upright and unable to budge whatsoever. I was PISSED. This reminded me of the whole airplane fiasco with childhood friend Sandy, when we flew to New York on a red-eye and two Cheetos munching middle-eastern men behind us refused to let her recline her seat and kept pushing her back up, the one behind her finally locking her seat up with his knees. I pushed back against the seat, it gave a little, and then the jerk locked up tighter and prevented the seat from moving again. And then there were the bumps. Mr. W is over 6′ tall and he said there is no way his knees even came close to touching the back of the seat in front of him, so he didn’t understand how it was possible that someone had to be totally up against the back of my seat and headrest. I pushed back consistently and hard, using my legs on the ground to brace me. So there was this stupid battle going on through the entire second half of the movie. Seeing my body move here and there from being bumped and watching me struggle back, Mr. W turned around a few times but it didn’t stop. After the movie, I told Ann what had been happening, and she turned and said that there it was some chick behind me. WTF! There’s no way she could’ve needed the extra legroom unless she were 7 feet tall, so she must’ve put her feet up against the back of my chair and used it as legrest. What a BITCH. I think people have no business being in public these days with their absolute lack of boundaries and manners. This is why I hate going to the movies.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon in Urgent Care due to severe vertigo. It had only happened to me once before a couple of years ago when I was in NorCal visiting college roommie Diana, but I didn’t care to ever go thru that again. Like that makes a difference. I stumbled a bit Saturday morning after putting in my contacts, but I figured my eyes just needed to adjust to the contacts for whatever reason. I then proceeded to drive to WalMart to buy a laundry hamper. The road was spinning around my head and I felt off-kilter. I suddenly recognized this as a mild version of the first time. I managed to get thru WalMart fairly normally and drive home (altho upon exiting the car and walking, I did fall left back into it), taking good care to leave space cushions around me on the road. Mr. W thought it may be dizziness due to sugar low, so I had a bowl of cereal and felt a little better. We then plopped on the couch to watch some Ally McBeal. Some time went by and when I sat up again, the spinning was back, and worse. He tried to convince me I needed medical attention as I tried to convince him I was fine. To prove my point, I got up to continue my laundry chores, but in transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer, everything spun so severely I had to brace myself against the washer and try hard to focus on one point, and even then the dizziness got me so nauseated I wobbled upstairs to the bathroom and hugged the toilet, breathing erratically, waiting for the cereal to make its way back up. As soon as I sat still, leaning my head sideways against the tub, I felt better. Things were still moving on their own, but at least the nausea was gone. I pulled myself up to look in the mirror. The motion alone brought the spinning sickness back and I observed I’d never seen my face and lips so colorless. I slumped back down. Mr. W found me in the bathroom like that a few minutes later and this time when he insisted I needed to go to Urgent Care, I was too weak to deny it.

At the hospital, the nurse weighed me (I apparently lost weight since being flakey on the gym the past few months, which could only mean I lost muscle mass, damn it — at least I returned to the gym on Friday), took my blood pressure (108/69, pulse 64), checked my oxygen saturation (98%). All vital signs looked normal, healthy even, as usual. I was sent back to wait in the lobby for the doctor. Hours went by and the spinning lessened until I was comfortable walking steadily to the restroom on my own. When the doctor finally saw me, though, he gave me a lot of time and very thorough testing. Mr. W saw that as an opportunity to rat on me to the emergency doctor. “She doesn’t eat breakfast, doesn’t eat lunch, and works out at the gym at lunchtime. She only eats once a day. She won’t listen to me!” I gave him a flat look. The doctor (as other doctors before him) didn’t seem concerned with my level of nutrition, especially after I told him I start every weekday morning with a hot mug of chia seeds in water. He checked my reflexes, walking, balance, took blood pressure laying down, sitting, and standing (pretty minimal changes), checked in my ears (no inner ear infection) and nose (passed the booger test). Then he had this tuning fork thing he put on various parts of my body to ask if I could feel and/or hear it. And then, Mr. W thought he’d pipe in and tattle on me about my recent omnipresent breathing difficulties and tried to relate it to malnutrition. The doctor looked over my past medical records on the computer, going back 6 years. Then he took an ECG (my heart’s normal, too) and listened to my lungs. So here’s his bottom line:

Looking at the progression of data from past blood tests to present, I apparently am dehydrated. This is why in such an otherwise normal healthy person, my sodium and potassium are in the high-normal range. Concentrated blood. He said this is also the reason why my pulse and blood pressure are so low (and I thought it was just cuz I’m athletic). He also noted that in more recent blood tests compared to before, my kidney function has gone down gradually, and he attributes their not doing as much filtering to that I’m not supplying them the tool with which they filter things — water. He asked what color my urine usually is. I couldn’t tell him, considering I pee probably twice or three times a day so I don’t notice. He balked. Now I’m QUITE dehydrated. Having ruled out everything else, he diagnosed the dizziness as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (calcium stones that detect balance float on fluid in the inner ear, and when one’s dehydrated, the fluid level drops), and gave me a printout of Care Instructions for the next time this happens. Apparently you just do Brandt-Daroff exercises, really easy stuff. You sit on the edge of a bed or something, and lay down quickly to the side that causes vertigo (for me, this time I fell left). Stay there with that ear flat on the bed at least 30 seconds as the vertigo subsides, then sit up. If vertigo is still there, go quickly down on the opposite side. If things spin then, wait for it to stop, then flop back to the 1st side. You just do this like 10 times. I guess it dislodges the little calcium stones that perceive balance in your inner ear or something. For the nausea, he recommends over-the-counter anti-motion-sickness medication meclizine, which we already have at home as Mr. W’s Disneyland roller coaster rides excuse-eliminator.

Now here’s the interesting part. As for my breathing difficulties, which I described to him as feeling like my lungs won’t expand when I breathe so I respond by taking deeper and deeper breaths until I’m lightheaded, he could find no organic cause. So he thinks it’s psychological. I said the other doctor there had diagnosed it as GERD. He doesn’t think it’s GERD. He said being full may put some pressure upward but that it shouldn’t impact my diaphragm to where I feel like it won’t expand outward. He thinks I’m having unconscious anxiety attacks. But I’m not stressed or anxious, I tell him, and even Mr. W agreed. He said to start writing down what I was doing when I find myself gasping for air, and note what I was thinking right before. I tell him it’s usually immediately after I’ve eaten that I have symptoms, sometimes I’m just sitting there after eating, watching TV, when I start the breathing struggle, hence GERD, right? He still didn’t think so. He said it’s likely a more deeply rooted issue than a conscious awareness of something that causes me stress or anxiety, or I’d have stopped the trigger myself by now. So a new theory was born.
Maybe the anorexia has come back, but only subconsciously. I’m so (subconsciously) freaked out that I’d overeat and get fat, that I don’t eat often, and when I do, the feeling of fullness triggers guilt, and that guilt triggers an anxiety attack that gives me the only consciously noticeable symptom: difficulty breathing. Hmm.

Today, Sunday, I was involved in a major furniture exchange. My parents gave me their current newish dining room set, I gave our too-large dining set to my aunt’s family, gave my parents our credenza, matching coffee table, bookshelf, and gave Kevin and his U$C roommates our leather living room couches (I visited enemy territory on Trojan turf for the first time today — can the place USE any more bricks?! It looks like the 3rd little pig put the campus together.). Our new couches will be delivered on Tuesday (yay!). I was talking to my mom about my recent hospital visit, and it turns out she’s had acid reflux and vertigo for most of her life! “So it’s a genetic thing! So this is all YOUR fault!” I joked, pointing a finger at her. As a matter of fact, she’d even had a random attack of vertigo Saturday night right after I’d recovered from mine. “You passed it on to me! So this is YOUR fault!” she accused, pointing back at me. The last stop was my aunt’s house to deliver the dining table, and she had us all sit around it and kept feeding us tea and junk food. After all the furniture was delivered and exchanged, I drove home and found myself again gasping for breath in the car. It suddenly occurred to me to relax my diaphragm and stomach. My full tummy extended. And breathing got easier.
Oh.my.God. I didn’t even realize I was sucking in my stomach. Thinking about it, when do I most tend to suck in? When I’m full, cuz that’s when I feel fat with my protruding tummy. I also suck in when I’m sitting, because that’s when fat folds over (blech) and is the most obvious. So if I’m wearing fitted clothes, feeling fat, sitting at work, my diaphragm is constantly being restricted from expansion — by ME! I’m gonna test out this theory. So far I’ve ended two bouts of breathing issues tonight by forcing myself to relax my stomach. It’s not the most attractive thing in the world, but at least I can stop gasping. I’m not subconsciously anorexic; just subconsciously vain.

It was supposed to be a light week at work with my judge on vacation as with most judges, so that there were more of us than were needed around the County. So I was surprised when my supervisor called me and floated me to Compton Court. I wasn’t happy about it, so on the drive I called Mr. W (who was at home waiting for installation guys to switch over our cable/internet/phone carrier and for his friend Chris to show up so they can hang out all day) for some soothing and sympathy. I got the exact opposite where he rushed off the phone and since I didn’t know what was going on, I was basically hung up on and when I texted him to ask why he hung up, I didn’t get a response and after some time I called him back and he was really irrate that I was calling again because he was working with the cable installer guy and I was interfering. AND it rained unexpectedly through the morning, so I drove to the city that rap artists earn their gang war wounds in, in the rain, found this unfamiliar courthouse, parked in the separate juror lot, walked a block through the rain with no umbrella or coat to the courthouse carrying my manual and file stamps since the handle of the bag I’d brought my materials in ripped off as I got out of the car, and walked into the middle of a murder and assault preliminary hearing. I emailed some coworkers during the hearing to ask if there’s anything special I need to do or note or code for a Prelim since I’d never done one before, and mid-email, sat through an earthquake. The 11th floor I was on swayed for a long time, and I looked around and briefly considered ducking under the desk, but no one else was budging except for a man in the audience who kept looking up and around at the creaking walls in confusion, and I didn’t want to create panic when I had one female bailiff who was watching a very fidgety inmate being held to answer on charges of beating up and trying to kill another inmate in a jail cell in order to help his criminal street gang. So I just sat there and dealt with the swaying. The judge never looked up at me through the entire hearing, and I thought he was upset it took me until 10:20 to get there. Things got better after that.

After the hearing, the judge introduced himself as he got off the bench and I handed him a Christmas card that someone had walked in for him. He looked at the attached document and said that this is from a family friend whom he gets UCLA game tickets from, and I said I’m a Bruin, and he said he was too, and the DA said she was too, and then it was all big happy family from that point on. Turned out the judge was very nice and was just very focused on the Prelim; he’d missed the fact that I’d come in, he’d missed another judge who stood in the courtroom next to the bench for a long time waiting to say hello to him, he’d missed the earthquake. When we tried to identify which judge had come by to visit him, all I could tell him was a physical description and that the visitor said this judge, Judge Herman, is his former boss. I learned Judge Herman is a retired judge just sitting in Compton for now on assignment to help out during the holidays, he was borrowing someone else’s dark courtroom to call these cases, and as we looked through a list of all the judges in the building so he could figure out who’d been by, I learned that half the bench officers in Compton were either his former employees when he was the head district attorney, or his former students when he was a professor at law school. As he got off the bench we got engaged in an hour-long conversation about the current UCLA football team and analysis on their development, coaching strategies, recruitment deficiencies, etc. I learned that the players with the highest IQs are the big boys in the front of the offensive line, contrary to what one might think, because of their need to remember all plays, change and recoordinate their positions and plays as defense changes, AND take a physical hit all at the same time. I learned he used to play college football until an injury took out his left knee and snapped apart every ligament there and that every 5 years, he goes back to an orthopedic surgeon hoping modern medicine has figured out a way to fix his knee, only to be told there is still nothing they can do except a full knee replacement when pain got intolerable. He still went to work out during lunch and came back in time to be on the bench at 1:30p waiting for three misdemeanor cases to come in. During that waiting time, he told me about the distribution of power in relationships (business or personal) being equated to a pie; power over various components are sliced up and designated to one or the other person, and conflicts arise when one person acts on something that’s considered within the other person’s slice of pie, because what’s on the slice is solely the other person’s turf. He said it was important to know to reslice the pie as things change and to allow dynamics to shift, such as when a baby is born, it needs the mother more so the father will do what he needs to assist the mother, keep her happy, but basically stay out of her hair on baby things if she’s got it covered, and as the child grows, it will eventually outgrow the immediate nurturing the mom had provided, and more power would have to shift to the father for leadership, discipline as the stronger hand, helping play sports or something, maybe. The mother would have to let go of that portion of her slice and allow the father to pick it up and that would then be his turf and she’d resign her control over those things (such as coaching the kid in a sport). I liked when he said that his wife told him, “I married you for life, not for lunch,” and they’re careful not to step on each others’ toes when they have their separated interests or activities. And after the hearings were done, he told me about a book he’d just finished reading called “Parallel Worlds,” and we got into quantum physics, religion, the current experiment under Switzerland, the theories of Creation and prophecies vs. mathematical astrophysicists’ projections of the End. As we left, he keyed me in the employee elevator to each floor I had to get off on to distribute orders and files and waited for me so that he could key me to the next floor (I didn’t have internal access to the building), and then was concerned that I had to walk in the rain back to the parking structure. I told him I didn’t think I could shrink any more than my current short size, and he laughed, and said he hopes I’d be back the next day. (I’m not, since I carpooled to work today so I can’t leave on my own.) I really liked him.

After work, I drove to childhood friend Sandy’s house a few neighborhoods over. I arrived starving, since I skipped breakfast as usual (except for my hot mug o’ chia seeds) and skipped lunch knowing that if I left the secured courtroom, I wouldn’t have keys to go back into it after lunch. She made me a big batch of potstickers and we chatted around her dining table while I ate and she watched me, and we drank hot oolong tea with honey. Her cats came by one by one to greet me, and soon I was surrounded by five furry faces. We then retired upstairs to her TV room/loft so I could look for Molly, Mr. W’s favorite cat. I soon sent him this picture by text message to make him jealous:

He wanted me to steal Molly but of course Sandy wouldn’t allow it. Soon her boyfriend Steve came home and we chatted for a long time about Asian parents, psychotic ex-wives, and the little mischievous ghost that’s haunting their house. We ordered pizzas and laughed a lot. I made two white cats (“this one and that one!” I’d say, pointing to each white cat in turn with the laser dot they were chasing. “They have NAMES, ya know!” Steve said in mock offended tone, knowing I can’t tell them apart, so all night it was This One and That One for Lacey and Daisy) chase a red laser light dot in circles, at each other, up a wall, and then made the dot chase the cats as they freaked out and walked backwards and sideways on their toes with their hairs standing up on their spines, which Sandy said she and Steve had never thought to do as they laughed at the cats’ reactions to the role reversal. They may have SEEMED freaked out, but they liked it, because when my arm would get tired and I’d turn off the dot, both white cats would whip around and stare at me with their alien almond eyes until I started with the laser pointer again. Sandy said if I ignored them after the stares, they’d start knocking things off the table to get you to play with them, and they’d go so far as to bat the actual laser pointer at you to force you to pick it up so they can chase the dot. Around the time I was planning to go home, around 10 p.m., her pizza delivery guy showed up and said he had trouble getting to her house because the streets were blockaded by police. We looked out and sure enough, police helicopters were flying overhead shining floodlights around her neighborhood. Great. So I had this text exchange with Mr. W:
me: i cant leave cuz the streets are closed & quarantined & police copters are flying overhead.
Mr. W: What the…..
me: i dunno. we’re watching the news to see what’s going on. all the copter searchlights are on & they’re going around her roof & neighborhood.
Mr. W: That sucks. How often does that happen there? Twice a day or more?
me: sandy says she’s hurt & offended.
Mr. W: What are you gonna do?
me: sit here. steve’s here so we feel safe-ish.
Mr. W: That might be the safest time to leave. When the cops are watching.
me: & get carjacked by a desperate refugee? no thanks!
Mr. W: Are you coming home tonight?
me: there are FIVE cats here!
Eventually the helicopters went away around midnight, which was when I left cuz I figured, they must’ve caught the guy, right? When I went home Mr. W was staying up waiting for me, which is unusual cuz it was so far past his bedtime. He said he wanted to make sure I got home from that area okay. I told him about the helicopters going away. He said that doesn’t mean they caught the guy, it just means they gave up. Great. But I still had a great evening.

I was driving to work today and thinking about my sleeping habits. Mr. W’s daughter left on a 5-day trip to New York, so we have the house to ourselves. Mr. W embraced the freedom by returning to his old nudist self, whereas I found nothing more luxurious than falling asleep for the past 2 nights downstairs in the living room with the TV on, alone. Of course Mr. W and my parents, people with wholesome “normal” sleeping habits, think I’m the most undisciplined sleeper ever, too lazy to turn off the lights and TV and go upstairs to bed when I’m getting tired. Deep inside — okay, not even very deep — I don’t want to go upstairs and lay in bed properly and go to sleep. The fact is I can knock out within the first commercial when a TV’s on, but if I were laying in bed upstairs, no matter how exhausted I was, I would lay there awake. It’s too proper. I fall asleep a little more easily if I were lying slightly improperly, such as perpendicular to Mr. W, or facing completely the opposite direction (sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed). There’s just something about not truly being ready for bed that makes me contrarily sleepy. It’s like falling asleep in class. You know you aren’t supposed to fall asleep, and you fight to stay awake, but all that resistance just makes it all the more tempting to doze off.

In the car this morning while parked on the freeway, I thought about my childhood. My mom made me go to bed at specific and etched-in-stone hours. She’s kinda anal about schedules, and gave me an extremely structured upbringing. Occasionally, I would beg to break the structure and a few times thought myself the luckiest girl in the world when she’d agree to let me take a cold shower instead of a hot one on a warm night, when I was allowed to have a visiting cousin or two spend the night, when I was allowed to stay up an hour past my bedtime so that I could watch a news story that the TV channel had been teasing during my permissibly awake hours. Once I was allowed to sleep in the bathtub. (I never asked for it again; it only seemed a cool idea in theory but I think in the middle of the night I took my pillow and blanket and retreated back into my bedroom.) As for the one occasion my hour-long begging finally resulted in my parents’ grant of a delay of bedtime so that I could watch a news program — I ended up never having seen the news story anyway, as my own snoring and my parents’ laughter woke me up 15 minutes into the extra hour I’d painstakingly earned. I was forced to go to bed immediately shamefaced after that. So why, as an adult, have I not retained the good sleeping habits my mother so specifically imposed on me in my impressionable childhood years?

Looking back, freedom to me had always been 1) staying up as late as I want, and 2) eating whatever and whenever I wanted. If I knew my parents were going to be home late or even not at all as I got older and was trusted to spend a few nights on my own as they traveled, the two excited thoughts that would immediately pop into my head were, “I can stay up all night! And EAT stuff without being harassed!” As an adult, vanity has reined in #2 (although food still tastes better when snuck in nibbles, as opposed to irreverently served in a plentiful plate in front of me), so the only “luxury” I allow myself is the “ha!” I get for being up all night, for not exactly going to bed or sleeping in the position I know I’m “supposed” to. Maybe the way to better sleeping habits would be to untie the deeply-rooted association in my head between “unconventional sleeping style” and “spoiling myself.”

I wonder if my cousin Mark, who also has hideous sleeping habits such as falling asleep in his car once he’s pulled into the garage instead of going in the house to bed first (I can’t say I’ve never done that), falling asleep in the day at locations and during events he was supposed to be alert, has the same psychological roots that formed his sleeping patterns.

The universe works fast to keep its equilibrium of experiences. To that, I say a very emphatic “HMMPH!”

In addition to being told by the hearing officer yesterday that I “likely won’t be held responsible” for the invisibility of the bus zone that is the subject of my $300 parking ticket, over the weekend I also received a $40 check from Dentist Andy. It was an office check, and I was confused as to why I deserved it. So I sent him a quick message on the social network site we’re both on, asking about it. He wrote back that my insurance had paid more than they’d estimated, so here is my refund, enjoy. Who does that?! I would’ve never known about the overpayment, and I’ve never known a busy doctor’s office to issue refunds on things like this. The best they’d do is give a credit on the next visit, and even that is rare. Talk about honest business!

To offset the happy karma of getting my $340 back, I felt that I was given some offensive inconsideration last nite. That yielded a bad night, and naturally not a great morning. That not-great morning continued with the normally 40-minute drive to work taking an hour and a half, during which this happened, AGAIN. Same shit, different toilet — while stuck unmoving on the freeway, I dialed immediately but got a message that said to check the number and dial again. I looked down at the phone; I’d misdialed and punched an 8 instead of a 0. I redialed, and after that, it was all busy. Turned out some chick named Lashenka from Lancaster was the first caller with a June birthday, so she immediately gets $102. Then, for $10,000, is her birthday…June…29? NO. OF COURSE NOT. CUZ THAT’S *MY* FREAKING BIRTHDAY!! Another bitch stole my money! The only thing to make this morning worse fast, I thought, would be if we got a jury trial today. When I’d left work on Friday we weren’t in trial. But I comforted myself thinking that if we do get a trial today, we’ll need a day to order jurors so it’ll start tomorrow, so I still get today to sit and calm down and be antisocial at work. So of course I walked into the courtroom, late because of the crazy traffic conditions, and found that my department was given a trial YESTERDAY while I was off arguing my ticket, and today it’s in full-swing, 40 jurors on the way, 4 attorneys, and I had to hurry and catch up to set up the pretrial paperwork. *throwing up hands*

To offset today’s bad day, thankfully tomorrow is our third furlough day. Maybe I just won’t even go home after work tonight.

I have a hearing in Downtown LA on Monday morning to dispute my stupid parking ticket. They want $300 for my parking in a “bus zone,” which is ridiculous because there was nothing there that told me it was a bus zone. There was no bus bench, the curb wasn’t painted red, no bus schedule was posted, the only sign regarding parking said no parking between specific hours on weekdays excluding Sundays (and I was parked there on Sunday, specifically excluded from the no-parking hours), and there was some obscure sign with an acronym I’d never heard of with no description or even a graphic depiciting what it was in reference to. Apparently the acronym is the magic indicator that a specific bus stops there. That’s just ridiculous. If they want to keep people from parking there, they need to make it clear that you CAN’T park there. This would be the equivalent to if I were to drive through another state, see a sign with a squiggle on it, shrug and keep going, and then some cop pulls out and gives me a ticket for going over 15 mph in a duck-billed platypus crossing zone. “WHAT duck-billed platypus crossing zone?” I’d ask.
He’d point to the sign with a squiggle and say, “See there? That them there sign tells y’all it’s a duck-billed platypus crossin’ zone, and ain’t nobody drivin’ more ‘an 15 miles an hour here on MY watch, endangerin’ all our duck-billed platypuses.”
I’d argue it’s a regional sign that didn’t have the speed limit or rules posted, and he’d say, “Everybody ’round these here parts know that’s a duck-billed platypus crossin’ sign, and ain’t no goin’ faster ‘an 15 ’round them duck-billed platypuses! Pay up, that’ll be $300.”
Total bullcrap.

That’s the exact analogy I’m gonna give at the hearing on Monday.

I’m thinking that achieving happiness isn’t so much about having something, but about not having something. The absence of pain, of negative stimuli, of excessive fat cells (heh), of drama, of other people’s bad influences, of feeling like the power to control your emotions has been handed over to a careless someone else. This means that something Anny wrote recently is true: everything that you need to be happy, you already have at this moment. Just lose the excess crap.

I’m pretty darn happy these days.

Frankly, I’m a bit sad that there’s a visible movement away from blogging and reading blogs to keep in touch with faraway or time-challenged friendships. I know that everyone’s more in touch than ever what with text messaging, instant messaging, twittering and social network sites. But that’s just a one-liner here and there, with maybe a few photos. It’s engaging, quick and convenient, but it doesn’t really allow one to lay out one’s mind, revealing thoughts and concepts like the old cliche of laying cards out on the table. I like the records I keep by blogging about things in my life or musing about thoughts I’ve had.

The other night, Mr. W and I watched “The Butterfly Effect” at home. Ashton Kutcher’s character finds that he has an unusual power to go back into certain points of his childhood, still maintain the current consciousness of his adulthood, and change the way he’d acted back then and hence change the future. It’s the old concept of “If I only knew then what I know now, how I would’ve lived differently.” He soon finds, however, that his changes didn’t necessarily make for a better future, and he’d re-do the past over and over again, trying to find the “right” solution so that his loved ones don’t end up dying, dead, a heroin-addicted prostitute, with the wrong people. Coincidentally, my beloved non-blood sister Jordan was on her social networking page wishing to find the Re-Do Store, so she could relive specific times of her recent past and change some decisions that have now brought her to unhappiness. Of course I was not a stranger to the same thoughts. “I want a re-do of this time period and completely eliminate this person from having had a place in my life.” Who hasn’t thought that, in some form or other? “I wish I’d never met you.” “I wish that on that ill-fated day in January, I had not accepted your stranger’s invitation to share the table with you at the crowded Starbucks, and had gone home instead, never to have seen you again, nor to have even learned your name.” Sometimes I’ve wished for re-dos so fervently, with every fiber of my existence, that it seemed impossible that I DIDN’T go back in time.

But how do I know that I didn’t? Maybe the fact that I’m alive right now and that my loved ones are alive, healthy (for the most part) and generally content, IS the best proof that I AM on my desired path. Maybe in some alternate reality, life is a whole lot worse, and this path I’m on right now is the “corrected” path. The problem with magically going back and correcting something by eliminating a pain is that without having experienced the pain, you’re unaware that you’re NOT in pain. I wish I hadn’t turned on Jeronimo Street that annoying morning when I got my first speeding ticket months ago, but if I could go back and fix that, I wouldn’t KNOW that I avoided a ticket, so I couldn’t even appreciate it. I’d probably be bitching about something else I wish I could go back in time to avoid. That being the case, how do I know that daily decisions I’ve made HAVEN’T effectively prevented disastrous results? I made it to work alive, with no damage to my car, no ticket. That’s a pretty successful morning, and maybe if I’d only left 5 minutes earlier or later, I would’ve been involved in a collision and right now I’d be wishing I could go back and leave when I actually DID leave. So really, who’s to say that there’s anything WRONG with current life, or that we DIDN’T get our wishes of preventing trauma?

All you can do is live now with the future in mind, i.e. In 10 years, how do you want to look back to today and see your life? These are thoughts I’d had for decades, and never really knew how to express them conceptually. I’d probably come back and read this in the future and think, “What?! What the hell was I rambling about?!” See, you can’t express this stuff properly on a status message. You also can’t go back and search through or re-read old status messages from years ago and laugh at yourself.